FUZZY LOGIC

Jackie Passmore
2005

"Textiles themselves are very literally the software linings of all technology." Sadie Plant, Zeroes + Ones

My friend Kath is one cool lady. A pensioner in her late 60s, I've worked with Kath for two years as a project of the webstreaming collective tenantspin.org. It struck me that Kath, along with the other older women in our programme, made exceptional video editors regardless of their existing levels of computer literacy. I explained the phenomenon to one of my colleagues as the "new media quilting bee." It is no wonder, I concluded, that a generation of women raised to engage in detailed handcrafts also exhibit talent at a digital artform which requires great patience, meticulous attention to detail and the virtual placing of pattern, cutting, and mending.

During my first winter working with tenantspin I attempted to learn to knit, and when my paltry scarves fell short of ideal I took them to Kath, a veteran knitter of forty-odd years. As she examined my deviant handiwork, the gallery who hosts our project led a group of funders through a tour of our editing suite, "And here we have artists working with member of the local community and digital media..." There sat Kath and I, two women in a sea of I-Macs, knitting needles in hand. "It's called skill-sharing!" I announced.

But truth be told, there was something important to that moment, to the exchanging of digital media art training for knitting instruction. The loom used the first punch-card system that serves as a basis for modern binary; in direct generational correlation to Kath and I, knitting is the functional grandparent to the forms and processes of digital art.

My younger brother Grant, former head coder of 90s ANSI art supergroup ACID, once relayed to me that during a tech support job for a computer company he made a house call to an older woman who could not get her mouse to work. He discovered that she had put the mouse on the floor underneath the computer and was trying to use it like a sewing machine pedal. In tandem, the artists of Fuzzy Logic at Low Grade trade between the tools of handcraft and computer programming indiscriminately, highlighting the oft-overlooked correlation between the lo-fi art of handcraft and knitting and it's digital descendant, the computer. Fuzzy Logic celebrates the art of the microprocess; knitting numbers, aligning loom and logic, weaving program and pattern. As art historians scramble to contextualize the use of the computer in new media art, artists such as Cat Mazza and Mandy McIntosh incite us to reconsider that the earliest prototype of the computer, the loom, was in fact an art-making machine. Fuzzy Logic: The origin of "digital" is "from the hands." From Jacquard to JAVA, the computer has always been used to make art.

Jackie Passmore, 2005