Being a sucker for a good pun, one of my favourite projects that I've seen over the last few weeks is Jean Shin's TEXTile. Created for a 2006 exhibit at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, this "cobblestone fabric" is crafted from some 22,000 recycled computer keycaps. Within the world of this work individual characters are not only considered modular elements with which to construct landscape, but combine to form a transcript. The length of TEXTile is an archive of the extensive email correspondence between Shin and her fabricator collaborators - the sculpture documents its own development.
TEXTile is bookended by a functional custom keyboard and display so that viewers may engage the sculpture and "continue the dialogue". Everything about this piece reminds me of Jay David Bolter's text Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing. In that book Bolter describes the distinction between topical and topographic texts as follows:
The word ?topography? originally meant a written description of a place, such as an ancient geographer might give. Only later did the word come to refer to mapping or charting ? that is, to a visual and mathematical rather than verbal description. Electronic writing is both visual and verbal description. It is not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places, spatially realized topics. Topographic writing challenges the idea that writing should be merely the servant of spoken language. The writer and reader can create and examine signs and structures on the computer screen that have no easy equivalent in speech.
TEXTile is very much about electronic writing. The piece renders the daily experience of exchanging emails as a non-verbal, haptic space of collaborative construction. The sculpture also playfully problematizes the form of an interface apparatus that is so ubiquitous that is is often overlooked. [via notcot]
Chema Cobo
Marc Chagall
Chema Madoz
