Project Development Outcome

Framed Music Strips

Project Development

Photographs by: Matthew Bradley

Punched-Hole Tunes: Ritornell’s Musicbox Business Cards

Ritornell's business cards are inspired by the project's live show. The improvised concerts evoke a lively atmosphere by the combination of filigree electronics with playful timbres of diverse acoustic instruments and utensils such as egg whisks, toilet brushes, chopsticks or sewing needles. As an integral part of their set list, Ritornell invites the audience to bring along their private musicboxes. Arranged in a big circle, the players' speed of turning levers is conducted: the results are as shimmering as you would expect.

Katharina Hölzl designed very special business cards to recreate this playful sonic universe. With the aid of laser assisted milling, nine micro compositions consisting of circles, triangles and Ritornell's contact information were applied onto a long musicbox paper stripe. Before handing out the cards to interested adressees, each individual subdivision is played back via an especially designed musical box – thus providing every business card receiver with a tailor made musical experience.

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Needlework for programmers

The movement brings together knitters, embroiderers and quilters who see parallels between the way they create their crafts and how open source software creators share their ideas. At the BildMuseet at Umeå University in Sweden, an exhibition — also called Open Source Embroidery — showcases artworks that use embroidery and code as a tool for participatory production and distribution.
“The idea of collaboration has been made cool by open source software,” says Carpenter, the curator of the exhibition. “But artists have been working like this for a long time.”
Even the differences between needlework crafts and open source software are alike, she says. Embroidery is largely dominated by women, while software is created mostly by men, she says. In embroidery, tiny stitches come together to create a pattern visible on the front of the fabric, while its system is revealed on the back. It’s similar to how software is created.
 The arguments about open source vs. free software can also be applied to embroidery, says Carpenter, where artists struggle with questions around borrowing and modifying patterns. “The Open Source Embroidery project simply attempts to provide a social and practical way of discussing these issues and trying out the practice,” says Carpenter.
The Open Source Embroidery movement, which started in 2005, says it will hold workshops to explore the idea further. “We are not all programmers,” says Carpenter, “but we are all looking to understand the shared philosophy and methods between craft and technology.”
Programming geeks, largely from the DIY community, are slowly acknowledging these similarities, agrees Becky Stern, an American artist whose work is included in the BildMuseet exhibition.
The exhibition will open in San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Folk Art on Oct. 2.
The Open Source embroidery exhibition also explores the history of computing as a craft. For example, the Jacquard loom is a mechanical loom invented in 1801 that used binary punch cards to design woven patterns. The loom is seen as the first programmed machine and one that inspired Charles Babbage in his design of the analytical engine.

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Helle Jorgensen – Cephlapods & Softwear.

The relationship between textiles and computers is explicit – the punched paper cards used to program early computers are direct descendents of similar cards used to program Jacquard looms during the height of the industrial revolution, More so terms like ‘interlaced’ (among other synonyms) which describe the way pixels are weaved onto the screen, only tighten this relationship.
Natureisdata is always happy to see complex non-Euclidean mathematical computation combined with textiles and handicraft. Helle Jorgensen has been a long time contributor to one of our favourite projects, the IFF’s Hyperbolic Crochet Reef, and its many different accumulations over the years. Gooseflesh is a blog of works in progress, completed creatures and associated inspiration combined in one repository. Byte sized wonders include Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Nature Study and Secret Strangeness of the Ocean.

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Luke Duncalfe - Jacquard Loom

Jacquard Loom Panels 1, 2, 4, 5 & 7 - Clickable Shockwave
 
Created by: Luke Duncalfe, 2002.

About:
He has always affected the way we compute, in the background. Joseph Jacquard's panels that could weave rich coloured yarn into patterned textile first displaced hundreds from their jobs as artisans, and later placed themselves at the very beginning of computing history, as examples of the first computer programs. Jacquard Loom Panels 1, 2, 4, 5 & 7 reflects on the panels taken from Jacquard's machine, their own patterned surface, and their punched-card happenstance of history through its reinterpretation of woven threads into the medium they became.

1. Click on Luke Duncalfe's Website - Jacquard Loom
2. At the bottom of the page click on 'View Jacquard Loom Panels 1, 2, 4, 5 & 7'.