The exhibition of Open Source Embroidery, including the Html Patchwork and Knitted Blog looks fabulous at HTTP. The exhibition opened on Friday 16th May, and will be up until June 15th. Do go and have a look - it's a small exhibition but well worth the trip to Manor House in North London. See
www.http.uk.net and we'll soon have some pictures to post on this blog. In the meantime, I think the Raqs Media Collective's definition of 'Yarn' is a perfect introduction to the concept of the exhibition:
“Fabrics, and stories are made from yarn. A yarn is a snatch of reality that travels by word of mouth. Or it is shipped with lots of html cargo. It is said that each fragment of code contains rumours and gossip, or yarns about the makers of the code. Yarns collect in basement cyber cafes, in stairwells of cinemas, in call centres, and behind the opaque surface of the walls of an apartment whose address is Error 404, which can be anywhere and everywhere at once. In these places, yarn collectors stitch different stretches of code-fabric to make long bolts of data, which are then taken apart by hackers, and distributed into many orbits. Yarns can adjust the amount of information they bear in relation to the width of bandwidth. That is why yarns are good kernels.”
(Raqs Media Collective, 2003, p365)
Raqs Media Collective (2003). A Concise Lexicon of/for the Digital Commons. In: Sarai Reader03: Shaping Technologies. Delhi / Amsterdam: Sarai / Waag. p357-365.
This sampler belonged to my grandparents, and is remarkable for the fact it is made by such a young girl. I've always mused on the comparisons of sampling music, embroidery, and software. The OSE workshop at Connecting Principle 2007 was called Sampling / Beta Testing - to describe the experimental phase of software and embroidery.
