Extreme TrackingOpen Source Embroidery: Craft + Code
Ξ August 4th, 2008 | → | by Jenna Ng | ∇ test, CCS, events, reviews, galleries |
[CCS welcomes this gallery review from Jenna Ng.]
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Open Source Embroidery: Craft + Code An exhibition facilitated by Ele Carpenter HTTP Gallery, London, UK 1 May-15 June 2008 |
Iain Clarke’s PHP Embroidery (left) and Paul Grimmer’s Ether (swatch) (right) |
Everything [in the past] was made by hand in a down-to-earth way, just rubber-suits and mechanics. That was the power of it… It is a physical thing, and that is extremely important, because when you start to make it on the computer it ceases to become real.
~ Carlo Rambaldi, “creature designer” of Alien1
There is a comforting solidity in the old tools. As Rambaldi laments, new technologies herald a certain loss—the ethereality of the internet, the intangibility of software code, the half-light existence of digital avatars: “it ceases to become real.” Like the infant grasping a mother’s thumb, there is unspoken solace in the touch, yet the immateriality of our increasingly digital world threatens the reassurance of that physicality; our fingers close around air.
“Open Source Embroidery” is an art exhibition which seeks to manifest the insubstantiality of the digital in materiality via—of all things—embroidery, knitting and craftwork. Conceived by Ele Carpenter, 2007 artist-in-residence at Access Space in Sheffield, the show at the HTTP gallery in North London, the city’s “first dedicated gallery for networked and new media art”, displays collaborations between embroiderers, patch-workers, knitters and computer programmers, whereby internet addresses, computer code and blog networks are stitched, intertwined and woven into various craft forms.
Carpenter’s HTML Patchwork, for example, sews together a quilt of hexagonal-shaped cloth patches, each embroidered with some form of code, such as HTML addresses or hex values, to present computer code as a tactile splash of fabric and thread. The physical is mirrored by the digital via Patchwork’s website (http://www.open-source-embroidery.org.uk/wiki/), whereby every patch on the digital counterpart of the quilt contains an internet link leading to further information on the patch’s maker. Quilt and website thus contain each other, the former materialising the latter; the latter actualising the former. Thus conceived, Patchwork reflects not only oppositions—in terms of gender, for example, as the masculinity of technologically driven compulsions and boys-and-their-toys mentality in computerisation matches up against the femininity of creativity and domestication in embroidery—but also similarities between craft and code: the latter underpins software like an underside of backstitches, as are they both typically shared in specialised and idiosyncratic communities. Subtle yet direct, HTML Patchwork is ultimately a cryptogram of old media/new media differences.
Another eye-catching work is Iain Clarke’s PHP Embroidery (Fig. 1), whereby Clarke’s open source PHP programming code (available in free printouts “for anyone to run, modify and distribute”) ripples across an LCD display screen in rows of incandescent colour, unceasingly shifting and transmuting to the code’s self-generating refreshes. The dialectic between materiality and digitality is once again manifest as we leap from Clarke’s code—its carefully spaced layout of nested brackets, level headings, inline and block elements etc—to the mesmerising wash of colour on the screen. Shown next to Embroidery is Paul Grimmer’s Ether (swatch), a woven swathe of network cables which connects the screen to the PC running the programme for Clarke’s work. The display is not only ironic in its juxtaposition—Ether as an actuality of the virtual (the cable being the material basis for the transmitting data); Embroidery as a virtuality of the actual (code running through the lighted screen)—but also paradoxically complementary for, notwithstanding that they were made separately, together they form a complete apparatus: one as a path, the other its omega point.
However, what ultimately weaves the exhibition together is neither wool nor code but its sheer network of human collaboration. HTML Patchwork, for instance, is a participatory project made by artists from various organisations, including Access Space, Totley Quilters, The Patchwork Garden, Isis Arts, and the Banff New Media Institute. Trevor Pitt’s Soft Bench (“a soft bench in a hard landscape”) is another collaboration between a group of women from Glebe Farm estate, Birmingham, who were invited by the artist to knit a bench in vintage pattern—the bench itself a classic community fixture: for lovers, for children, for friends. Finally, Suzanne Hardy’s Knit-a-blog, a patch quilt of craftwork made by her blog readers (at http://glittyknittykitty.co.uk), is a similarly synergistic undertaking, as each contributor adds to the patchwork in the way of a blog conversation, only with wool and yarn rather than words on a data-shared website. Once more, immateriality (of a blog network) is made material. More than that, however, Knit-a-blog demonstrates the beauty of communal effort—that community can be drawn from the insubstantiality of the digital, and that an online network can culminate into collaborative artwork which is tangible, real and, indeed, very beautiful. The threads and fabrics are not only the materiality for the computer processes which hum through our lives but, more importantly, are also the links between us, the connections between communities, the warp and woof of love.