Furtherfield Gallery
McKenzie Pavilion, Finsbury Park, London.
Being Social:
Annie Abrahams, Karen Blissett, Ele Carpenter, Emilie Giles, moddr_ ,
Liz Sterry, Thomson and Craighead.
Opening: Saturday 25th February, 1-4pm
Exhibition continues until 28 April 2012.
Here's some info about my work in the show:
Embroidered Digital Commons: Meme
The Embroidered Digital Commons is a collectively stitched version of
the Raqs Media Collective’s text ‘A Concise lexicon of / for the
Digital Commons’ 2003, facilitated by Ele Carpenter. The term 'meme'
will be stitched as part of Furtherfield's exhibition 'Being Social'
opening in their new gallery in the middle of Finsbury Park, London.
The Saturday morning workshops are open to all and will be facilitated
by Emilie Giles and Ele Carpenter with special guests. See
http://www.eleweekend.blogspot.com for more details.
A cultural ‘meme’ is the way in which an idea spreads; so if you are a
crafter, computer programmer, artist, blogger, maker, or just
interested in cultural memes and social networks then you are invited
to come along and find out more about the project. The embroidery of
'meme' will include a series of grey on black embroideries in support
of the protest against the highly restrictive SOPA and PIPA
anti-piracy laws. So if you feel strongly about digital rights and
electronic freedoms black fabric and grey thread will be provided.
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Further Info on the Embroidered Digital Commons:
The full lexicon of the digital commons is an A-Z of the
interrelationship between social, digital and material space. It
weaves together an evolving language of the commons that is both
poetic and informative. The terms of the lexicon are: Access,
Bandwidth, Code, Data, Ensemble, Fractal, Gift, Heterogeneous,
Iteration, Kernal, Liminal, Meme, Nodes, Orbit, Portability,
Quotidian, Rescension, Site, Tools, Ubiquity, Vector, Web, Xenophilly,
Yarn, and Zone.
The ‘Embroidered Digital Commons’ is an ambitious project to
hand-embroider the whole lexicon, term by term, through workshops and
events as a practical way of close-reading and discussing the text and
its current meaning. Each term is chosen in relation to the specific
context of its production through group workshops, conferences and
events. Each term is then stitched by 20-40 people and is used as the
basis for a short film depicting the sequence of embroideries.
The embroidery is a slow reproduction of ‘A Concise Lexicon of / for
the Digital Commons’ text, transmitting the meme of the lexicon to
hundreds of people stitching across the globe. In this way the work
is a cultural meme, transmitting ideas through thinking and making as
part of a distributed participatory project. The meme of the digital
commons travels fast through networks that investigate the language of
shared production and distribution, for example crafters and open
source programmers are committed embroiderers of the digital commons.
As a particularly virulent meme, the idea of the digital commons has
spread across all areas of cultural production including music, design
and art.
Reference:
Raqs Media Collective, 2003, A Concise Lexicon of/for the Digital
Commons. In: Sarai Reader 03: Shaping Technologies, ed. Monica Narula,
Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi, Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram +
Geert Lovink, Sarai-CSDS Delhi/WAAG Amsterdam, 2003. p365. Available
at: http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/texts4.html
http://www.open-source-embroidery.org.uk/EDC.htm
http://www.furtherfield.org/programmes/being-social
