Ravelry

Since the inception of Ravelry, a social network for knitters and crochets, in 2007, craftivists have gained access to the global knitting community. This has allowed for many of the movements and groups included in this curation to exponentially increase their exposure, since Ravelry has over 1 million members from all over the globe. 

The tradition that is embodied by craftwork is vital to the success of these craftivist movements. Through network society, we can expand our visions and utilize those related to us in thought and activity. Craftwork and network culture combine to create a "low"-tech, high-tech rapport to spread causes globally. The 2000's saw an increase of this ideology due to network society. Hopefully the two cultures can continue to work together to spread the peace that is inherent in the making of an object, whether low or high-tech...

Knit Your Bit

In contrast to the M.24 Chaffee, a different type of wartime knitting was organized by the Red Cross. Knit Your Bit was an effort to gather handknit garments for soldiers. Volunteers were part of a "Production Corps"and would knit everything from socks to sweaters. This was meant to support American Troops with warm clothing. The tradition is still alive today with knitters making helmet liners for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

The Production Corps represents social networking and network theory in that at the national level, there were many women and children knitting for the cause. Together they formed the Production Corps, yet they were not necessarily ever in the same locale. They were joined together through this invisible network of knitters who were all working towards the support of soldiers. Thus the knitters were all contributing in their own way to the war efforts.

Posters (Screenshots of Redcross website): Left, L.N. Britton, 1918. Right, Wladyslaw Teodor Benda, 1918. 

Pink M.24 Chaffee

In 2006, a combat tank from World War II was placed in front of the Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. Volunteers were responsible for crocheting and knitting pink squares to construct a blanket to completely cover the tank. Though passerbys were free to contribute squares to the project. The "pink tank," as it is sometimes called, was a form of protest against Denmark's involvement in the Iraq war. Over 4,000 squares were used to create the blanket, representing the wide spread of global protest.

From the Pink M.24 Chaffee website:

Unsimilar to a war, knitting signals home, care, closeness and time for reflection... For me, the tank is a symbol of stepping over other people's borders. When it is covered in pink, it becomes completely unarmed and it loses it's authority. Pink becomes a contrast in both material and color when combined with the tank.

The artist responsible for the "Pink Tank" is Marianne Jørgensen. She got submissions from knitting groups from all over the world through the widespread network culture. Today, with websites like Ravelry, an online knitting and crocheting community, which has over one million members, Jørgensen probably could have expanded her outreach exponentially. 

Iranian New Art

Iranian New Art is a network of women from Iran who "work together to make large scale art work in [the] environment." They use materials found in nature, such as leaves or moss, to create dynamic textiles to promote awareness of ecological issues in Iran.

From the Textile Arts Center's Blog:

Their projects to date have included crocheted wool and spun fiber installed as webbing in vacant Persian interiors, dense forests, and as organically generated diagrams on remote island coasts and desert salt flats. These site-specific creations seem to transcend the boundaries of ‘women’s work’ with their haunting outlines and schemes for ethereal but very convincing activism.

(آسمان هفتم(هفتاد هزار پرده  Image courtesy of http://iraniannewart.blogspot.com/

"فرش" خزه  Image courtesy of http://iraniannewart.blogspot.com/

"فرش"برگهای سوزنی کاج  Image courtesy of http://iraniannewart.blogspot.com/

"چهل تیکه" برگهای رنگی  Image courtesy of http://iraniannewart.blogspot.com/

Knit a Neuron

Anne & Helen

Image courtesy of Knit a Neuron

Knit a Neuron was started by two scientists in England. Anne is a knitter and Helen, a crocheter. They wanted to combine their love of science and fiber arts, and so Knit a Neuron was created. They started a blog and posted a call for knitted entries, for which they provided several patterns for knitting and crocheted neurons. They hoped to collect enough from all over the world to create a large brain sculpture that shows what a brain looks like after having gone through a stroke. They hosted several knitting nights at Science Cafe, which is an informal meeting (at a bar) to discuss emerging technologies and science. Several people, men and women of all ages, joined together to knit and crochet neurons for the project. Aside from these knitting nights, they have used the internet to obtain many of their entries, expanding their project and vision far beyond their local community. Thus the value of the Network Culture has helped them immensely to take their high-tech (neurons & imaging) and low-tech (knitting & crocheting) even further into the realm of high-tech (network society)! 

Even NPR's Robert Krulwich is talking about them! Yesterday, in discussing the possibilities of living clouds and arsenic life, Krulwich says "I don't think these 'brain cells' are even remotely alive – though they are gorgeous – but as Chris Impey says: 'The possibilities may simply be limited by our imaginations.'" Anne and Helen obviously have fantastic imaginations, since their project has been so successful!

Close up of the neurons
Image courtesy of Knit a Neuron

Before permanently installing the piece, it will travel to help fundraise for the "Head Injury Therapy Endowment Fund" They initially planned to install the sculpture in the Clinical Research Imaging Centre in Bristol, England which is opening this Spring, but received so many neurons, that the artwork became too large for the space! They are still trying to decide what to do with it now that they've collected all the neurons. There is no place on their blog that indicates how many neurons they received and from which parts of the world, so hopefully they will put some of that info up in the future!

Gabriel Dawe

Plexus No. 3
Image courtesy of http://www.gabrieldawe.com/

Gabriel Dawe is a native of Mexico City and worked as a graphic designer before foraying into fiber arts. From his website: 

In search for creative freedom he started experimenting and creating artwork, which eventually led him to explore textiles and embroidery—activities traditionally associated with women and which were forbidden for a boy growing up in Mexico. Because of this, his work is subversive of notions of masculinity and machismo that are so ingrained in his culture. By working with thread and textiles, Dawe’s work has evolved into creating large-scale installations with thread, creating environments that deal with notions of social constructions and their relation to evolutionary theory and the self-organizing force of nature.

The social constructions that Dawe is creating are comparable to some of the diagrams that are used in network society to show the various ways that we connect with our peers. The spiderweb-like creations with linear connections could easily be seen as social diagrams, connecting him simultaneously to his past and future. However, the Plexus series, which has been exhibited in Dallas where he is working on an MFA, is more about an architectural construct than the duality and contradiction of his forbidden craft. In an interview with My Modern Met, Dawe stated: 

Conceptually, these works are about the human need for shelter... Fashion and Architecture have many functions, but one thing they both share is that they protect us from the elements. I'm taking the main material that clothing is made out of—thread—to make an architectural structure. By reversing scale and material in this way, I end up with a structure that I see as symbolic of the social constructions humans need to survive as a species.

Considering how early it is in Dawe's career, he's already captivating an audience who wants to escape into his dreamy spaces. From the sound of it though, you can't really capture the true nature of his installations with photographs, so hopefully he'll be showing in New York sometime soon... 

KnittaPlease

The columns at the National Gallery of Art are tagged in 2009.

Image courtesy of flickr user The Shopping Sherpa

KnittaPlease is a group of anonymous knitters who have been tagging the urban environment with yarn bombings since 2005. You've probably seen them somewhere in the city: a meter, a stop sign, a tree, and on and on. It started as a "response to the dehumanizing qualities of an urban environment. By inserting handmade art in a landscape of concrete and steel, she adds a human quality that otherwise rarely exists." The softness of the fabric in conjunction with the building materials is a new type of spatial graffiti. For a while, on the KnittaPlease website, you could download tags, print them out and attach them to your own knitting graffiti, and they accumulated projects all over the globe, expanding their network far beyond the initial Texas crew. (There is a Knitta Book that is a compilation of global tags in the works). There is also a blog which chronicles their travels and artwork. They have also started doing ad campaigns for clothing companies, apparently? It will be interesting to see how they ride the line between mainstream advertising and underground art culture...

microRevolt

Cat Mazza, Image courtesy of http://www.juliachristensen.com/

Cat Mazza is an artist who created microRevolt, which brings together craftivists from all over the world and "develops projects which combine knitting with machines, and digital social networks to investigate and initiate discussion about sweatshop labour." (From We Make Money Not Art interview) Their biggest project to date is a petition to Nike about their use of sweatshops. The petition exists as a 15 foot wide blanket that displays the Nike Swoosh, made up of 4 inch squares sent by knitters from over 30 countries. The corresponding website has links of each country exhibited, and if you click on any country, white squares will appear on the blanket, showing the location of all of the contributors from that country, and if you scroll over the white square, the name of the contributor will also appear (see below, Iceland is highlighted, with one knitter contributing a square from Reykjavik.) This allows us to see the network of knitters that she obtained through a Network Society, ie Social Media.

knitPro Chart for 

The Infrastructural City

In order to gain more and more contributions, Mazza put a free knitting chart maker on the microRevolt website, called knitPro, with an option to donate through PayPal or to contribute a square to the Nike petition. With knitPro, you can upload any image and the program will turn it into a chart, which can then be knit or embroidered (this goes back to the idea of 0s and 1s being the foundation of knitting.. everything is based on a grid system). So, Mazza provides a free service that's tucked in the microRevolt website, in hopes of further disseminating her activism.

During a lecture at the Textile Arts Center this November given by Sabrina Gschwandter, an audience member asked if Mazza had given the Nike blanket to the Nike executives, which was originally part of the plan. Gschwandter, a fiber artist and writer, responded by saying that the blanket is still traveling around in different art venues around the country, which is probably proving to have a more significant impact than if Mazza handed the blanket over to Nike. Through the continual travel of the 15 foot blanket, Mazza's spreading her vision to more and more people, even two years after the blanket was completed. If she had just handed it over, it probably would have disappeared and the message would have been forgotten soon after. Instead, each time the blanket reaches a new location, more Revolutionaries join the fight against sweatshop labor. 

Open Source Embroidery

HTML Patchwork by Ele Carpenter
Image courtesy of flickr user Furtherfield

Open Source Embroidery: Craft and Code is an art movement that combines technological practices through embroidery, knitting, quilting, weaving, and other crafts. It was first displayed at an exhibition in London in 2008 at the http:// gallery and has since traveled to Sweden and the United States. 

When I explain the concept of knitting to a non-knitter, I always start with comparing knitting to binary code. Binary code consists of 0s and 1s, and by combining these two elements, you can get endless systems, creating the foundation of our Network Culture. Knitting is very similar in theory. There are just two stitch types: knit and purl. Every sweater, scarf, hat, glove, etc. consists of just these two basic elements, and through the manipulation of these two elements, you can create endless combinations. Easy, right? Ele Carpenter, the creater/curator of Open Source Embroidery uses a similar approach to explain her reasoning for combining Craft and Code:

"Embroidery is constructed (mostly by women) in hundreds of tiny stitches which are visible on the front of the fabric. The system of the stitches is revealed on the back of the material. Some embroiderers seal the back of the fabric, preventing others from seeing the underlying structure of the pattern. Others leave the back open for those who want to take a peek. A few integrate the backend process into the front of the fabric. The patterns are shared amongst friends in knitting and embroidery 'circles'.

Software is constructed (mostly by men) in hundreds of tiny pieces of code, which form the hidden structure of the programme or interface. Open Source software allows you to look at the back of the fabric, and understand the structure of your software, modify it and distribute it. The code is shared amongst friends through online networks. However the stitches or code only make sense to those who are familiar with the language or patterns.

The same arguments about Open Source vs Free Software can be applied to embroidery. The needlework crafts also have to negotiate the principles of 'freedom' to create, modify and distribute, within the cultural and economic constraints of capitalism. The Open Source Embroidery project simply attempts to provide a social and practical way of discussing the issues and trying out the practice. Free Software, Open Source, amatuer and professional embrioderers and programmers are welcome to contribute to the project."

Carpenter initiated The HTML Patchwork, shown in the image above, consisting of 216 hexagonal pieces of fabric in websafe colors quilted together. All contributors have a background in craft AND code, so that each piece is a genuine compilation of the low-tech/high-tech mentality. There is a wiki site for each participant to share the story of their patch and their history with craft.

The Open Source Embroidery project was featured in WIRED magazine's Gadget Lab section (showcasing "hardware that rocks your world"), titled "Geek Art: Needlework Brings Together Programmers, Crafters." The article corresponded with the US opening of the exhibition. 

Knitted Blog by Suzanne Hardy

Image courtesy of flickr user Furtherfield

Knitted Blog used Open Source networking to gather all of the components from knitters around the world, then all of the "knittivists" (like craftivists) could post their contributions to the glittyknittykitty blog. Each piece was sent to multiple participants and was continuously added to, diminishing a sort of ownership, and establishing an arena for creative commons.

Spincycle Yarns

I have admired Spincycle Handspun Yarns, based in Bellingham, Washington, for quite some time now, but unfortunately, have not had the opportunity to try their yarn out! Spincycle, started in 2005, consists of two "sassy spinsters" who handspin and dye all of their products and then bike to local venues to sell their yarn (hence the cycle in their name – they are car-free). Their mission is to "spin yarn that is both fresh and classic, to inspiring your craft with ever-changing textures and colors, and to advancing the knitting revolution!" 

To add to their environmentally friendly mantra, all of their all-natural raw material comes from local farms, except for one type of fiber that is from the Falkland Islands. The reason that they let this one foreign fiber into their studio is because the farm that breeds the sheep is extremely sustainable, with windmills and no bleaching or harsh chemical treatments on the product. Even the dyes that they use are non-toxic, so it is safe for them, as the makers, the knitters, and for the end-users. They are extremely involved in every part of the creation cycle, from meeting the animals, choosing the fleece, cleaning, dyeing, and spinning the fiber into the final yarn. And although they do sell some of their yarn in stores located in Washington, Oregon, and California, it is mostly available through their online store, so they even know who ends up with the product. Their business model is extremely sustainable (and admirable, in today's economic situation.) 

In fact, their business model provides an interesting comparison to many businesses represented in Network Cultures, especially like those discussed by Nicholas Carr in his article "From the Many to the Few." There are many parallels to be drawn, such as the "few"  involved in the production process, but Spincycle is on such a different scale from the Facebooks and YouTubes of the networked world. Spincycle, since it is managed by just two people, is able to reach its users on a very personal level, allowing the users to feel like they are helping to impact change through environmentally safe products. Users will be more likely to make repeat purchases because of the close interaction of the makers into every stage of the process. This is quite different from the Network, which often takes away the individual experiences that are provided through this type of care put into the production of a good or service. Although, Spincycle is completely networked into society, with a website, online store, Facebook fan page, Ravelry page, Yelp page, Etsy page, etc. However, their success is most likely not due to their being "plugged in" to the network, but due to their sound and friendly practices. (Just to add, I do not know how "successful" they really are as a business, but the fact that they have been around since 2005 is enough indication for me that they are doing something right!)

Grumpy Birds BFL Yarn

Swamp Thing Novelty Yarn

Misanthrope BFL Yarn

Urban Craft Uprising

This weekend, Seattle is hosting a craft show for indie artisans called Urban Craft Uprising. Started in 2004, the show aims to foster the craft world by providing "unique, high quality, hand-crafted alternative to 'big box' stores and mass produced goods." All material is chosen by a jury, to ensure the highest quality possible. They also manage a blog, highlighting and interviewing the various artists/vendors who will be at the show.

The show also provides a unique type of Public for artisans and consumers. The vendor space will allow artisans to sell their works for income, while also providing a common area for attendees to practice their craft. There are also demonstration sessions, adding an educational opportunity as well.

Independent fairs such as Urban Craft Uprising provide a great opportunity for artisans to gather, share, and make some money to further increase their craft. (Or in the consumer's case, spend money to further increase their craft). It also allows the general public to gain acces and support these small (mostly local) businesses. It's strategic timeframe of early December is perfect for Holiday shopping, further supporting these craft businesses. Since its inception, the attendance has increased to more than 8,000 guests, with 130 vendors. They have also added a Summer show to their annual schedule. 

Artwork by Anna Hrachovec of Mochimochi Land via Urban Craft Uprising

The Drawing above is a playful advertisement for the show, mixing craft and the urban environment! Perfect for exhibiting the potential venues of craftivism + urbanism together.