From medieval tapestry and Navajo weaving to the work of 20th-century artists like Louise Bourgeois and Keith Smith, textiles and language have an interwoven history. Since the birth of computing (from the technology of the Jacquard loom), the digital has come to mediate and complicate the relationship between fabric and writing. This talk will explore the relationship between text, textile, and language in the digital age.

In antiquity, Philomel’s tongue is cut out by her rapist so that she cannot tell the story of her rape: she weaves it instead. In 1973, Beryl Korot’s multichannel installation Text and Commentary juxtaposes the recording of her weaving with the pattern for the cloth and the cloth itself. In 2013, Nick Thurston and the UK-based conceptual press information as material publishes an entire book of poetry written by anonymous laborers via Amazon's Mechanical Turk service. Thinking about the connections between each of these moments, and more, we will trace the way that the patterning of information, definitions of authorship, and evolving codes of transmission move across time in the coded, the woven, and the spoken.

*This is a free event for the Think Olio community*