Language Scarves Open Source Embroidery Ele Carpenter

Introduction Exhibitions Html Patchwork Workshops Language Scarves Links to interesting things

Ele Carpenter's Shared Language Scarves map the language used to describe ownership and engagement with art across three creative sectors, highlighting an increasingly politicised process moving from object based art to Open Source through Socially Engaged Practice. The scarves are stitched during events discussing issues of cultural production, ownership, organisation, and distribution. These events enable the embriodered texts to be contested and developed through conversation. The stitched words are discussed below. Audience: Participants: Community of users An art gallery or museum presents art objects to an audience; socially engaged practice develops projects with an audience as participants; open source networks involve their audience as users. The notion of audeince is shifting away from narrowly defined social groups, to communities of users with particular skills and interests. Education: Facilitation: Self-organisation An art gallery presents objects to enable people to experience them. The purpose of this experience is often described in terms of education and entertainment. In social engagement it is not the object, but the participant who embodies the knowledge of the experience. Social engagement faciliatates people to value their own cultural experience. Open source takes this pedagogy a step further to encourage self-organisation, where users develop the tools they need to develop and distribute their own culture. Target Groups: (located) Community: (Distributed) Network Gallery education and outreach programmes follow funding agendas for priority socio-economic target groups. The social deprivation of these groups is increasingly linked to lack of access to 'culture'. Socially engaged artists work directly with their audiences, often presenting the work back to the (secondary) art gallery audience. Socially engaged practice aims to work with a communities own culture. This is achieved through working with people to identify issues relevant to their locality or specialist area of interest. Eg keeping the local pool open, or exploring common areas of interest such as chess or driving. Networked technology defines social relations not in terms of a located 'community' but in terms of it's 'network' mapping the relations between people at different points of time and space. This network enables the development of distributed communities of interest. Author: Collaboration: Collective Open Structure The words above chart a shift from producing or consuming an object to taking part in a process. The author becomes a collaborator and then works within a collective open structure. Free Culture has transformed authorship to shared ownership to common ownership with formal legal structures such as the creative commons. Copyright: Shared copyright: Creative Commons The concept of copyright has shifted from a legal structure of ownership to a licence to share. Whlist socially engaged practices have used joint copyright as a way of establishing shared ownership - Creative Commons enables people to license creative material so that it can be shared or reused by others. 1:1:1 1 : Many Many : Many Traditional distribution is based on the single viewer (1) contemplating an art work (1) created by the artist (1). In socially engaged art the multi-authored work (many) can be represented back in the gallery as a singular viewing experience (many:1). Alternatively the artist may develop their individual concept as an educational process with many people (1:Many). Open source programmes such as Pirate Radio (Pit Schultz) work on a Many:Many model, enabling people to be both the producers and users of the radio station. This model has now been widely adopted by mainstream media. Producer: User: Producers = Users Art objects are produced and consumed by different people. Socially engaged art and open source involves people in the production of their own culture, which is also consumed by others in different ways. The open source development model involves users being the producers, or at least contributing to a part, of the production process. DIY aesthetic: Process: Sustainable economy This mapping challenges the nature of the aesthetic from something that looks handmade, simply rejecting high production values (ripped jeans, torn paper), to something that is hand built or adapted according to need. Alongside this is the aesthetic of dialogic process; developed through social engagement, enabling people to develop sustainable tools and resources, that are collectively developed and owned.