Productive few days of working and reflection in the Museum für Abgüsse Klassischer Bildwerke in Munich with Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Dave Griffiths and Alex McLean, as part of the project Weaving Codes/Coding Weaves. Whilst paying attention to the work and dialogue between Ellen, Dave and Alex, the context for the museum also provided a critical context in itself for reflecting on the project (including through a form of visual/photographic note-taking which will be returned to as provocation for future writing). Above, Penelope (the weaver) and Artemis/Diana (the hunter/archer) - in close proximity in the museum. A kairotic
connection perhaps? Kairos
has origins in two different sources: archery, where as Eric Charles White
notes, it describes “an
opening or ‘opportunity’ or, more precisely, a long tunnel like aperture
through which the archer’s arrow has to pass”, and weaving where there is “a ‘critical time’ when the weaver must draw
the yarn through a gap that momentarily opens in the warp of the cloth being
woven” (Eric Charles White, 1987. Kaironomia:
On the Will to Invent. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London: 13).
The experience of being in the Museum für Abgüsse Klassischer Bildwerke provided a context for thinking through the ideas related to the Weaving Codes/Coding Weaves (specifically in relation to Penelopean labour) from a different perspective, through the provocation of various encounters therein (some examples of encounter below) which offered a very particular prism for reflection. Ideas of live coding/weaving to manual dexterity (or loss thereof); different modalities of sense-making (embracing tactility, temporality, embodied experience, perhaps even the politics and poetics of écriture féminine); the relation between weaving/unweaving to folding/unfolding/refolding; reversibility and also irreversibility; the notion of the version (as a site of repetition or iteration but with variation, the possibility of different inflection); the relation between cuts and continuities in notation (discontinuous and continuous systems for describing both the experience of coding and of weaving); practices for 'making tangible' the hidden or invisible, the immaterial or seemingly virtual, through the spatialisation of process as well as attending to the nature of its temporality .... more to follow.
The experience of being in the Museum für Abgüsse Klassischer Bildwerke provided a context for thinking through the ideas related to the Weaving Codes/Coding Weaves (specifically in relation to Penelopean labour) from a different perspective, through the provocation of various encounters therein (some examples of encounter below) which offered a very particular prism for reflection. Ideas of live coding/weaving to manual dexterity (or loss thereof); different modalities of sense-making (embracing tactility, temporality, embodied experience, perhaps even the politics and poetics of écriture féminine); the relation between weaving/unweaving to folding/unfolding/refolding; reversibility and also irreversibility; the notion of the version (as a site of repetition or iteration but with variation, the possibility of different inflection); the relation between cuts and continuities in notation (discontinuous and continuous systems for describing both the experience of coding and of weaving); practices for 'making tangible' the hidden or invisible, the immaterial or seemingly virtual, through the spatialisation of process as well as attending to the nature of its temporality .... more to follow.
Visual 'note-taking' in the Museum für Abgüsse Klassischer Bildwerke
From my recent paper 'Live Coding / Weaving - Penelopean Mêtis and the Weaver-Coder’s Kairos', "I think of Luce Irigaray when she says, “one must listen differently in order to hear an other meaning which is constantly in the process of weaving itself, at the same time ceaselessly embracing words and yet casting them off to avoid becoming fixed immobilised” (Irigaray 1980: 103). A Penelopean labour - doing and undoing - but not the repetitive practice of sameness, but rather one of attending to difference, to the potential twists, variations and permutations of the thread or code. Here, a ‘doing-undoing-redoing’ perhaps akin to the Deleuzian conceptualization of a plier/déplier/replier, where the act of folding, unfolding and refolding “no longer simply means tension-release, contraction-dilation, but enveloping-developing, involution-evolution” (Deleuze 2006: 9).
Below is a draft version of my paper, 'Live Coding / Weaving - Penelopean Mêtis and the Weaver-Coder’s Kairos'. An initial version of this paper was presented at the Threads and Codes symposium. This current version will be presented at the International Conference on Live Coding, 13 - 15 July 2015, University of Leeds, UK. ICLC is the first International Conference on Live Coding, hosted by ICSRiM in the School of Music, University of Leeds, UK, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as part of the Live Coding Research Network. http://iclc.livecodenetwork.org/
From my recent paper 'Live Coding / Weaving - Penelopean Mêtis and the Weaver-Coder’s Kairos', "I think of Luce Irigaray when she says, “one must listen differently in order to hear an other meaning which is constantly in the process of weaving itself, at the same time ceaselessly embracing words and yet casting them off to avoid becoming fixed immobilised” (Irigaray 1980: 103). A Penelopean labour - doing and undoing - but not the repetitive practice of sameness, but rather one of attending to difference, to the potential twists, variations and permutations of the thread or code. Here, a ‘doing-undoing-redoing’ perhaps akin to the Deleuzian conceptualization of a plier/déplier/replier, where the act of folding, unfolding and refolding “no longer simply means tension-release, contraction-dilation, but enveloping-developing, involution-evolution” (Deleuze 2006: 9).
Below is a draft version of my paper, 'Live Coding / Weaving - Penelopean Mêtis and the Weaver-Coder’s Kairos'. An initial version of this paper was presented at the Threads and Codes symposium. This current version will be presented at the International Conference on Live Coding, 13 - 15 July 2015, University of Leeds, UK. ICLC is the first International Conference on Live Coding, hosted by ICSRiM in the School of Music, University of Leeds, UK, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as part of the Live Coding Research Network. http://iclc.livecodenetwork.org/