Holes--Linings--Threads (review)

Web site: <http://www.felber.dircon.co.uk/holesliningsthreads/>. Artist: Alicia Felberbaum.

The site's concept is based on Sadie Plant's essay "The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics." According to the author, women have historically had a fundamental role in the invention, development, manufacture and use of technology. Plant begins her argument by pointing to the role of women in the history of technology, drawing attention to the technology of looms and their connection to computers through the development of Babbage's Analytical Engine. Using the metaphor of weaving, she describes the development of computer software and tries to visualize the basic non-linearity characteristic of the World Wide Web: as a "web of complexity, weaving itself." In an extension of this argument, Alicia Felberbaum, the author of holes-linings-threads, uses women's history in the textile industry, in Batley, West Yorkshire, U.K., to create the context of Sadie Plant's essay in a construct of visual and auditory references.

The web site does not have a common informational architecture of the sort that provides explicit menus that usually give a comprehensive overview of the informational space to be explored and accessed. Initial words (cards and holes, softwares linings, threads) invite users to get "interlaced" in the concept of the web site and start their navigation. An image of tapestry emerges as the web matrix, which is gradually constructed by the proposed connections. These links are constantly actualized by each user's reading, intervention and action. The images used bring together the concept and physical aspects of looms and weaving, showing diagrams and components such as switches and sets of gears. These images refer also to the functional process, the logic that is present in computer technology in which the user/weaver needs to have her/his commands understood by the machine. Following the context of computer systems and web technology, there are several levels of language that translate the machine language, based on binary numbers, to different users, from computer programmers to common web users. Turning on and turning off becomes yes and no, zero and one, and this can become a language to be converted into physical movements performed by any machine during its different and specific tasks. There are other important considerations about the use of images on this site, namely the movement created by the animated GIF files using a specific property from HTML tags to construct backgrounds in which a small image is horizontally and vertically repeated until the screen is totally completed. The purpose appears to be to re-create and reinforce the idea of looping in the constant repetitions that determine the physical movements of looms and define internal procedures of computing. This mirrors the necessity of every computing language to have routines and sub-routines as basic elements to describe recurrent functions and implement events. The use of these animated GIFs as background in many pages here results in an interesting visual effect, but it is also pure meta-language used to talk about the logic of computing employed by the author.

Plant has created a cohesive metaphor of the Web and an alliance between women, machinery and the new technology. Felberbaum refers to Plant's work and accurately uses resources from the programming language to create a poetic space. The site demands an unusual attitude from users to handle the interface and to weave their own way from their choices. From this exercise, it proposes changes in the users' contemplative and interpretative behavior for action and intervention. The informational layers are in a constant potential state, until the user's reading and interaction determines an actual state out of the many potentials. The web space can be "occupied" by users via the creation of personal networks, in the same way women's work wove their histories in the textile industry.