Ele Carpenter
Embroidered Digital Commons
Abstract:
Embroidery is often considered a marginalised female activity, a task that keeps women rooted to their chairs and prevents them from participating in public space. However, throughout history women have found ways of expressing radical ideas through subversive stitch, including text. More recently the knitting or sewing circle has been a space for women to engage in dialogue and organize, leading to the explosion of craftivism in public space and artworks engaging with the politics of the textile industry. The politics of craft are a significant part of recent debates about feminine virtue and technology.
Ada Byron Lovelace translated and annotated a text describing Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. Her notes are much longer than the original text, and they are the first expression of the idea of computational programming and software.
The Embroidered Digital Commons is a project to embroider an existing text by the Raqs Media Collective called 'A Concise Lexicon of/for the Digital Commons'. The definition of 'Nodes'** describes a rhizomic structure forming a web of ideas, where cultural memes are repeated and distributed. The text also raises the nature of de-territorialisation. The definition of ‘Nodes’ will be stitched by women from many countries, gathering in different configurations of networks to share ideas. For a few days their location will be Belgrade, which like many cities of the world has been claimed and reclaimed, destroyed and rebuilt, and is both par-des (a land of exile) and no-des, (a land of homeless) but is now a node at which people configure.
- "Nodes: Any structure that is composed of concentrated masses of materials which act as junction points for the branching out of extensible parts of the overall system may be described as nodal. The concentrations or junctions being the nodes. A nodal structure is a rhizomic structure, it sets down roots (that branch out laterally) as it travels. Here, nodes may also be likened to the intersection points of fractal systems, the precise locations where new fractal iterations arises out of an existing pattern. A work that is internally composed of memes is inherently nodal. Each meme is a junction point or a node for the lateral branching out of the vector of an idea. In a work that is made up of interconnected nodes, the final structure that emerges is that of a web, in which every vector eventually passes through each node, at least once on its orbit through the structure of the work. In such a structure it becomes impossible to suppress or kill an idea, once it is set in motion, because its vectors will make it travel quickly through the nodes to other locations within the system, setting off chains of echoes and resonances at each node that trace a path back to the kernel of the idea. These echoes and resonances are rescensions, and each node is ultimately a direct rescension of at least one other node in the system and an indirect rescension of each junction within a whole cluster of other nodes. Nodes, when written, perhaps erroneously, as 'no-des' gives rise to an intriguing hybrid English/Eastern-Hindi neologism, a companion to the old words - 'des', and 'par-des'. 'Des' (in some eastern dialects of Hindi, spoken by many migrants to Delhi) is simply homeland or native place; 'par-des' suggests exile, and an alien land. 'No-des' is that site or way of being, in 'des' or in 'par-des', where territory and anxieties about belonging, don't go hand in hand. Nodes in a digital domain are No-des" (Raqs Media Collective, 2003).
SvD, February 2011
- Conferences > NEWW international conferences > Belgrade April 2011 > Carpenter