Panel Statement

Digital Divas presents Between the Sheets: An attempt to generate a MOO mediated debate with a physical and virtual presence. Digital divas will stage this debate with the help of absent friends via a MOO space attempting to deflate the space between participants, inviting everyone to take a corner of this piece of patch-work and stitch a few ideas into the fabric of this textual quilt Digital divas speak with a language of textiles. Somewhere or how, for us (them), textiles became the model with which to explore new technology or vice versa. Textile + technology, the two are inextricably part of the same language, the same history. I would venture to say that in very few disciplines is there such a symbiotic existence, despite the nature of computers now having applied relationships to potentially every discipline. It has to do with language, an overarching system of signs and symbols and rules forusing them that is used to carry information, as in programming, Ones and Zeros, on/off, over/under. The work has been done that puts this on the map. Sadie Plant’s Zeros and Ones, Future Looms, Barbara Layne + Ingrid Bachmann’s Fault Lines: Measurement, Distance and Place, Regina Frank’s Address and Hermes Mistress, Gwen Zierdt’s Unabomber, Emily DuBois/ Michael Elinson’s 1984 “Woven Music” (a collaborative work for loom and player piano) It is at this point we say -what now? Textiles has been a guide that has led us all into new and challenging territory; issues of real and virtual are sensitised, high and hand technologies are juxtaposed, dynamics of community, of networking, of identity are addressed. Are there still places to go? Do we step further inside the mind of the computer or do we step back into the world of physical touchable objects? Rather than set any theme beyond the common denominator of textiles, participants are invited to say what’s on their minds, what is current in their thinking. Would this not be the ground from which to survey the possibilities of the future?

• Janet Bezzant, moderator, MA Course Leader Textiles, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
• Barbara Layne, Montreal, CA
• Sadie Plant, UK,
• Regina Frank, Germany
• Ingrid Bachmann, Chicago, US, is an artist whose activities include a studio practice, curatorial projects, writing and collabo-rative ventures. Recent projects include Knit One, Swim 2, an interactive installation, and Fault Lines, an intemet computer weaving collaboration with Barbara Layne. She has written for numerous catalogues and art magazines and is currently co-editing MATERIAL MATTERS, an anthology that examin-ing the relationships between material and culture. Curatorial projects include “Re-Inventing the Box”, for ISEA 97 and “Poke Out Her Eyes and Other Stories”. She is currently Visiting Artist at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago.