a world woven::edgework

An Other Internet fabricated with help of conductive yarn and electricity

This installation is a small and slow version of the internet: an internetje. It is part of an ongoing material research into what an Other Internet could be. The internet might seem invisible and untouchable, but it is made of cables, antennas and buildings full of computers. Messages travel as electricity in copper, as light in glass fibre on the seabed, or as radio waves through the air. A photodiode turns light into electrical pulses, an antenna does the same with radio waves, so a computer can read them. To understand the internet is to see that anything digital, taken apart, is a sequence of electrical signals, and that their meaning is agreed upon by people. Some agreements are shared by the whole world. In this installation, it is shared by four small computers and pieces of yarn that transport the electrical signals. The yarn also retraces another history. The punched cards of the Jacquard loom inspired Charles Babbage’s computer design. And before “computer” meant a machine, it was a job: people, often women, calculating by hand for navigation, banks and astronomy. Computing has always been a craft. This installation brings these histories together and tries to learn from the slow human labour the internet is built on.