Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Completing the Embroidered Digital Commons

After four years of over 1,000 people stitching approx 4,500 words The Embroidered Digital Commons is nearly complete! We started with 'Yarn' in 2008, and it looks as if the whole text will be completed by the end of 2013.

Each of the 26 terms of the 'Concise Lexicon of/for The Digital Commons' are being sewn by different groups and networks around the world. We now we have the task of digitising the project, taking photographs of the embroideries and designing a website for the whole work.

However many of the terms have one or two phrases which need to be embroidered to complete the paragraph. And there are still 3 terms which have not yet been claimed: Bandwidth, Data, and Orbit.

Please contact Ele through this blog if you would like to stitch a single patch to help complete a term for the lexicon, or if you would like to run a workshop or co-ordinate one of the remaining terms.

If you are interested in exhibiting part or a whole of the 'Embroidered Digital Commons' different configurations of digital films and physical embroideries can be tailored to specific architecture. The physical work will be an installation of fabric and digital image-text. There will be 26 short films, and a high resolution film of the whole lexicon. Each term carries its own metaphors and has developed it's own distinct style. This is reflected in the way that the textiles are being constructed in many different formats: framed as a collection of objects to be gifted, appliqued to a door curtain to provide access, pinned to a wall forming a rescension of a text, orbiting a space, or beautifully completed as a quotidian patchwork quilt.