Perhaps what we needed was not a digital revolution but an evolution based on the needs of individual human beings: the natural person, not the legal person. Let’s imagine that a computer was something that women handcrafted. What would an industry founded on such fundaments have to offer the world? (p. 94)

Stitching Worlds makes an important artistic statement that questions the foundations of the digital and takes a unique approach in deconstructing “digital” from the viewpoint of the arts-based research project. (p.93)

What if electronics emerged from textile techniques such as knitting, weaving, crochet, and embroidery? How would technology be different if craftspeople were the catalysts to the electronics industry, via textiles manufacturing? The project expands on the tension created by the use of highly traditional textile techniques for making functioning electronic technology. By revealing unexpected potentials of often-undervalued knowledge and skills, Stitching Worlds questions commonly accepted societal value systems and their implications.

The research was organized in four parallel and interconnected tracks: (1) hands-on “experimentation” on creating textile-based electronic components, (2) “theoretical study” into the broader, “transdisciplinary topics of the project, (3) continuous speculation” through prototyping objects and installations, and discovering new and stimulating forms of artistic expression, and (4) “reflection and dissemination” towards understanding our own practice within the larger field of contemporary modes of artistic production.

Mari introduced open source before open source was even an idea; he was motivated to provide access to processes of making for everyone. What if as designers we could provide access to processes of imagining? Ideas that challenge and expand possibility, opening up alternative realities that previously would have remained unimagined.

[!NOTE] Enzo Mari Frustrated with the growing culture of consumerism in the early 1970s, Enzo Mari embraced a new approach to the design of everyday objects. His manual Autoprogettazione offered easy-to-construct models of tables, chairs, beds, and other household furniture from ready-made cuts of lumber. A precursor to the open-source movement, the published drawings and instructions in the manual meant to empower people to become their own makers and perhaps in the process to modify his designs and become their own designers. This approach to design is both pedagogical and political. The objects people would make from his designs were intended to be more valuable because of their own participation, including the knowledge and skills that were to be gained. Meanwhile, this activity creates a vision of design decoupled from centralized control over production, the generation of false desires, and the exploitation of profit central to a consumer-capitalist system. Mari: “The first problem facing a designer is to define his own model of an ideal world, and not to create an aesthetic. … The designer cannot fail to have his own ideology of the world. If he has none, he is a fool who only gives shape to other people’s ideas.” from Design After Capitalism

Design as empowering

Perhaps, as designers, unreality is the only thing we have left—a tool for loosening the grip of the reality we find ourselves within, to help think beyond known frameworks, and to shift our thinking.

Design as outing the box

What sets Stitching Worlds apart—and also makes it art—is thus the intentions behind the project. Artistic and critical intentions that shape creative processes that “do something to us, set us in motion, alter our understanding and view of the world, also in a moral sense.”1 Intentions to which we hold on throughout the whole research process, by letting continuous self-reflection guide us.

It’s an art by intention, it guides a reflection throughout.

One of the main premises of the project is a refusal of the typical, uncritical understanding of research and invention as progressive, utilitarian, and therefore unbiased processes.

What gets less attention is that every invention is highly political already in the making process it introduces, in resonance with the Foucauldian sense of knowledge and power.

post-positivism x constructivism, transforamtive ![[Pasted image 20260301132934.png]]

The medium of textiles was deliberately chosen because of the extremely provocative medium it provides in challenging our assumptions, expectations, and desires about what constitutes technology.

[!NOTE] Rancière In Jacques Rancière’s terms, “the distribution of the sensible” (French: le partage du sensible) refers to the way a society organizes what can be seen, heard, said, thought, and done—and who is allowed to participate in that field. It is one of his central concepts, especially in The Politics of Aesthetics.

The research carried out in Stitching Worlds, in other words, should not be understood as solely instrumental in creating expressive art objects and installations. In addition to the instrumental dimension of the research, the research process is conceived as art practice. The project proposes the creation and presentation of knowledge in the marginal space of needlework as artistic strategy.

Design/Art as Research

About textile

But what is this thing? It is somehow just material, or just form, or just a textile formula that collapses form and material into a non-form and non-material something.

What could it mean, then, to take textile thinking elsewhere?5 That is, to take elsewhere ideas about a design object characterized by waiting to be a thing, building things, localizing form, defining itself.

[!NOTE] Localizing form Form is not an abstract whole imposed on matter, but something that emerges from situated material relations.

it is easy to find examples, such as a perspective on city planning where we focus only on the connections of streets, letting the city grow on its own or really any form of network where we focus only on the form of connection: how things connect and fit together rather than their places in an already planned, comprehensive thing. It is very easy here, and perhaps tempting, to think in political terms, but it is a way of thinking that is much more difficult than it might appear to be.

Precision is not about being able to say in detail, and with “ordinary” precision, what will happen when the textile is blowing in the wind, but to know what that is as a textile thing: experience, tacit knowledge, the mystical knowledge of practice. There is really nothing mystical here, no mystical tacit knowledge developed by unreflected practice. (p. 23)

So what does it mean to be precise about this textile thing from the perspective of textile (design) thinking? It is not to be able to describe a complex, dynamic system in mathematically precise terms. It is how to understand the simple thing, not the complex thing. The mathematically precise description of the textile blowing in the wind as a complex, dynamic system is certainly something that deepens our understanding, but it talks about something else. A complete acoustical analysis of a performance of, say, a cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach does not tell us very much about the music.

Indescribable

Precision = The exactness of the relationship between rule and material execution that makes complex expression possible.

That we change perspective in form thinking, from the global shape, the global structure to the local neighborhood, the local connections. That we change perspective in design thinking from the ready-to-use things to the waiting material.

The printing press has always been used to inexpensively replicate and disseminate information, a crucial role in an information- driven society, but the role of textiles has been mostly reduced to one of functionality.

[!NOTE] Article 27 of the United Nations’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights

• Authors should be credited.
• Authors should be paid.
• But cultural participation should not be blocked.

keeping individuals from spreading or copying patterns or styles, should be considered equally frivolous as inhibition of free speech or freedom of religion.

As mentioned before, the sequence of knitting stitches conveyed in a pattern sheet is not copyrightable in and of itself. So, if a group of freedom hackers decided to unleash knitting patterns from their copyright-infested pattern books by turning the instructions into pure code of knitting stitches and sharing them on the internet, copyright won’t stop them. Computer formats for hand and machine knitting are readily available (see KnitML14 and Knitting Assembly Language15 ).

A quine is a computer program that can print its very own code. 21 Correspondingly, a quine fabric is a piece that has the instructions of how to create it built right into it.

[!NOTE] Quine textile If the instructions are:

• Embedded in the fabric
• Structurally necessary
• Impossible to remove Then:
• You cannot copy the pattern without copying the instructions.
• You cannot remove authorship without destroying the textile. It’s a thought experiment about copyright protection.

ased on their properties, different traditional metallic threads can be used to create different electronic components, such as connectors, resistors, capacitors, coils, switches, and sensors.

Craftspeople, whose textile handcrafting skills are currently undervalued, provide a rich resource to explore as potential production landscapes for textiles with new functions.

despite how entirely dissimilar their manufactured goods seem, there are striking resemblances in the nature of the making processes, machines, and techniques. Addressing the challenge of the industrialization of textile electronics, the Industrial Cross-Pollination Map is a methodological proposal for identifying links between the two industries as potential points of intervention.

![[Pasted image 20260301151347.png]]

I can try wet felting, and weaving/knitting for the construction I have tried machine embroidery, some shortfalls:

• a bit challenging for the machine, lots of hiccups
• embroidered line is rigid, and hard to extend

Crafting realities:

• be transparent, and more importantly,
• critical exploration not on functions

“Crafting Realities” is a critical exploration, which probes an alternative profile, the textiles craftsperson as the producer of electronic technology. If, as Richard Sennett suggests, craftsmanship is “the desire to do a job well for its own sake,” what kind of electronic artifacts should we expect this basic human impulse to breed? (p. 72)

By involving actual skillful craftspeople, technology meets handcrafted finesse, delicacy, and self-expression. New tools and new criteria emerge.

[[A Non-Functional Function

The function of non-function]]

woven random-access memory actually qualifies as a handcrafted digital artifact

I am interested in considering textile routines and materials as constructive for technological artifacts, and exploring what this might make us alive to.

The example of the gloves demonstrates the use of materials genuine to a textile crafting practice to build a functioning electronic circuit. Skilled hands and knitting needles form the materials into a three-dimensional object, following a pattern that defines the arrangement of the conductive and insulating material into the functional and visual artifact.

![[Rehmi Post and Margaret Orth, “Smart Fabric, or ‘Wearable Clothing’,” First International Symposium on Wearable Computers, Digest of Papers.pdf]]

The latter corresponds to the functionality of a relay, an electronic component first developed around 1835 6 and later used to build the first programmable, fully automatic digital computers. (Designed by Konrad Zuse, the “Z 3” was presented in 1941 and included over 2000 relays. It is assumed to be the first working, programmable, fully automatic digital computer. See Walter Conrad, ed., Geschichte der Technik in Schlaglichtern (Mannheim: Meyers Lexikonverlag, 1997))

One is efficiently packaged, engineered for the widest possible application, mass-produced, and sealed in a black box. The other is laboriously crafted by hand, has a single function and is hardly usable in any commercial application; it is a unique artifact whose pattern reveals its function. Still, both have essentially the same use; both are integrated circuits, ICs that can implement a logic XOR function. For other logic functions, the legs of the chip need to be connected differently; in the embroidery the pattern must change so the individual relays are reconnected to implement a different function. If the according changes are made, both are capable of implementing all logic gates. They become building blocks for any digital device.

Finding the correct material, though, required a lot of testing, as the electronic quality of a metal thread is not something of historic importance, and thus not part of the knowledge traditionally passed on with the craft.

Handcrafting digital and electronic objects demands foremost crafting skills, a fundamentally different prerequisite than other electronic making/assembly practices. It incorporates crafts and materials not previously connoted to the electronic or computational domain and manifests itself in how the artifact comes into being, and consequently in its visual appearance and possible use.

David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship

David Pye describes craftsmanship as using any kind of technique or apparatus, in which the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends on the judgement, dexterity and care which the maker exercises as he works. The quality of the result is continually at risk during the process of making.

Contrary to that, during mass production, the quality of the result is predetermined. This might require a large degree of judgement, dexterity, and care before the production process starts, but once started there is no possibility for variation.

The function as well as the form depend on the maker’s choices and skills that render a design into a physical artifact.

The resulting material or object, rather than component, is a unique handmade electronic or digital artifact.

When crafting electronic artifacts, these materials, patterns, and stitches not only define the visual and haptic appearance, but also the invisible as well as intangible electronic qualities.

If adequate tools are used, the electronic changes can be observed during the textile making, allowing a reflective integration of aesthetic as well as functional aspects in the practice.

Also, if not crafting an artifact oneself but looking at the final craft object, its scale provides a possibility to visually and tangibly retrace the electronic and digital construction.

Craft is expanded into dealing with the invisible aspect of a material, but craft has also been dealing with both visible and invisible nature of materials since the beginning. It’s a continued space.

considering not only the final function but also the making to be a relevant aspect of a human’s interaction with technology

The success of neoliberalism is wired into the digital realm, from the society of control to algorithmic governance, to labor and self-exploitation.

Media art lost its critical stance due to the ubiquity of digital technology and its penetration into everyday life, the institutionalization and commercialization of the media art scene

Media art lost its political stance, while Nake onec voiced: There Should be No Computer Art.”

In the 1970s, Nake criticized his generations of artists—and himself—for legitimizing the big machine through art.

Through seeing their work, one starts to imagine the digital—industry—differently, as an industry based on sophisticated female labor and knowledge without compromising its relationship with the social context and tradition.

his is not only about science, or more specifically, technology; it questions the premise of the “digital revolution.” When and how did we realize that we needed such a revolution? We know from world history that revolutions are not sustainable without a cost. Indeed, we are suffering from the consequences of the digital revolution, which brought about the rise of neoliberalism.

Practitioners are involved, with ethnographic research component, “a participatory art practice. “

n their practical work, Ebru and Irene collaborate with women; they learn from and develop together with them. They extend their practical knowledge and experiments by working with women from different cultures, from Europe and Turkey to China, South America, and beyond. They collect different traditions and techniques of textile handcrafts while developing new knowledge by combining their experiences with new technologies.

This collaboration brings high technology down to earth among the people, not as a commodity, but, on the contrary, as a tool and medium with which to work/develop things and ideas.

In that sense, it is also a good example of what artistic research is or can be; it requires high-level scientific and technological knowledge, engineering, and experimentation. However, when the artists decided to take their experiments to another level by producing electronic components through textiles, they needed the type of knowledge that the textile industry or, typically, women had to offer.

I am doing this research in the midst of Doug Ford pointing at basket weaving as an unwanted training/job, benefitting from the Material Art and Design education from 100 McCaul.

As an artistic choice, the artists started working with women, and this choice eventually brought new openings and new directions to their work; questioning/implying the value of craft, tradition, DIY, women’s labor, the type(s) of knowledge rendered insignificant, knowledge-power relations, non-commodity oriented research and development, and last but not least, digital technology itself. Of course, this is my speculation on the flow of things; it could also go in the other direction or—most probably—continuous mutual interaction of all parts; but all of this was (and is) only possible through artistic research. Not many artists work in this way and likely no scientist or technologist does, either.

Crafted Logic does not take digital technology as a given; it is much more radical than that. On the one hand, it recreates digital technologies; it poses fundamental ontological questions on the other.

While making it, I felt like walking through the history of computation that happened in the past 200 years, the time that I didn’t witness became vivid and tangible.

produce a political discourse

Crafted Logic is doing what media archaeology does in a different, reversed way; lead from today to an imaginary beginning. Artists do not take an obsolete technology and research it as—at least some—media archaeologists might do; instead, they create a highly elaborate but actually obsolete technology to do the same; to narrate their stories of the digital.

Crafted Logic is not one such digital artwork that utilizes given digital technology to criticize the digital condition; on the contrary, it suggests another technology in which a holistic critique (critical approach) is embedded in and through the interrelation of science and technology. To conclude, I would add, Ebru and Irene recreate anew “the big machine” with its myth inverted; they propose reading the whole story backward.

…

Embroidered computer

Through its mere existence, it evokes one of the many imaginable alternative histories of computing technology and stories of plausible alternatives to our present daily lives.

In its complete design, the computer includes a total of 369 switches, constituting an 8-bit computer with 1-bit ALU multiplexed to four registers with an 8-bit register width and two additional storage registers.

![[StitchingWorlds_Book_Kurbak_Ed__1_May2019_PDF-A.pdf]]