Phillip Stearns is an American artist whose work with electronics, code, and textiles grows out of digital malfunction and glitch.,He derives imagery from short-circuited cameras, corrupted files, and disrupted digital transmissions, then weaves it into blankets and other textiles on a computerized Jacquard loom.,,He is based in Denver, Colorado.
Stearns holds an MFA in music from the California Institute of the Arts and a BS in music from the University of Colorado in Denver.In 2011 he curated and exhibited in “Algorithmic Unconscious” at Devotion Gallery in Brooklyn, a show of computer-produced art alongside artists including Arcangel Constantini and Daniel Temkin.The following year he began Year of the Glitch, producing a new work every day for a year from manipulated cameras, scanners, corrupted files, and disrupted digital transmissions. He treats a glitch not as an error but as a way of revealing hidden dimensions within familiar technology.In 2012 he also founded GlitchTextiles, a textile design studio that wove patterns from his glitch photographs, including images made with short-circuited cameras, into jacquard-woven blankets.,In 2014 Transfer Gallery in Brooklyn presented “Evident Material”, a new series of his work.
In 2017 he released Computational Textiles, pillows, tapestries, and other woven objects generated from code he wrote and then translated into woven patterns by a computerized Jacquard loom. He made the series with help from the Textiel Lab at the Netherlands' TextielMuseum in Tilburg. “Computational Textiles is my project to further explore the discipline of weaving and the medium of textiles as vehicles for expressing certain computational processes”, he said.In 2018 his textile work appeared in the group exhibition “Afterimage” at Paradice Palase in Brooklyn, alongside Emily Oliveira, Paolo Arao, Flora Wilds, and Becca Van K.In 2023 he launched Pickl.art, a platform that lets anyone create custom woven products on demand.He received a Greene Fellowship in 2024 and has been an artist in residence at RedLine Contemporary Art Center in Denver.,
