By Katie Haegele
In talking about the idea for her new-media project, Open Source
Embroidery, British curator and media researcher Ele Carpenter says the
zeitgeist deserves at least some of the credit.
Open Source Embroidery is a kind of socially engaged art experiment
that seeks to include as many people as possible and brings together what
Carpenter sees as the common elements of embroidery, which has
historically been women's work, and computer programming, an area populated
largely by men.
When she first became interested in the connections between the two
kinds of work, Carpenter taught herself both backstitch (a basic
embroidery stitch) and some html. She has altered hats and scarves by stitching
them with provocative slogans in html coding, such as " Peace."
(Welcome to programming as literature. )
But the main project under the OSE umbrella is a six-sided quilt of 216
hexadecimal colors (so called because the html codes for colors have
six digits).
Both experienced and beginning needleworkers and computer programmers
were invited to contribute hexagonal patches, each embroidered with its
html color code.
The quilt is on display at the media lab Access Space in Sheffield,
England, where Carpenter was an artist in residence this summer. It can be
viewed at http://www.eleweekend.blogspot.com/.
As for the zeitgeist, well, knitting, embroidery and other needlework
are hipper than ever. Carpenter says the "stitch 'n' bitch" groups -
like quilting bees for the post-Courtney Love crowd - that have popped up
in cities all over the United States and the U.K. have helped to make
it socially acceptable, if not cool, to do needlework in public. Within
such groups needlework patterns are shared freely, and it is common
practice to alter an original design to yield a different result.
Likewise, open source software is a labor of love.
Programmers spend hours creating software programs not for any
financial gain but because they want to make a good product. The source code is
made visible and can be altered by other users, meaning the software -
like a quilt - is ultimately created as a collaborative effort.
Carpenter's project poses questions about the changing nature of
intellectual property in the 21st century.
"What interests me is the emphasis on the process rather than the
product," she told me in an e-mail.
"Open source software is free, but usually requires you to pay for
technical support, which most people need. So the 'investment' is not in
the software as a product, but in the process of learning how to use it.
In patchwork, the production process, advice and support is free, but
the final quilt (and the final software) can be sold. "
But it's not all about being ultramodern. Carpenter calls her
experiment an homage to Ada Lovelace, who was born nearly 200 years ago and who
worked with Charles Babbage on the Analytical Engine, the first
universal computer. He decided to use standard punch cards in the engine,
influenced by the Jacquard loom (named after inventor Joseph Marie
Jacquard), which was the first machine to use punched-card programming.
Says Carpenter, "Lovelace wrote, 'We may say most aptly that the
Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard Loom
weaves flowers and leaves. ' "
Don't you just love it when things come full circle?
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