Here are a few photos of my loom and unfinished woven piece.
I was not aware of how accessible a DIY loom can be. Though I do think, I need to make additional tools for a refined result, this basic tool did make me feel like I could construct it differently if need be. This was a quiet reminder of how we design the tools and then the tools design us. The process of converting letters into ASCII binary code and then translating the same into textiles felt the opposite of GUI. Instead of data abstraction – it felt like tracing the material roots of data.
As an industrial designer, I have often ignored my affinity towards this soft material for its apparent lack of function beyond ’embellishment’.The textile politics chapter effectively points towards this medium (verb or noun or craft?) and its subversive qualities. ‘Textile politics is to give texture to politics, to refuse easy binaries, to acknowledge complications’. Juxtaposing textiles with radical almost revolutionary aspects pushes one to reimagine it with alternate functions.
I found the idea of considering ‘women & mechanical computation as interchangeable to revise history’ fascinating. Not simply because of the historical ties of weaving with computation but due to the conceptual similarity that both ‘software & feminine sexuality reveal the power that something which cannot be seen can have’. Considering this with our last class discussion about data reminds me how potent something invisible (or hidden on purpose?) can be. Data abstraction supported by metaphors of ‘cloud’ & ‘seamless’ interactions adds more layers to this ‘onion-like structure’ than remove any. Perhaps that is why the term ‘close to the metal’ refers to the native machine code that has no ‘layers’.
The gender lens in the reading reminds me that ‘gender values largely float free of the machines themselves and are expressed and enforced by power relationships between men and women. Computers do not simply embody masculinity; they are culturally constructed as masculine mental objects’ And similarly, textile objects and techniques embody feminity as a culturally constructed value.
A few parts that I found particularly hard to understand –
- The positioning of yarn as a signal towards ‘textile production being grounded in racialized, gendered systems of labour’ ( the photographic portrait of Sojourner Truth)
- Casual pleasure
“On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge.” Accessed February 18, 2020. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249563606_On_Software_or_the_Persistence_of_Visual_Knowledge.
Fray. Accessed February 18, 2020. https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo11040813.html.