Tensile Specimens
"Tensile Specimens" is a hybrid publication comprising archival material, new textile works, and excerpted writings annotated by commissioned participants, elaborated by an exhibition at the Hessel Museum.These texts present a variety of perspectives on digital technologies, attending to their relation to theories of cybernetic self-organization and to how they were inspired by methods of industrial textile production. The Jacquard loom, whose use of punch cards as a programming system is often understood as a forerunner to the computer, is one such technologically bridging mechanism.
In materials science laboratories, a tensile specimen is a fiber stretched to its structural limit. The artists included in "Tensile Specimens" similarly test the limits of plausibility in their textile experiments. Considering how the digital has subsumed the language and operations of weaving, this publication focuses in on the notion of anonymity. At stake is the erasure of individual identification with products of human labor: particularly, the anonymization of technical activities. In the long history of textile production, anonymity marks both the way that collective craft practices eschewed naming individual makers and the way that increasing mechanization further distanced weavers from the cloth they produced. Tensile Specimens contends that these models of anonymization transferred from textiles into emergent digital technologies and their surrounding discourse. This transfer is evidenced both in the way that digital labor is conceived and in the construction of a digital commons, which allows for a potentially anonymous collectivity.
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"Tensile Specimens" is a hybrid publication comprising archival material, new textile works, and excerpted writings annotated by commissioned participants, elaborated by an exhibition at the Hessel Museum.These texts present a variety of perspectives on digital technologies, attending to their relation to theories of cybernetic self-organization and to how they were inspired by methods of industrial textile production. The Jacquard loom, whose use of punch cards as a programming system is often understood as a forerunner to the computer, is one such technologically bridging mechanism.
In materials science laboratories, a tensile specimen is a fiber stretched to its structural limit. The artists included in "Tensile Specimens" similarly test the limits of plausibility in their textile experiments. Considering how the digital has subsumed the language and operations of weaving, this publication focuses in on the notion of anonymity. At stake is the erasure of individual identification with products of human labor: particularly, the anonymization of technical activities. In the long history of textile production, anonymity marks both the way that collective craft practices eschewed naming individual makers and the way that increasing mechanization further distanced weavers from the cloth they produced. Tensile Specimens contends that these models of anonymization transferred from textiles into emergent digital technologies and their surrounding discourse. This transfer is evidenced both in the way that digital labor is conceived and in the construction of a digital commons, which allows for a potentially anonymous collectivity.
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