The Future Looms

A collaborative project between Pavilion and IRIS

"The computer emerges out of the history of weaving, a process often said to be the quintessence of womens work. The loom is the vanguard site of software development....the computer was always a simulation of weaving: threads of ones and zeros riding the carpets and simulating silk screens in the perpetual motions of cyberspace: it too presents the screens, the clothing of the matrix, already displaying the virtual machinery of which nature and culture are the subprograms and joins women on and as the interface between man and matter, identity and difference, the actual and the virtual"

Sadie Plant, "Weaving Women & Cybernetics"

This project sets out to explore the relationship of women to both declining (industrial) and emerging (computer) technologies. The rationale for the project is built around a number of linked elements or threads which will be woven together by the teams of commissioned artists:

- The past, history, oral traditions: the future, cyberfeminism, the internet

- Physical location, manufacturing, materials; global networks, abstract processes, the information super-highway

- Women as labourers, story-tellers, signifiers; women as inventors, authors, artists

The project provided a publicly accessible production and exhibition site, in which three artists - a photographer, a writer and a new media practitioner, all women, will produce new work in response to a commissioning brief. The final destination for the artists' work was a website, constructed in advance, maintained as a live site for the duration of the year, and offering an interface between the artists and a global audience. The artists maintained journals, dialogues, notes and conversations on the website, so that the processes of art production - research, thought, development of ideas - become accessible to their audience. The audience had the opportunity, through the internet, to actively intervene in the discussion. The physical site functioned as a nexus, a point of meeting, between a geographically based community with specific cultural identities, and the vast, shifting, ephemeral constituency of the internet.

The Future Looms was commissioned for Photo 98's Public Sightings programme which is a ground breaking series of artworks that will see photography and electronic imaging in a range of public spaces and on the internet.

The site is a journey into the textile industry of Batley, in Yorkshire weaving relationships between the city's industrial past and its technological future. The Future Looms web site was developed by artists Alicia Felberbaum, Roshini Kempadoo, writer Fiona Russell and "cybereducationalist", Steve Williams in association with PEEL : (Design)