Raw Color from Eindhoven, The Netherlands, is working on a project to print encoded messages on textiles using bleach. The project is still in a development phase, but they have managed to present it at the Salon in Milan. They use a high quality Egyptian cotton to print on. An issue they encountered was the bleach reacting differently to the different dye colors of the textiles. For example, bleaching the green dye made the bleach yellow, on the pink dye it became a fluor pink, and on the blue textile the bleach stayed properly white.This took some time to get under control, and you can still see the bleach has a different effect on each textile. This is basically due to the exact composition of the dye. De bleach ‘kills’ some components in a dye, leaving the surviving pigments. In the photo’s below you can see the process step by step, starting with the coding, then making the bleach printing work on the textiles. Finally the cryptographer it self. Raw Color will put the encoded textiles into production once they have the entire process working steadily.
The process works as follows: you send a text message to a computer which translates it into predetermined symbols (see photo above). These symbols are printed on the textile using a cryptographer (see below). Raw Color relied on help from several partners to get this multi faceted process working.
