Quilting research / writing

HOW TO SPLIT UP RESEARCH OBJECT:

INTRODUCTION / WHAT

THREE CHAPTERS:

1. archiving, heritage and inheriting scraps
2. Scraps / reusing digital media/elements/artefacts
3. Clouds/ servers, digital spaces or collecting/ connecting(?)

WORKING PROCESS

RESULTS / DOCUMENTATION

General INTRODUCTION

A quilt is a record of time through scrapped fabrics and cloths. When they come together they make a visual archive of what has been worn and thrown out. Without the present to look back at it, it is not as meaningful. There should be an anchor in time to make a look-back insightful.

Quilting is a form of textile based craft that uses inherited fabrics/scraps/clothing to create a bigger piece of textile, usually bound in 3 layers to create a sort of thick cover. This cover usually is a duvet cover, a blanket or a throw.

‘Quilting <p>’ is a project that explores the relations between physical quilting and its digital translation. Through our research, we trace back into the history of quilting, understanding its archival function of inheriting scraps and how we also, inherit and collect digital scraps through no-longer-inspected bookmarks, scrapped HTML projects and screenshots of the forgotten.

The physical quilt exhibits translations of websites made during our quilting workshop. We gathered together and asked participants to think of a website that they wanted to recreate with fabric scraps.

This project is by Sevgi Tan and Martina Farrugia (XPUB1).

Archiving, heritage and inheriting scraps

During the initial phases of this project, we wanted to start by getting a good understanding of quilting. We wanted to familiarise ourselves with the research made about quilting, it’s histories and how it has been implemented in artistic practices. While reading ‘Many Hands Make a Quilt: Short Histories of Radical Quilting’ by Jess Bailey, we became interested in the communal aspect the quilt held, how people got together to craft together scraps of fabric. The quilt was Alsop a useful medium and tool to make things public, to make collective histories recorded through the act of quilting. Quilting made it possible to:

“The absorbent quality of quilts enable them to hold trauma and joy - sometimes simultaneously. The nature of a quilt as a useful heirloom promises that intergenerational care derived from the past will continue to exist in our future.” p. 10.

Similarly to this text, Hannah Wales, in her article called ‘We Crip in Commune; Quilting as Archiving’ writes that quilting is a way to communicate such collective histories while also using it as a tool to archive ‘lived experiences, injustices and using it as a form of resistance’. Quilting gives us the ability to community build while also using textile as a way to shape communities.

After reading through different texts, we also thought about where one gathers these scraps of fabric and where we get such pieces. Do we search for these pieces in charity shops, sale sections in fabric stores or possibly given to us via friends and family? We ended up thinking about our families and inheriting old clothes, jewellery or a handmade quilt your grandmother had made during sewing class.

Martina’s entry:

My grandmother used to sew her own clothes and make due with the scraps that her family had provided for her, and she made sure to pass on this tradition of self sufficiency to my mother. As mentioned in ‘Many Hands Make a Quilt’ by Jess Bailey:

“Quilts hold people and stories.… Throughout history, communities have turned to the collective intimacies of quilting in moments of need.”

Similarly to the practice of quilting, my grandmother held onto scraps of fabric, hoping to give them life in her own projects or use them in times of mending and repair. In regards to the communal aspect of this practice, I remember during my childhood, my grandma and mother hovering over me as I practice my basic stitching techniques on the sewing machine. I reflect on these times and realise that there was a sense of togetherness as we sewed these scraps together; it was a collective activity, where this skill was being inherited from one generation to the next. When writing this text, I thought about the introduction of ‘The Material Kinship Reader’ by Kris Dittel and Clementine Edwards, where they discuss that:

“Material was made more alive through social encounter, by being passed between lives and hands and carried down the supply chain.”

Apart from the skills I learned through these women, I was also extremely grateful for the materials they had given me. They held onto fabric, beads, needles and yarn for years on end, but then decided to hand everything over to me- I can’t imagine the years of hoarding such valuable materials for their own future projects. I felt a sense of responsibility through inheriting such fabrics and I still hand them old neatly folded in a box back home in Malta.

I had a moment in my life where I thought about inheritance a lot, mainly how all these objects of making and scraps were being passed down to me. During the first months of XPUB, this thought resurfaced and I remember having a dream where I was in the office of a notary public waiting for a will to be read out. I was not sure who had passed away and who was in the room with me, but I remember the atmosphere in the room getting very serious- the notary turned his attention towards me and said:

'Martina, you have inherited something big. You have inherited an important web domain, it's yours now'.

I remember everyone looking at me, gasping and shouting out 'YOU GOT THE BEST ONE!!!'.

When I woke up, I remember thinking how crazy it would be to inherit such a thing from someones will. While working with Sevgi, this dream resurfaced in our conversation and we thought about inheritance and its connecting link with the project; could inheriting a quilt your grandmother gave you be the same as inheriting an online space or a discarded HTML page?

Scraps and reusing digital media, elements and artefacts

While reading ‘Wasting Time on the Internet’, by Kenneth Goldsmith, he creates a comparison where the internet browser history and download folder can be considered the modern-day memoir:

“What sits in my download folder - piles of books to read, dozens of movies to be watched, and hundreds of albums to be heard - constitutes a sort of self-portrait of both who I am in this particular point in time, and who I was in earlier parts of my life.” P.20

The things we save, bookmark, collect and craft through quick HTML pages, are all personalised to our interests- it is indeed a self-reflection, almost an archive of our interests. Could these forgotten pieces of digital scraps be compared to the physical fabric scraps we use in quilting? Throughout our research, we also view these forgotten scraps as artefacts, be it digital or physical. The idea of the artefact presents an archaeological approach, and we look onto different possibilities of translation, specifically from the physicality of quilting to digital and vice-versa. We are representing, translating “work done in the spaces between old things and the stories they hold in the present - mediation” - ARCHAEOLOGY, The Discipline of Things, Bjornar Olsen, Michael Shanks,Timothy Webmoor, and Christopher Witmore, p. 89. The quilt presents many layers, a top is held together with a soft filling and a back part. I imagine these layers of the quilt to also be represented on a webpage, with its many CSS elements. As described by Jess Bailey ‘Many Hands Make a Quilt: Short Histories of Radical Quilting’:

"A quilt is a blanket made from three layers of material, joined through dense and often visible stitching. A quilt has a decorative top, a soft filling or wool wadding and a simple back often made from recycled family clothes or discarded home textiles. The foundational fibre arts technique of quilting is embedded in a dizzying array of material histories and artistic practices throughout the world."

Clouds/ servers, digital spaces or collecting/ connecting

When thinking about digital spaces and collecting scraps of information within them, I also think of the way we categorise things and how we, as individuals, collect such digital scraps. In the book, ARCHAEOLOGY, The Discipline of Things, they mention how digital media offers various modes of organisation and translation:

"It also takes into account the specificities of digital media, which offer different modes of manifesting things. These modes are richer, in light of particular questions, and they offer different possibilities for the translation, assembly, and stabilising of pasts not predicated upon the conventions developed for analog representation." -Bjornar Olsen, Michael Shanks,Timothy Webmoor, and Christopher Witmore, p. 103.

The organisation of online links, bookmarks and scraps can also hold a communal aspect. When reflecting on the digital quilt, we thought of the idea of a webring and how can a webring be translated into a digital 'quilt'. A webring creates connections with other websites while also compiling all of these online scraps, similarly to the quilt.

When researching web-quilts and webrings, we wanted to keep in mind the research XPUB2 wrote during their SI23, Quilt Infrastructures. Here are a few notes from their research:

• Through this collective project, they wanted to provide spaces for collective dreaming and create action to form understanding of big tech.
• Servers run by communities created agency.
• service, division of labour, infrastructure
• The notion of quilting as a methodology to understand these hidden web structures (data, radio signals, messages, etc...).
• Quilts are similarly multilayered in structure.
• Seams are infrastructures built in relation to each other, not from scratch.
• The quilting of server connections, processes, interfaces and interventions.

• Through quilting, they could make public the innards of labour and collective processes.
• Learning about early community servers and using actions on the keyboard as a driving force.
• (map of data centres)
• The invisible within such infrastructures

This is a link to their quilt: https://issue.xpub.nl/23/quilt/quilt.html