[ONLINE] ETHOS LAB: Materializing Data with Macramé

In celebration of Ada Lovelace Day 2020 ETHOS Lab at the IT University of Copenhagen will be hosting a workshop on Macrame and Data Feminism with Vasiliki Tsaknaki, Assistant Professor in Digital Design, ITU.

The history of computation is filled with contributions made by women and their ingenuity, crafts, and art. But so often the kinds of contributions that are feminized are also marginalized. The close relationship between computation and weaving, as seen for example in the jacquard loom, or with knots and tying has often been overlooked when recounting the innovation of computational artifice. More recently, work in “data feminism” has drawn attention to the ways that we feminize and marginalize particular ways of working with and visualizing data. Particular aesthetics of objective totalizing visions are privileged over partial and embodied ones.

 In her talk, Vasiliki Tsaknaki will tell us about her own work collaborating on digital technologies with craft artists and working with soft and textile forms of programming and designing computation. 

The talk will be an inspirational point of departure and an introduction to some of the ways that knots, tying, and textile arts like macrame, have (might) contributed to computational aesthetics and thought. 

In the workshop, through exploring possible paths to visualizing gender data with macrame knots, we will reflect on how data is produced, designed and communicated. We will also be working hands on with macrame to explore how tying and knots might be a way of transmuting and interpreting data on gender representation at our own institutions. Attempting to materialize data in macrame, we will reflect on what happens when we put data into our hands to think and work with through string, beads, and tying knots.