glittyknittykitty

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September 1, 2010

Embroidered digital commons

The Embroidered Digital Commons (EDC) is a project taking place from 2001-2012, an artwork faciltiated by Ele Carpenter as part of the Open Source Embroidery (OSE) project, utilising social and digital connectivity.

The project in its totality is to create an embroidery of the text 'A Concise Lexicon of/for the Digital Commons' by the Raqs Media Collective (2003).

From the EDC website:

This distributed embroidery aims to collectively stitch terms from the Lexicon as a practical way of close-reading and discussing the text and it's current meaning. Each term is chosen in relation to the specific context of its production.

Some terms have already been completed, some are ongoing, some have yet to start and many have not yet been claimed.

We at gkk have asked for a term to be reserved for us. Our term is:

QUOTIDIAN

And the Raqs Media Collective definiton:

Quotidian: Common but not commonplace. The memorable nature of the everyday. Memory walking down a street and turning a corner. Memory buzzing in a hard disk. Ubiquitous, the dirt in a site, the fog in a liminal zone, that which is thickened through repetition.

Milk, computers, onions, computers, pyjamas, computers, carpal tunnel syndrome, computers, accidents, computers, sex, computers, bread, computers, night, computers, class, computers, skin, computers, love, computers, money, computers, headaches, computers, police, computers, buses, computers, bicycle, computers, radio, computers, horoscopes, computers, matrimonials, computers, funerals, computers, biscuits, computers, conversations, computers, silences, computers.

The quotidian is that which makes a journal turn, over time, into a history, because it induces the search for patterns and meanings in an otherwise tangled mass of time, in memes iterated beyond reasonable limits. Routine, yet random, the quotidian nature of anything demands fleeting moments of lucid engagement with the real world, which now includes within it the world that is forged every time any fingers do a qwerty dance on a keyboard. The quotidian is a measure of all things, rare and commonplace.

I may have been a bit stupid to choose a term without realising how long it was.... this is one of the longest in the lexicon... but in terms of our initial thinking I am convinced we made the right choice.

We have yet to finalise our thoughts on what our patches will be like aesthetically, and how much of a coherent integrated artefact we want to end up with, but we have decided that unlike many of the other terms currently being created, ours will not be a community created piece.

Ours will be a term created in the private social digital space between the two authors of glittyknittykitty, who are at opposite ends of England geographically, but which will be shared via readers of this blog, and via our other more public digital personas in social networking spaces.

The only thing we have agreed on, apart from the term 'quotidian' is that our creative energies will be pushed via the need to blog daily.

A quotidian activity.

Ideally we would like to finish and blog a patch a day. We may not finish one every day, however we will blog daily about our progress.

As we agree on how we will do this project, and what the guiding aesthetic principles for our term will be, we will blog more under the 'quotidian' category on this blog.

Please don't ask if you can take part in our EDC project. We will say no.

But you can contact Ele and create a term yourself. She would be delighted to hear your ideas.

Posted by glittrgirl at September 1, 2010 3:42 PM

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Posted by: brendadada at September 4, 2010 1:07 AM

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