Softweave

ABSTRACT

The contents of this volume are a weaving.¹  The text lays parallel to a graphic design practice that emerges from research into computation, digital publishing and speculative design. I ask how we can change the structures of world building to become collaborative and ethical practices — resisting hierarchy and reclaiming agency in the spaces we occupy. By making soft modifications imbued with feminist praxis across a variety of automatic processes, softwares, feeds, and streams, this thesis explores ways to open up critical avenues of making in order to speculate on fluid futures that we can co-author.

1.    The computer emerges out of the history of weaving, the process so often said to be the quintessence of women's work. The loom is the vanguard site of software development. Indeed, it is from the loom, or rather the process of weaving, that this paper takes another cue. Perhaps it is an instance of this process as well, for tales and texts are woven as surely as threads and fabrics. — Sadie Plant, The Future Loom: Weaving Women and Cybernetics.

ABSTRACT

The contents of this volume are a weaving.¹  The text lays parallel to a graphic design practice that emerges from research into computation, digital publishing and speculative design. I ask how we can change the structures of world building to become collaborative and ethical practices — resisting hierarchy and reclaiming agency in the spaces we occupy. By making soft modifications imbued with feminist praxis across a variety of automatic processes, softwares, feeds, and streams, this thesis explores ways to open up critical avenues of making in order to speculate on fluid futures that we can co-author.

1.    The computer emerges out of the history of weaving, the process so often said to be the quintessence of women's work. The loom is the vanguard site of software development. Indeed, it is from the loom, or rather the process of weaving, that this paper takes another cue. Perhaps it is an instance of this process as well, for tales and texts are woven as surely as threads and fabrics. — Sadie Plant, The Future Loom: Weaving Women and Cybernetics.