De-code Gender: A Knitted Perspective

During the International Conference, Interart/Intermedia Experimentation in Italy Through the Ages, Royal Holloway 12-13^th April 2019, I had the honour of presenting the collaborative and cross-disciplinary project </unravel;> which I have worked on together with Ellen Jonsson. I looked especially at the research behind our work, and the creative process of making it.

In our practices, Ellen and I are both interested in the technical and conceptual crossings between design, art and craft in relation to data visualization (in this case text and textiles), often working through social design issues, sexuality and gender-challenging themes.

</unravel;> is a performance of the making of a 25-meter knitted manifesto which unravels ideas and preconceptions of binarisms: craft and design, analog and digital, female and male, zeroes and ones. Through the hacking of binary systems, we challenged the notion of gender binary tout court.

The performative design piece was presented during Degree Show 2: Design, at Central Saint Martins, London. For this final collaboration, we found there was no better way to talk about binarisms than by using the binary system par excellence: weaving and the Jacquard loom is the first form of programming. The process took two months of researching, experimenting and prototyping. During this time, we learned how to set up a knitting machine, we hacked the Brother 950i, worked out on how to knit type and wrote an essay on gender binaries.

Perfectly summed up in the word textus, text and textiles are deeply linked and interconnected with coding. Language and knitting are coded systems themselves: a set of rules and functions. In this process of interlacing yarns and ideas, the medium becomes the message. The project was based on thorough research about the links between the binary language of weaving-knitting and that of computing, as well as about the stereotypes around gender and technology: our focus was the contrast between the male-dominated computer hacking, and the domestic female ‘quick and easy’ hobby of knitting.

Fig 1 Vintage domestic knitting machine, Brother series (source:web)
Fig 2 The Jacquard Loom, invented in 1800 (source:web)
Fig 3 A punch-card used to create patterns in the Jacquard loom (source:web)
Fig 4, 5 Vintage posters advertising domestic knitting machines (source: web)

extract1

The yarn is neither metaphorical nor literal, but quite simply material, a gathering of threads which twist and turn through the history of computing, technology, the sciences and arts. In and out of the punched holes of automated looms, up and down through the ages of spinning and weaving, back and forth through the fabrication of fabrics, shuttles and looms, cotton and silk, canvas and paper, brushes and pens, typewriters, carriages, telephone wires, synthetic fibres, electrical filaments, silicon strands, fibre-optic cables, pixels screens, telecom lines, the Net, and matrices, the World Wide Web to come.

(from: Zeros + Ones. Digital Women and The New Technoculture, Sadie Plant, 1991, knitted text for </unravel;> Issue 1)

The 25-meter long knitted essay produced during the Degree Show includes a title, 4 chapters and a bibliography, and it is a collection of extracts and quotes by authors that inspire us in our practices: Margaret Atwood, Sadie Plant, Marshall McLuhan, Monique Wittig, Donna Haraway, Anni Albers, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, just to name a few.

The project also explores the communal spirit of a craft; a space in which people can share thoughts and opinions. Craft as a vehicle for political change.

For our second iteration, specially commissioned for our participation in the London Design Festival 2018 within the Creative Unions Exhibition (Lethaby Gallery, Central Saint Martins), we produced </uravel;> Issue 2: Histories or Tales of Future Times, we knitted a 25-meter long fairy tale, challenging gender stereotypes in the fine line that divides History from a Tale.

The point is that we have not formed that
ancient world—it has formed us. We ingested
it as children whole, had its values and
consciousness imprinted on our minds as
cultural absolutes long before we were in fact
men and women. We have taken the fairy tales
of childhood with us into maturity, chewed
but still lying in the stomach, as real identity.

(from: Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality, A. Dworkin,1974, knitted text in </unravel;> Issue 2: Histories or Tales of Future Times )

According to Joseph Campbell “myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of human life.” Folk tales and folk art (craft) are both parts of an inseparable interwoven net. They contain the spirit of the collective unconscious. We asked ourselves: what is the impact of those stories in shaping our perspective on gender? Our research focused on the dangerous promotion of gender stereotypes through fairy tales and the authors and thinkers that challenged those representations. With this project we wanted to write a different tale, in an optimistic attempt to imagine a more inclusive and queer future.

Each day for the duration of the performance we knitted one chapter of this tale, each told from the perspective of a new narrator. The structure of the written piece was, this time, inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron framed narrative structure – a literary technique of a story within a story. In The Decameron, ten characters/narrators shelter in a secluded villa outside Florence to escape the Great Plague, and each one tells a story every night.

And on day the first
the first narrator
sat by the spinning yarn
and thus begun:

(beginning of each chapter, inspired by The Decameron)

In our story, all voices are one and multiple at the same time. The narrator is an archetype, made out of an indefinite plurality of narrators. The story is a combination of perspectives, that we ambitiously put together inspired by Vladimir Propp’s formulas for creating stories.

You can find the texts and the bibliographies in the project’s website: www.projectunravel.com

Fig 6, 7, 8, 9. </unravel;>. Performance during Degree Show 2: Design, 2018
Fig 10. Knit detail
Fig 11. Prototyping sessions
Fig 12. Second installation for London Design Festival ’18, Creative Unions exhibition
Fig 13, 14, 15. The title for </unravel;> Issue 2 was inspired by one of the first collections of fairytales, Stories or Tales from Times Past, with Morals, 1697, written by Charles Perrault