In Textile Migrants, after their home was undone by climate change, arriving as fire, the creatures don’t get to go home. Beyond the border, there’s no way back, there is only the unfamiliar.

Building kinship

For Donna Haraway, kinship is built across the line between human and non-human, through constantly seeking and establishing relationship, not through blood or ownership. That’s exactly the process I want to illustrate with the Textile Migrants stop-motion film. Here, the textile creatures build their memories by touching the world around them.

At every encounter with their environment, their individual memory ball grows. The same process happens every time they interact with the Collective Memory. In Textile Migrants, the Collective Memory ball represents what Haraway calls the sense of belonging and what Vilém Flusser calls the “familiar”.

Reaching toward the unknown

As a second generation of Vietnamese migrants, I deeply relate to what Vilém Flusser wrote about the process of creating new roots for migrants: “I am embedded in the familiar so that I can reach out toward the unfamiliar and create things yet unknown.”

Interestingly, I can relate to this notion of unfamiliarity when testing new tools, like I did with my own AI tests a few weeks ago (see the 01/08/2026 post). The lack of familiarity, in the sense of a common ground between me and the tool, led to the unexpected. I evaluated the outcome from my knowledge of the puppet I have designed and the materials I used. Whether the result was good or bad is not the question. What is important here is that it led to the unfamiliar.

Similarly, in the story, as the textile creatures cross the border into a new environment, both the migrants and their environment have no familiarity with each other. The creatures do not feel a sense of belonging. Before they begin to interact with each other and their environment there is no collective memory with their environment yet,

What the colour-changing material is actually saying

In Textile Migrants-An Ecological Tale, the puppets are made with thermochromic and chromic materials. Their colour shifts with heat, light and water instead of holding one fixed state. This is a metaphor for the never-ending process of performing one’s own identity in relation to their environment.

What is next?

Connecting the still frames of the caterpillar and putting them in motion, in a film to tell the story of the textile migrants. That means making other caterpillars and other textile characters with various materials, and putting them in conversation with each other. It also means setting them in interaction with an environment made of sensory, animated woven textures.

Sabrina

(1) My first real steps into using AI tools for visuals, not a conclusion, and not a reason to give up on finding a place for AI in this process. Each prompt came from my own knowledge of how I physically built this character, out of the plasticity and aesthetic of the textile material itself. In this material-led process, the character emerges from the material rather than being decided before it. Written from that knowledge, the prompts still failed to produce a visual that reflects the character I’ve actually made by hand. The open question stays open: how do I bring an AI tool successfully into this process?

_{(2) The black-to-white thermochromic transition, animated with Midjourney from two real photographs (S.Recoules Quang 2026)}

(2)Here, I used the AI tool to animate the transition between two photographs I took myself: the storyteller black, and the same puppet after being heated, turned white. The shift shows how triggering her thermochromic properties becomes part of the character’s own expressivity.

(3) The storyteller mid-construction, coiled hemp ribbon, held by hand. Here I hold the wire to understand how moving the wire make the character moves from its eye

(4) Close up of a collective memory made of e-textile scraps; silver thread, thermochromic and chromic materials, conductive and resistive threads, electrical wire…

(5) The texture and the structure that Midjourney failed to represent despite having fed this photograph along with a prompt describing how the character behaves.

A question I’ve been sitting with

Since starting to share this project, I’ve been carrying a question I don’t have a clear answer to yet. How do I bring AI tools into a material-led practice that starts on a workbench? When does a tool support my vision, and when does it start doing its own thing? And where, in the process, should it even enter, at the very beginning before anything exists, or only once something already does?

I got a real, if small, answer this week, by testing it on the storyteller.

What I tried

I sat down to generate a reference image of the storyteller in Midjourney: the coiled body, the wire, the bead. I know this puppet by hand. Nine stitched ribbon coils, stacked with gaps of air between them, the top coil folding down over the one beneath it like a nose, a small painted wooden bead nested into that fold attached to two rigid wires, about 3mm thick, folded and doubled together, threading through it and curving down to the memory ball at the base. I described all of it, carefully, over and over, in as much detail as I could put into words. I fed it photographs.(5)

(1) It never got there. The bead kept floating outside the head instead of nested into it. The coils kept flattening into one solid mass, losing the spaces of air that are half the point of how this creature is made. However I rebuilt the prompt, it kept sliding toward a photograph of a caterpillar, not my puppet character.

Why, I think

The tool doesn’t know the character. I do. I made her, coil by coil, with my own hands, over weeks. That knowledge doesn’t live in a text description, however precise. It lives in the process of making physically the puppet.

A fair objection: maybe this was a prompting problem, not a tool problem, someone better at this than me might have gotten there. I don’t think that’s quite it. I wasn’t working from one text description, I paired it with real reference photographs and a style reference, and rebuilt the prompt for a full session. What I’m actually pointing at isn’t a skill gap, it’s that some of what I know about this puppet was never going to fit into an instruction in the first place. That’s not a knock on the tool. It’s the limit of describing something you can only really know by having made it by hand.

Vilém Flusser has a line I keep coming back to: I am embedded in the familiar so that I can reach out toward the unfamiliar and create things yet unknown. The tool doesn’t share my familiar. We are both unfamiliar to each other, and that’s a different thing from the tool simply having nothing to work from.

That unfamiliarity runs deeper than the coils and the bead. There’s a whole layer of this puppet that doesn’t show, not to a camera, and not to a prompt.

The part we do not see

These puppets are built from what my doctoral research (RCA, 2024) calls “weird materials,” thermochromic and hydrochromic textiles sitting at the threshold between manufactured and natural. They can be manipulated by hand, the way any puppet is, and by electronic circuitry, which is the part that doesn’t show (3).

Inside the memory stone, alongside the yarn and jewellery wire, there’s silver thread, conductive, and just as flexible as everything else in there (4). It can carry a signal the way copper wire would, except it bends and coils the way thread does, which is why it is so exciting to work with e-textiles for me. Here the material leads, technology comes second and the puppet character emerges from their combination.

The thermochromic pigment works quietly. In this e-textile world, the shift from black to white happens almost too slowly to see. Triggered by heat, the material picks up from its surroundings instead of waiting something wired to trigger it on cue. For filming, that same shift sometimes needs a nudge, a hidden heat element under the ribbon, or a sensor logging the exact moment it happens, so the camera can catch what the eye might miss. The logic behind the character moves relies on my coding of hidden sensors and small motors and my design of unseen electric circuitry running on a ESP32 microcontroller. Like most people writing code now, I debug with AI-assisted tools, that’s just how the craft works today. It doesn’t change whose decisions those are.

None of that shows on screen, by the same house rule that keeps every robot and every wire hidden inside the props in this world: the puppetry has to look like magic, not machinery. But what’s visible and what isn’t to the audience is a real question. How much of a weird material’s own technology should get to show?Sometimes the answer is none of it. The silver thread carries a signal and reads as decoration. That’s doing real dramaturgical work, not hiding a limitation.

What worked with Midjourney

Around the same time, I tried something different. I fed Midjourney two real photographs of the storyteller, one black, one white, and asked it only to animate the transition between them. Not to invent anything. Just to move between two things I had already made.

That worked, and I liked what came out of it. (2) The colour bleeding from black to white across the coils is exactly the shift this material does on its own, in daylight, except now I could show it happening. It’s the clearest demonstration I have yet of an idea I keep returning to for this project: these materials are communicating with their environment through colour, not just changing because of it.

Where that leaves me

Make the puppet first, by hand, or in code. Fix the storyteller’s identity the way her coils, bead and wire are already fixed, as a physical object in the world. Only then let an Ai tool like Midjourney in, not to invent the form, but to show transitions, carry it somewhere the camera alone can’t easily show.

I don’t think that’s a universal rule. It’s just the line I found this week, by hitting it.

What about you? When does a tool support your vision, and when do you let it do its own thing?

Still a gap between the hand and the AI tool. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just that, for now, the outcome doesn’t help my vision of the character as much as making by hand, and being led by the material, does.

Sabrina

#TextileMigrants #Puppetry #AIandCraft #MaterialProcess #TextileCraft #StopMotion #Thermochromic #PracticeLedResearch #ETextile #PhysicalComputing #CreativeTechnology

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In Textile Migrants: An Ecological Tale, caterpillars are one family of e-textile creatures, cloth worked with the same care usually given to circuitry. Each one is a stack of ribbon, coiled and stitched into loops with real gaps of air between them. At the back sits a loose cluster of scraps, yarn, thread, small fragments of things, her textile memory stone. Without her weight, a caterpillar cannot stand. Her only eye is a small bead, holding a loop of wire that rests against the stone when she is still.

By day, caterpillars move through their encounters, with other e-textile creatures, with the world around them, and each touch produces textile memory. The wire reaches out, gathers what the encounter produces, and returns to rest against the stone again.

The storyteller is one of them, her body dark hemp ribbon, coiled from her eye down to her base. She is the one who carries this ecological tale.

What she’s looking for

Among the caterpillars, the storyteller is the one whose body is entirely black. Every day, the caterpillars, like all the other textile creatures, carry some of what they gather to something larger than themselves; the “Textile Collective Memory”.

Not everything goes there, all the textile creatures keep some of what they gather for themselves too, held on their own textile memory stone. What reaches the collective is made only of what the creatures put into it.

Why I’m building it this way

I keep returning to the idea of kinship from Donna Haraway. That kinship doesn’t have to run through blood or ownership, it can be built through contact, through relation, through showing up again and again. The memory is collective because the making of it is collective, it is what is “familiar” to all the textile creatures. There is a connection with Vilém Flusser: “I am embedded in the familiar so that I can reach out toward the unfamiliar and create things yet unknown.”

How the collective memory grows, what its limits are, what happens if it stops being touched. I do not have the answers yet, I’ll keep sharing that as it develops.

Sabrina

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I’ve spent years now working across weaving, puppet-making and circuitry, most recently through a practice-led PhD in Design at the Royal College of Art (Storytelling and Material Interferences: Practice-led Research between Puppetry and Textiles, 2024). This is where I’ll start documenting where that practice is going next: a project called Textile Migrants.

What is Textile Migrants?

Textile Migrants is a stop-motion animation and filmed performance following handmade textile creatures through a journey of forced displacement. After going through a violent process of border control, the survivors reach a new world. Returning home isn’t possible and old connections are now gone. We follow the textile creatures as they find new ways of communicating with an unfamiliar environment and as they build new relationships and identities that grow out of who they were.

Why materials that change

The puppets are thermochromic and hydrochromic: their colour and texture shift in response to light, heat, and water, rather than holding one fixed appearance. My doctoral research called materials like these “weird” — they sit at the threshold between manufactured and natural, human and non-human, and they resist being pinned down to a single, legible identity. In this project, that refusal isn’t just a material property. It’s the argument: identity and belonging aren’t fixed possessions to be checked and stamped, they’re something continuously activated by environment and relationship.

A different way of thinking about kinship

Two threads I keep returning to while writing this. Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble argues for kinship that isn’t bound by species or bloodline — “making kin” across the line between human and non-human, as something built through relation and response-ability, not simply inherited. Vilém Flusser, writing on migration, put a related thought more simply: “I am embedded in the familiar so that I can reach out toward the unfamiliar and create things yet unknown.”

Both push against the same fiction this story keeps testing: that identity or belonging is a fixed inheritance rather than something continually built. Textile Migrants is full of more-than-human characters — caterpillars, poppies, birds — whose colour and material state have to be continuously activated rather than granted once and stamped. That makes it as much an ecological question as a political one: what does belonging mean, when kinship isn’t a possession but something made, again and again, in relation to others?

What’s next

Over the coming months I’ll share how these puppets are made, the questions I’m working through, and — as they join — the collaborators bringing new perspectives to the project. If you want to follow the process from first stitches to finished film, hit subscribe.

— Sabrina

More of my work: www.theatredu1k.com

Tags: #Puppetry #TextileArt #StopMotion #MaterialDesign #Thermochromic #Migration #PracticeLedResearch #Ecology #Multispecies #MoreThanHuman