Holes–Lining–Threads

Website: http://www.felber.dircon.co.uk/holesliningsthreads/
Artist: Alicia Felberbaum

Reviewed by Luisa Paraguai Donati
Department of Multimedia
Institute of Arts, Unicamp, Brazil

luisa@iar.unicamp.br

The concept of the Website is based on Sadie Plant’s essay The future looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetic. According to the author women have historically had a fundamental role in the invention, development, manufacture and use of technology. Plant begins her argument by pointing to the role of women in the history of technology by drawing attention to the technology of looms and their connection to computers through the development of Babbages Analytical Engine. Using the metaphor of weaving, she describes the development of computer software and tries to visualise the basic non-linearity characteristic of the world wide web: as a "web of complexity, weaving itself". Plant (1995) In an extension of this argument, Alicia Felberbaum, the author of Holes–Lining–Threads, uses women’s history in the textile industry, in Batley, West Yorkshire, UK, to create the context of Sadie Plant’s essay in a construct of visual and auditory references.

The website does not have a common informational architecture with explicit menus that usually give a whole comprehension about the informational space to be explored and accessed. The users are invited from initial words (cards and holes, softwares linings, threads) to get "interlaced" in the concept of the website and start their navigation. An image of tapestry emerges as the Web matrix, which is gradually constructed by the proposed connections. These links are constantly actualised by each user’s reading, intervention, and action.
The images used bring together the concept and physical aspects of looms and weaving showing diagrams and components as switches, and set of gears.

These images also refer to the functional process, the logic that is present in computers technology in which the user/weaver needs to have her/his commands understood by the machines. Following the context of computer systems and Web technology there are several levels of language that translate the machine language, based on binary numbers, to different users, from computing programmers to common Web users. Turning on and turning off, becomes yes and no, zero and one, and this can become a language to be converted into physical movements performed by any machine during its different and specific tasks.

There are other important considerations about the use of images on this site; namely the movement created by the animated gifs using a specific property from HTML tags to construct backgrounds in which a small image is horizontally and vertically repeated until the screen is totally completed. The purpose appears to be to recreate and reinforce the idea of looping in the constant repetitions that determine both the physical movements of looms and define internal procedures of computing. This mirrors the necessity of every computing language to have routines and sub-routines as basic elements to describe recurrent functions and implement events. The use of these animated gifs as background in many pages here results in an interesting visual effect, but it is also pure meta-language used to talk about the logic of computing that the author uses.

The texts on the website comprise interviews with women weavers and some quotations from Sadie Plant’s book and essay to make the connection between looms and computer technology. The use of juxtaposed and superimposed texts in layers emphasizes the idea of non-linearity and the possibility of a potential state for interferences. The users can modify the graphic composition of texts, changing their size, font, colour, and position, and are invited to leave a message, which will be integrated to the website later. Sound are used only in some pages to make reference to these interviews accompanied by text that emphasizes the women’s accent; some words are completely changed.

Sadie Plant has created a cohesive metaphor of the web and an alliance between women, machinery, and the new technology. The author of the website refers to Plant’s work and accurately uses resources from the programming language to create a poetic space. The website demands an unusual attitude from users to handle the interface and to weave their own way from their choices. From this exercise, it is proposed changes in the users’ contemplative and interpretative behaviour for action and intervention. The informational layers are in a constant potential state, until the user’s reading, interaction, determines which one will be actual. The web space can be "occupied" by users via the creation of personal networks, as the same way women’s work wove their histories at that textile industry.

References:

Jones, D. (1997) The Technologies of the self: 'sex' in cyberspace. In Impact Seminar Series. http://www2.vuw.ac.nz/humanz/new/events/impact97/6.shtml

Plant, S. (1995) The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics. In Mike Featherstone & Roger Burrows (eds) Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment. London: Sage.