Textile Networks at Radical New Cross

The Embroidered Digital Commons continues! This autumn we're excited to be working with Rose Sinclair to consider how textiles shape communities before and after the internet at the Textile Networks as part of the 'Radical New Cross' festival taking place at Goldsmiths College, London.

We are inviting people to come and stitch the term 'Data' as part of the Embroidered Digital Commons, and take part in a public discussion about textile networks. Designer Rose Sinclair will lead a discussion on Dorcas societies of the 1950–60s, which brought together Caribbean women through textiles and acted as networks for social and economic change. The untold oral stories of Dorcas society members will be told through an accompanying installation. Ele Carpenter will introduce the Embroidered Digital Commons project and invite a collective reading and stitching of the term data.

Saturday 14th November,
1.15 - 4pm in St James Church at the end of St James's road in New Cross:
St James Hatcham Building, New Cross, St James’s, SE14 6NW

All crafters, makers, coders, hackers, artists, programmers, and stitchers are welcome! 
The event is free, but you need to book here: http://beinghumanfestival.org/event/textile-networks/

Here's the text we will be embroidering:

"Data: Information. Can mean anything from numbers to images, from white noise to noise to sound. A weather report, a portrait, a shadow in surveillance footage, a salary statement, birth and death statistics, a headcount in a gathering of friends, private e-mail, ultra high frequency signals, sale and purchase transactions and the patterns made by pedestrians as they walk in a city - all of this can be and is data. Data, like coal, uranium and other minerals vital to the running of the world economy is mined, processed, refined and sold at a high price. Battlefields, early twenty first century inter-personal relationships and stock exchanges have been known to be hypersensitive to data traffic. Data mining is a major emerging industry in Delhi. The miners lead very quiet days, and spend long nights coding in low temperature zones called "Data Outsourcing Centres".

Contrarily, the word 'Data' (dãtã) in Hindi/Sanskrit is taken to mean "giver", which suggests that one must always be generous with information, and make gifts of our code, images and ideas. To be stingy with data is to violate an instance of the secret and sacred compacts of homophonic words from different cultural/spatial orbits ('dãtã' in Hindi and 'data' in English) as they meet in the liminal zone between languages, in the thicket of the sound of quotidian slips of the tongue. Errors in transmission and understanding too carry gifts and data."
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Raqs Media Collective (2003). ‘A Concise Lexicon Of/For the Digital Commons’, Sarai Reader 03: Shaping Technologies, ed. Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi, Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram + Geert Lovink. Sarai-CSDS Delhi / WAAG Amsterdam, 2003.

Eye of the Needle: Art, Stitch, Partnerships and Protest

Ele Carpenter will be taking part in a panel discussion 'Eye of the Needle: Art, Stitch, Partnerships and Protest' on Monday 13th July at the British Library along with Cornelia Parker discussing her  Embroidered Magna Carta Wikipedia page, and Curator Sue Pritchard, Curator of Textiles at the V&A.

EDC 2015

The Embroidered Digital Commons is in the last years of production!  A surge of enthusiasm from stitchers and makers around the world is helping to complete the whole lexicon. Here's a link to Mike Cummins patch as part of the term 'Liminal' co-ordinated by the wonderful Brenda Burrell.
 

LIMINAL
"Interstitial, vestibular and peripheral. Far from the centre, close to the border. A zone both between and without larger structures. Liminal spaces and moments are those into which large stable structures leak animated data about themselves and the world. Things happen in liminal zones. A city carries within it the contradiction of liminal zones located in its centre, because inner cities are the city's farthest borderlands. Liminal fringes are often the most conducive environments for the culture of memes. This is because exiled images, ideas and meanings from several stable structures mingle in the corridors between them. Here, bereft of identities and other certainties, they are free to be promiscuous and reproduce. They infect each other with recombinant strands of thought and image. At the same time, the perspective of liminality brings intimacy to bear on an exclusion. Being liminal is to be close to, and yet stand outside the site of the border of any stable system of signs, where meaning is frayed from being nibbled at on the edges. Nothing can know the centre better than the sideways glance of peripheral vision. Liminality may be acquired from prolonged exposure to the still air of airport departure lounges, thick and over-boiled tea at the Inter State Bus Terminus on the ring road in Delhi, or the sub-liminal flicker of a cursor in an e-mail message."  (Raqs Media Collective)