The Living Net: Vibrant LIves
Digital Humanities summer Institute
Victoria, British Columbia
Photo by Jessica Rajko.
The following images are from an exhibition presented at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria, British Columbia, June 2016. In this iteration of the Vibrant Lives project, we enlivened my haptic net with objects contributed by FemTechNet artists and scholars and local community members. The action of crocheting objects into the net was performed in and with audiences as they felt the real-time data output of the space. The call for objects was incited by my collaborator Jacqueline Wernimont as an invocation of Carolyn Steedman’s work in Dust. This language from Jacque's Facebook and Twitter call:
So, in the spirit of (Carolyn) Steedman’s rag rug and other related models, I’d like to ask my “nets” – all of you who make up the networks that sustain this work – to help me weave a bit of an analog network into our vibrating, vibrant web for Vibrant Lives @ DHSI. Send me a bit, a trace, an item, a piece of your everyday and I’ll sit with it and weave it into our net at DHSI.
Several women contributed the “ends, endings, traces, and trailing” of their everyday lives; the very things that Steedman suggests are the archives where we can find those who are most often excluded from official archives and their networks of power. This work has already been the topic of much conversation in digital humanities, including publication in the forthcoming edited collection of essays with the University of Minnesota Press titled, Making Humanities Matter.
