Extreme TrackingOpen Source Embroidery: Craft + Code
Ξ August 4th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ 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. (more…)