The DXARTS Softlab and UW Design’s Studio Tilt are excited to announce the two artists in residence—Allyce Wood and Cathryn A. Ploehn—who will join them in May 2026. Together, they will co-create art and design projects as part of the Soft Data and Common Wares research project, with a particular focus on Hyperlocality.
Hyperlocality explores data, networks, and technologies tied to closeness and the personal. It may involve working with highly specific datasets or developing technologies that operate in situated environments—off-the-cloud or even off-the-grid. Through an open call, the two labs invited multidisciplinary projects that investigate the creation of artifacts, materials, and interpretative processes, as well as thought-provoking juxtapositions of data. These projects aim to offer critical perspectives and build new vocabularies of the commons.
Allyce Wood in her West Seattle studio
Allyce Wood lives and works in Seattle, creating installations, works on paper, and textiles—with a focus on digital jacquard tapestries. For Wood, the loom bridges traditional and digital technologies, merging online and offline experiences into woven cotton and wool.
A collector of both technologies and threads, she works on a mid-century Bergman floor loom, a passed-down marudai, and a restored 1960s knitting machine. Each process reflects a unique code system, from punch cards and graph paper to hand-painted watercolors. Her fascination with systems—and breaking their rules—stems from a lifelong curiosity about reason and experimentation.
From 2015 to 2019, Wood lived in Oslo, where she learned digital jacquard tapestry, a pixel-based mechanized process. This allowed her to blend her digital and physical worlds into tactile, familiar materials. The experience led to both factory-scale collaborations with industrial machines and hand-driven weaving projects in Iceland and Scandinavia.
Public engagement is central to Wood’s practice. She actively seeks ways to share and connect, driving her to pursue exhibitions, public projects, and publications that invite community involvement and knowledge exchange.
West Seattle NameDraft - overshot work in progress
Allyce Wood’s proposed work ‘NameDraft’, expands her artistic practice, which focuses on the intersection of textiles, code, and materiality. Building upon her research into the historical industry of women’s craft and the continued presence of textiles in domestic spaces, this project centers on name drafting, a technique used in overshot weaving that translates letters into binary structures, words into flowing patterns. This process of encoding language this way enables it to be reconfigured through looms, knitting drafts, and other textile systems. Furthering her historical research, data collection, and aesthetics will enable the creation of new structures to emerge. NameDraft will support the creation of new artworks embedded with coded messages and deep meaning.
Cathryn Ploehn
Cathryn A Ploehn is a designer and professor at the School of Design and Creative Technologies at The University of Texas at Austin. She designs interactions and data to cultivate ecological and collective livability.
Her research practice, Feral Data Visualization, demands an embrace of place-based, situated, embodied, and vegetized forms of visual pattern making that de-estrange us from ecological and social community.
Her work has been featured in venues like the Museum of Human Achievement, IEEE Vis Arts Program, Eyeo Festival, On Data and Design, Nightingale Magazine, and the Information is Beautiful Awards. She holds a Master of Design for Interactions from Carnegie Mellon University.
Gift of the Elderberries proposed exhibition setup
Cathryn Ploehn’s proposed project ‘Gift of the Elderberries’ is a (open-source, offline-first) cyber ritual for practicing and recording gratitude. Gratitude reveals invisibilized systems of care, asking us to question the systems of power that manufacture conditions for pervasive (but often individualized) anxiety. The ritual elevates these previously ephemeral entanglements of living through a (low-fidelity, bioregional) elderberry-based interface for reflecting and archiving (local, embodied) records of gifts as digital "berries." Through the eyes (and beak) of local birds, these experimental interfaces ask how we might digest habits of isolation into nourishing practices of collective solidarity.
We’re excited to welcome these two artists/designers to the labs, where they’ll collaborate with Directed Research Groups (DRGs) from both DXARTS and UW Design. Stay tuned for project updates!