Embroidered Digital Commons
Description
1.
"The Embroidered Digital Commons is a collectively stitched version of ‘A Concise Lexicon of/for the Digital Commons’ by the Raqs Media Collective (2003). The project seeks to hand-embroider the whole lexicon, term by term, through workshops and events as a practical way of close-reading and discussing the text and its current meaning" (http://www.furtherfield.org/programmes/activities/embroidered-digital-commons-workshops)
2.
"In 2003 the Raqs Media Collective wrote ‘A Concise Lexicon of/for the Digital Commons’. The full lexicon is an A-Z of the interrelationship between social, digital and material space. It weaves together an evolving language of the commons that is both poetic and informative. The terms of the lexicon are: Access, Bandwidth, Code, Data, Ensemble, Fractal, Gift, Heterogeneous, Iteration, Kernal, Liminal, Meme, Nodes, Orbit, Portability, Quotidian, Rescension, Site, Tools, Ubiquity, Vector, Web, Xenophilly, Yarn, and Zone.
The concept of the digital commons is based on the potential for everything that is digital to be common to all. Like common grazing land, this can mean commonly owned, commonly accessed or commonly available. But all of these blurred positions of status and ownership have complex repercussions in the field of intellectual property and copyright. The commons has become synonymous with digital media through the discourse surrounding free and open source software and creative commons licensing. The digital commons is a response to the inherent 'copy n paste' reproducibility of digital data, and the cultural forms that they support. Instead of trying to restrict access, the digital commons invite open participation in the production of ideas and culture. Where culture is not something you buy, but something you do.
The embroidery is a slow reproduction of ‘A Concise Lexicon of/for the Digital Commons’ text, transmitting the meme of the lexicon to hundreds of people stitching across the globe. In this way the work is a cultural meme, transmitting ideas through thinking and making as part of a distributed participatory project. The whole text is easy to take apart, divide into small sections, stitch, and reassemble through fabric and film. It is easy to translate into different formats, but hard to translate metaphor into different languages.
The poetic and metaphorical aspects of the digital commons are recontextualised through close-reading, close-listening, discussion and shared making. The ideas are most effectively explored when they are expressed and illustrated using and multiple layers of meaning and wit. The meme of the digital commons travels fast through networks that investigate the language of shared production and distribution, for example crafters and open source programmers are committed embroiderers of the digital commons. The meme of the digital commons has also spread across all areas of cultural production including music, design and art." (http://www.furtherfield.org/programmes/activities/embroidered-digital-commons-workshops)