Re: <nettime> "The Tools and the Tribute, " an essay by Bruce Sterling

[Plusea <hannah@plusea.at>]

hello bruce,

thank you for sharing your essay about the Share Festival Artmaker Bag here, i really enjoyed reading it. for the last two years i’ve slowly been building myself a Wearable Studio Practice <http://www.plusea.at/?category_name=a-wearable-studio-practice>. basically a series of wearable and portable accessories for carrying my tools with me at all times so that i can make things in unusual and unexpected situations. and through this experience have also been thinking about how tools represent our practices and their evolutions from discrete disciplines, through inter-disciplines into new disciplines. 

my practice is in electronic textiles, so my toolset is a mix of electical engineering and textile crafts tools. many of them hand tools, which makes portability easier. a lot of time was spent narrowing my selection of tools down to a bare minimum, and then easing it up again to a comfortable range. but i’m missing “quixotic” items! unfamiliar and unexpected tools to remind myself that this project is not about efficiency, but about carrying my practice outside it’s comfort zone, to expose it and encounter the unexpected. including unrealistic tools now seems like an essential part of this narrative.

< This means that a “Share Festival Artmaker Bag” is a quixotic effort. If this cluster of implements actually functioned as a standardized set of common tools for tech-art productivity, then its core users would immediately want to hack it, abandon it as passe’, and turn their attention to something more “advanced.” >

thank you for introducing the notion of a "quixotic effort”.

hannah


Hannah Perner-Wilson
+49 (0)176 86804943
hannah@plusea.at <mailto:hannah@plusea.at>
www.plusea.at <http://www.plusea.at/>



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