Cornelia Sollfrank

Cornelia Sollfrank's questions seem pertinent to the Html Patchwork...

“Currently most women seem to prefer to undertake politically engaged work in a purely cultural environment and on a non-technological level. Women are not actively influencing the development of hard- and software, and therefore are surrendering any chance to share the related power. The question is, whether cultural/ aesthetic practice alone can sufficiently affect technological development, or whether women finally will have to get their hands dirty with technology. We have to ask ourselves questions like "How deep do we have to get into technology in order to be able to handle it consciously and be able to influence technological developments?" and "What prevents us from just going for it?" and "Does cyberfeminism necessarily require technical competence, or is it sufficient to theorize about technology and to focus on the social, cultural and political aspects of new technologies?" Cornelia Sollfrank (1999), http://www.obn.org/hackers/text1.htm

Her comments raise important questions about the use of art to explore an open source paradigm... Any thoughts?

Last patchworkshop at Access Space

What a busy week! On Thursday we finally sourced the missing fabrics (mostly greens) from the Karachi Stores on Attercliffe Road. They were so helpful and very generous. Thanks Tahir. Abi was right to recommend the shop. Indian fabrics have a greater yellow/green colour range, and have fabulous bright almost luminescent colours.
Then Saturday was the busiest patchworkshop so far. Kathrin from Manchester came for the day and helped to draw out the patchwork design on a white sheet. We then transfered all the patches from the wall onto the sheet. So at last we have a portable patchwork. Richard finally got round to embroidering his patch which is the most glamourous of them all! Tony Kemplen popped into drop off his pink parrot patch, and stayed to make another. We celebrated Lisa's birthday with cake and candels, and generally ate too many biscuits.Tricia from the patchwork garden described some of the different ways in which patchwork quilts are made collectively - and showed us some beautiful examples. She explained that older quilts kept the paper in the back of the patchwork as an extra thermal layer. At the moment we're planning to keep the paper on the back of the Html quilt - but it might fall out when we take some of the tacking out. There's still a good 50 patches to make - so I'm hoping to run some workshops here in Newcastle after christmas. In the meantime - if anyone would like to make a patch do get in touch and I can send you the fabric swatch of your choice.