the hyperrhetoric of the quilt

this is great. from the latest Desktop magazine....

"The Digital Quilt is a digital storytelling and knowledge management tool in development that will allow users to create, save and store digital stories. It uses the patchwork metaphor as the basis for a web-or software-based narrative mapping technology. The Digital Quilt creates a powerful research tool for visualising and analysing individual and community knowledge.

Embedded in the Quilt, the intimate patches are pathways to stories. Patches thread connections between cultural memory and issues of identity and knowledge."

The author, Michelle Barrettt Ferrier is a doctoral candidate at the University of Central Florida. She is looking at the behaviour of people (largely women) who make quilts - in terms of narrative, history, relationships, identity and knowing - and reconstructing this in a 3D, multimedia, WWW environment.

Desktop says:
The Digital Quilt takes the conversation begun by quilters about how quilts function in culture and stitches it together with the agendas of post-feminist and post-structuralist hypertext researchers to create a unique place from which to launch invasive tactics that reinvest history with subaltern voices."

how interesting is that??

we have a quilt, hand-made by Joyce Miller and her mum and friends in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. all by hand. They are Mennonites, and as foreign guests we discovered a little about the quilting circle as a place of community, stories and connections. You've probably seen the movie "How to Make an American Quilt". It's not quite the same, but obviously building on the reality, so to speak. And no Winona Ryder though. (what is she doing these days?)

Desktop is a great Australian mag if you are interested in publishing, web, design, etc, and Niche Media have other great local publications. The best in the country on this kind of stuff.

The Digital Quilt currently has a focus on Hurricane Katrina as a way of connecting survivors and their stories.

About two years ago, our Aboriginal congregation in Port Augusta linked with Beaumont UC in Adelaide, and a busload of women came down from up north to visit the city ladies. Apparently they mainly sat around and told stories. I've heard some of them second-hand from both sides, and by all accounts it was a deeply moving experience of understanding people and cultures. Then each person made two quilt squares based on their life story. The squares were stitched into two quilts, one (which I've seen)
is in Port Augusta and one in Adelaide.

exponentially good.