To Dream Tomorrow

John Füegi & Jo Francis of Flare Productions make fantastic documentary films, including a documentary about our very own Ada Lovelace. Ada Byron Lovelace: To Dream Tomorrow includes interview with Sadie Plant and Miranda Seymour amongst others, to give an overview of her life, and locate her firmly within the history of computing. The film clearly describes the importance of Ada's Notes which accompanied the designs for the Analytical Engine. The notes anticipate the importance of the engine as a universal machine, not simply for calculating numbers, but for computing symbols and rules. What we might call algorithms and data. Füegi &Francis describe their intensive research process for the film, and cite Doron Swade's statement in the film which is worth repeating here:

"Ada saw something that Babbage in some sense failed to see. In Babbage's world his engines were bound by number. He saw that the machines could do algebra in the narrow sense that they could manipulate plus and minus signs. But all his calculating engines, his Difference Engine and his Analytical Engine, which is the programmable general purpose machine, were all bound by number, they manipulated number as a manifestation of quantity. What Lovelace saw was that number could represent entities other than quantity. So once you had a machine for manipulating numbers, if those numbers represented other things, letters, musical notes, then the machine could manipulate symbols of which number was one instance, according to rules. This is a fundamental transition from a machine which is a number cruncher to a machine that manipulates symbols according to rules, that is the transition from calculation to general purpose computation. And looking back from the present high ground of modern computing, if we're looking and sifting history for that transition, then that transtion was made explicitly by Ada in that 1843 paper."

The making of the film in 2003, coincided both with the 150th anniversary of the death of Ada, Countess Lovelace (27 November 1852), and marked Doron Swade's completion in 2002 at London's Science Museum of the printer Babbage designed to work either with the Difference Engine or the Analytical Engine. Both the engine and the printer in all their beauty are seen working in the film.

Knitting Knitting Pattern

Suzanne is busy knitting a cover for one of the HUMlab flat screens. The green text is the code of the knitting pattern for making the cover. The pattern is in Swedish, so English speakers might not get the abbreviations. We chose the green and dark grey colours to emulate a basic screen, and they just happen to co-ordinate with the jungle wallpaper in HUMlab!

The 7 flatscreens in HUMlab will be used for the HUMlab Syjunta exhibition which opens on Friday 23rd January, 16.00 til 18.00. The exhibition will present the Html Patchwork and other works made through the Open Source Embroidery workshops.

Women and Open Source

Okay - I'll be honest here. There's a dropped stitch of an idea in Open Source Embroidery Fika here in Umeå, which I keep trying to pick up. It is this: OSE only works when it is inter-disciplinary, when people bring hardware and knitware, softwear and code-wear. Otherwise it's just tech, or just textiles (and we know the gender cliques they hide within). Although OSE Fika has made some progress in convincing embroiderers not to be scared of the tech threads, and reassuring the tech-iles not to be put-off by the text-iles, there's a lot more work to be done. We need confidence in taking things apart, questioning the ethics, the access, the utopian and dystopian models we are emulating.

As inspiration - take Aileen Derieg's essay Things Can Break: Tech Women Crashing Computers and Preconceptions. She gives an overview of women and open source, and an introduction to the Genderchangers Academy.

Stitching the Yarn Text

The Open Source Embroidery (OSE) Fika groups have fostered some interesting starting points of conversations about craft practices grappling with the idea of Open Source or what Camille Mousette called an 'open attitude'.





But our discussions are fragmented across different sites and individual creative projects. I feel that there is a need to bring together the different threads within a collective work which explores the material nature of technology. So I have proposed a collectively embroidered and short text that I keep referencing: the Raqs Media Collective definition of 'Yarn'from their Lexicon of/for the Digital Commons. I think this stitched text will visually consolidate one aspect of what OSE means in relation to HUMlab and the language of new media.

In yesterdays OSE Fika we set up a paper document for people to choose the line of text they would like to embroider, and started stitching on the fabric swatches that the aesthetics department gave me in return for a lecture.

The design board for the patchwork is at HUMlab (see photo above). If you are in Umea and would like to make a patch, the text and stitchers list is available next to the design board in HUMlab, underneath the library in the Humanities building.