Open Source Embroidery: Curatorial Facilitation of Material Networks

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Open Source Embroidery: Curatorial Facilitation of Material Networks Ele Carpenter th

The Present and Future of the Exhibition Format, May 27 , 2010. 'Exhibiting the Lab' organised by I+C+i Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) Key Words: Amateur, Curator, Artist, Craft, Open Source, Participation, Art, Craftivism. Forward: Ele Carpenter is an artist and curator based in the UK. She currently lectures on the MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths College University of London, and is a Research Fellow at HUMlab in partnership with BildMuseet at the University of Umeå in Sweden. She completed her PhD on politicized socially engaged art and new media art in 2008 with CRUMB at the University of Sunderland, UK. Since 2005 she has developed the Open Source Embroidery project to investigate the relationship between craft and code. Her talk at the CCB on May 27th 2010 gave an introduction to the Open Source Embroidery project and Open Source Software. It is reproduced here with some additional notes on immaterial labour, materiality and the amateur. Introduction The starting point for this paper is an interest in the shared language between socially engaged (relational) practices and new media art, which has led me to develop the Open Source Embroidery (OSE) project. Informed by the free and open source software movement and socially engaged arts practice, Open Source Embroidery has been developed through three key concepts: • • • •

Investigation of (im)materiality, with a focus on the digital as material Facilitating amateur - professional relationships across craft + code Making the tension between object and process visible Creating an exhibition as a process, with a balance between spectator and participant

These are huge topics, and can’t all be discussed in depth here. So this paper will introduce the thinking behind the project, focusing on open source, moving on to issues of materiality and the role of the amateur. But firstly I shall describe the curatorial landscape in which the Open Source Embroidery project is situated. Over the last ten years the connective and collaborative characteristics of digital media have reintroduced the language of participatory production-and-distribution into the cultural sphere. New media art has contributed to the rehabilitation of discourse on the nature of the commons, materiality and open methodologies. Although these ideas are informed by new media systems they have older histories in collectives, community organization, folk and craft culture. Digital art and socially engaged art, along with craft, are historically on the margins of the modern ‘fine’ art world, also functioning within spheres of popular and folk culture. Whilst digital and socially engaged art have always embraced a performative and conceptual approach to immateriality, it is only recently that craft has exploded into a fashionable participatory culture. Leaving behind some of the preciousness of the hard-won fine-craft, and embracing public and activist forms of making (craftivism), the coolness of knitting is now being commodified as ‘knitted cakes’. (Carpenter, 2010)

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