P@tch: Can We Use DIY Techno-Craftivism to End Armchair Activism
Abstract
Like a Fitbit for your ethical performance, P@tch is a textile-based new media project that uses light and social media to allow the user to track their progress as an advocate for an environmental, ethical stance. P@tch workshops are built to create a space for creativity and discussion surrounding the conflict between personal and corporate accountability to affect change.
Keywords
Feminism, Craft, Wearable Technology, Workshop, Activism, Social Media, Accountability, Community, Ethics, Environmentalism
Introduction
Like a Fitbit for your ethical performance, P@tch (Figure 1.) is a hand-embroidered patch that allows the user to track their progress as an advocate for an ethical stance. This utilizes the ethos of Punk, DIY/Lo-fi, and digital opensource movements by posting all sources, material, and instructions online for anyone to access. By posting all of these resources on my website I hope to foster a more inclusive space for voices that are often unheard in new media art and tech fields in general.
The main components of P@tch are an RGB color mixing LED light, a small sewable microcontroller, a Bluetooth module, and a button switch. This wearable is made with soft circuit electronics allowing participants to sew the circuits directly into the fabric of their patch. The Bluetooth module connects to the Adafruit Bluefruit app on their phone which then sends self-reported data to a feed on an open source platform. It then triggers another online application created using IFTTT to transmit data from their feed to their twitter account.
Conceptual Framework
Technology has biases and is shaped by the society that produces and uses it. Our self-tracking gadgets track everything from efficiency at work, diet, exercise, and sleep patterns, but there is not yet a market for tracking qualities such as our empathy or our ability to affect change. This absence may be due to the capitalistic, white and male power structure of current tech space and needs to be rejected and restructured to include women and people of color to unleash the true power of technology. The action of wearing the P@tch is a performance in the sense that it draws attention to the wearer and sparks conversation with others in the surrounding community. We can imagine an alternative world in which tracking our environmental impact was as popular as tracking our fitness level. A glowing world full of low power LED accountability jackets.
Second wave feminist movements – such as the ecofeminist and anti-war movements, leaned into this essentialist notion of gender roles and saw science as “other”, believing it to be inherently masculine and violent.
Early ecofeminist movements emphasized women’s connection to nature as intrinsic to their feminine identity. They argued there were irreconcilable differences between the mechanical/masculine and the natural/feminine [3].
Social scientists studying the gender problem in science in the ’60s and ‘70s gave little thought to the nature of the technoscience industry as being exclusionary as it was believed that science is intrinsically concerned with unbiased and objective research. Since the 1960s, social scientists have studied women’s exclusion from science and technology [1]. Many, such as Australian Sociologist Judy Wajcman, agree that it is not only the role of discrimination in these fields that discourage women from starting careers in the science and tech fields but the more complex issue of the internalization of prescribed gender roles penetrating our systems of mass media and education that tell women science and technology are for men [2]. In TechnoFeminism, Judy Wajcman points out that assuming the issue of socialization puts the problem on women’s shoulders to become more “man-like” as opposed to questioning how the fields of technoscience can be altered to accommodate qualities women are socialized to have.
In the early 2000s, the Maker movement hoped to open up technology to everyone in true DIY fashion, but Makerspaces continue to have a gender gap issue. According to a 2012 independent market study published in Make: 81% of U.S. Makers identify as male [4]. This leaves many women and marginalized groups feeling that the power structure in these supposedly structureless spaces is just a continuation of the power structures of the tech industry, forcing them to create their own spaces such as Double Union or Hacker Moms in San Francisco [5].
The concept of this project is inspired by Judy Wajcman’s position that subversive possibilities of new technology have been overlooked and can be a valuable tool for destabilizing the current patriarchal and classist power structure [6]. The structure, however, is taken partially from artists Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch’s Key Features of craftivism: participatory projects that value democratic processes, use of various cross-disciplinary media, and ongoing commitment to politicized practices, issues, and actions [7].
White male domination over emerging technology and science has contributed to the idea that “man’s work” is skilled or valuable work. This allows us as artists and marginalized people to use these emerging technologies subversively. By combining technology with the rich history of textiles in resistance and activist movements, we can create new objects that confuse the essentialism of masculine/feminine tech/textile.
Technology like craft stretches the bounds of aesthetics and the way we interpret how art can be made. Because of this, I view the tinkerers as the new craftsmen making things with our hands in the real world as well as in the digital realm. In my work, I want to blur these lines even further by utilizing ways in which textiles enhance my technological work and vice versa.
Workshops
In person, P@tch workshops invite participants to create their own critical design object that allows them to discuss boundaries that inhibit personal political action that shift from the online space to the physical realm, as well as question the limits of personal and corporate responsibility. The P@tch workshops teach participants the basics of embroidery, conductive thread circuitry, to get them started making their own self-accountability-tracker that can be synced to their twitter feed (Figure 2.).
To begin a workshop, I begin by providing my own story of creating the P@tch and provide my personal plastic-use tracking P@tch as an example. I do not prescribe my own ethical beliefs to the participants, but encourage them to create a tracker to advocate for something they care about. I then have participants introduce themselves so participants get a short introduction and get to know one another. The participants are provided with written instructions that include images and circuit diagrams in an eleven-page zine. By providing instructions for workshop-goers that covers things like how not to create a short circuit, it is my goal to make participants feel less rushed to complete their P@tch by the end of the workshop. The zines also include instructions on where to find the code or how to get the microcontroller up and running. I walk from person to person helping and joining conversations instead of taking a place at the head of the workshop table. This allows me to help those too shy to ask for assistance, and I can encourage those who are more experienced to help others. It also gives those that wanted to the option to work ahead of the rest of the group and those who worked more slowly to go back and reference the instructions.
I had the opportunity to run the first iteration of this series of workshops at Purdue University on October 26th, 2018. Around 10 participants came to make a color change P@tch. The workshop participants were mainly college-educated women ranging in age from late teens to middle age with previous sewing experience, but little to no experience with electronics. Some participants had no sewing skills and that seemed like a larger hurdle than the circuitry. In these kinds of cases, I think it is important to demonstrate and provide clear guidelines on how to sew basic stitches and how to tie off their thread which I had left out in my first set of instructions. For this particular workshop, I adapted the P@tch to the skillset of the group by only include a color changing LED instead of the Bluetooth module. In this color change version of the P@tch, the button switch only triggers a color change in the LED, so those within your vicinity can see how you are doing on your goal. I intended to make the experience relaxed and low stress as I knew they had a lot to learn in a short amount of time. I did not ask them to share their tracked behavior (though many did) with other participants or me, but I did ask them to fill out an exit survey. One participant chose to follow their plastic use, three decided to monitor their water use, and one chose to be more conscious of riding their bike over driving to work.
Evaluation
At the moment P@tch is entirely reliant on self-reporting, requiring the user to evaluate their behavior and decide if they believe it to be in line with their ethical goal or not. While this may not be the most scientifically significant data to collect, I personally find that using P@tch to monitor and evaluate my behavior is quite effective because of this. The awareness I have gained by using this monitor has already impacted my consumer habits as I shop, particularly at the grocery store. I now notice all the sneaky ways manufacturers use plastic in their packaging and have realized how difficult it is to buy something without creating plastic waste. I am not opposed to utilizing more concrete data for the P@tch project, however. I am currently negotiating with Science Gallery Melbourne to put together a P@tch workshop that will include a CO2 sensor to track air quality. I feel this kind of hard data along with self-reflection is a way to track the larger consequences of our consumer decisions.
I have a section of my website dedicated to sharing all resources and code I used to create my project and have included a discussion board section for people to ask for help or to start conversations surrounding their P@tch. In the future, I plan to continue to provide both demonstrations and written instructions to make the P@tch via workshops, but I am also creating a video tutorial to make it more accessible.
As I continue my opensource art practice, I continue to ask:
Can we re-engage the radical potential of craftivism without creating another neo-liberal capitalist site for self-promotion and marketing?
Can we hybridize practices by joining craft, technology to make a kind of Techno-craftivism making the personal political?
References
Jennings, J. E., & Brush, C. G. (2013). Research on women entrepreneurs: Challenges to (and from) the broader entrepreneurship literature. Academy of Management Annals, 7, 663–715. doi:10.1080/19416520.2013.782190
Aspray, W., & Cohoon, J. M. (2006). Women and Information Technology : Research on Underrepresentation. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press. Retrieved from
Shiva, V., & Mies, M. (2014). Ecofeminism. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com
Make/Intel. (2012). Maker market study and media report. Retrieved from http://cdn.makezine.com/make/sales/ Maker-Market-Study.pdf
Henry, Liz.(2014). The Rise of Feminist Hackerspaces and How to Make Your Own. Model View Culture, Retrieved from modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-rise-of-feminist-hackerspaces-and-how-to-make-your-own.
Wajcman, J. (2004). TechnoFeminism. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Black, A. & Burisch, N. (2010). Craft Hard, Die Free: Radical Curatorial Strategies for Craftivism in Unruly Contexts, The Craft Reader. Oxford, England: Berg Publishers, 609-614.
Bibliography
Aspray, W., & Cohoon, J. M. (2006). Women and Information Technology : Research on Underrepresentation. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.lib.purdue.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=156930&site=ehost-live
Henry, Liz.(2014). The Rise of Feminist Hackerspaces and How to Make Your Own. Model View Culture, Retrieved from modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-rise-of-feminist-hackerspaces-and-how-to-make-your-own.
Jennings, J. E., & Brush, C. G. (2013). Research on women entrepreneurs: Challenges to (and from) the broader entrepreneurship literature. Academy of Management Annals, 7, 663–715. doi:10.1080/19416520.2013.782190
Make/Intel. (2012). Maker market study and media report. Retrieved from http://cdn.makezine.com/make/sales/ Maker-Market-Study.pdf
Shiva, V., & Mies, M. (2014). Ecofeminism. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com
Breaking the Rules: Unleashing the Potential of Embroidery as a Critical Medium with Augmented Reality Tech .
Mixing traditional feminists mediums with new technologies ties us to our past while bringing the movement into the digital age. In the 1960’s and 1970’s the fine art community rejected the feminist craft movement until feminist art slowly carved out a space for itself. Now augmented reality has the same opportunity, to be brought into the fold of the art world.
The immersion of augmented reality has presented opportunities for marketing and gaming, but has yet to reach its full potential as an artistic medium. Augmented Reality lends itself to guerilla-tactics in a way other mediums cannot by allowing artists to subvert physical spaces and expand on them through digital content to engage the viewer. This technology is already being used in print media and product packaging to create interactive user experiences.
The implementation of image target based augmented reality gives artists the opportunity, not only to enhance objects and images that already exist, but to create images and objects to be enhanced. Image targets are images that can be tracked by software which recognize key features in the image through the device’s camera. The tracked image can then be manipulated and enhanced with digital content. Artists can co-opt this technology as a critical medium to create something beyond entertainment or marketing to point out issues within the social system.
Through experimentation I discovered that many of the rules put in place for successful image targets lend themselves well to embroidery as a medium. The imperfection of hand made objects is easy for the technology to recognize due to variation in stitches. By combining embroidery, a traditionally “feminine” craft, with augmented reality, it becomes a medium for critical commentary and subversive intervention.