dataspejlet opening

it's been awhile since i wrote about dataspejlet - an art project at trapholt museum in kolding. i submitted my embroidery and our weaving group submitted our woven length of fabric back in june. and today, the final artwork, imagined and created by danish artist astrid skibsted, and stitched and woven by more than 600 people, was opened to the public. it was a lovely day, with mimosas, speeches and plenty of time to see the work. i want to go back again when there are less people there and really experience it. the energy there today, with all the creators there, was amazing, but  the work needs pondering in a more solitary way to appreciate the significance of all the stitches and threads.  

stitching together a lovely, messy, chaotic life

nearly a month after my disappointment at not getting hold of a kit that would enable me to participate in the dataspejlet community art project at trapholt museum, i was at a friend's house for a board meeting. i saw that she had a kit and i told her how sad i was that i missed out on getting one. i snapped a picture of it there on her side table, but that sense of sadness and being on the outside of something i wanted to be part of welled up in me again and i found it almost too painful to look at. i even thought the colors she had gotten were great and would have been so much fun to work with. she told me that her neighbor also had one and she would ask her if she was going to use it. i went away a little bit hopeful, but still mostly resigned to not getting one.

then, a week or so later, my friend sent me a message, telling me she'd left me something up in our creative group's workshop at the library. i crossed my fingers that i knew what it was and i was delighted to find that she gave me her own kit. i breathed a sign of relief. 

oddly, i didn't start stitching on it right away. i got out my data files and chose the words i wanted to work with and i drew a sketch on some graph paper that husband had lying around on his desk. and then, i went around pondering it in the back of my head for a couple of weeks. i'm one who always works best close to a looming deadline. and i wasn't doing nothing - i was pinning stitch inspiration on pinterest and thinking about how i wanted to express the words i'd chosen. i was also keeping an eye on the #dataspejlet hashtag on instagram, but not a lot of posts were being shared and i didn't want to have to open the dreaded facebook to go see what people were posting in the group. plus, i figured it was best to do it my way anyway, without too much inspiration/influence from others.

but during our long weekend, i finally got stitching. it was beautiful out in the garden, on the pillow-covered bench between the greenhouses. i started with the circle representing husband. it has a circle within it that represents sabin. 

i chose the golden mustard color for husband and pink for sabin - my colors were those, plus purple. i probably would have chosen other colors if i were choosing myself, but these were what i had to work with and i do like them. i decided to  completely fill those two circles with stitches, because they represent the two people who complete me. 

the next circles that i worked on were the overlapping ones representing time/reality and cats - funny that those overlapped, but i think the time/reality comes from posts i did about reading murakami and of course, cats figure heavily on my facebook page. i chose to leave more "air" in those circles, not filling them out completely with stitches and there, where they overlapped, i used both colors, plus i added the third color, to show that the interesting part is where my preoccupations overlap. 

and then i turned to the similarly overlapping circles representing ships and LEGO. i filled those out with little + signs (i should note that we were only allowed to use stitches that go horizonal or vertical, no side-ways or curves or french knots or fancy stuff). and i stitched three hearts in the space where they overlapped, to signify how much i do love both. they are both from my work life, but both have become something of who i am.

i really enjoyed sitting in the sunshine, stitching. when i needed a break, i'd get up and pull a few weeds or water the plants or plant a few seeds. and i picked myself a small bouquet of fragrant lilacs, my favorite flower, to have at hand while i stitched. i sat in the sun with my big sun hat on and enjoyed the meditative stitching, seeing where it would take me and what thoughts it would provoke.

i didn't get it all finished on the weekend, so monday after work, i started my second to last circle. this is the one where i chose a group of words from the data, as they all seemed related and harmonious together. they were: story, fabulous, beautiful, sunshine, awesome. and reality was in that circle as well. i think it's my favorite circle - the three colors complementing one another best. it was also one i stitched most intuitively, letting the colors tell me where they wanted to be and how many stitches and the length. it simply felt freer than the others, which felt careful and deliberate. i liked this one best.

it was getting a bit dark by the time i finished, but i took a picture anyway. i'm pleased with the result. and then on tuesday, i had only one circle left to do. the bad one. 

we were given white thread to use for stitching those bits that we wished weren't there or which we didn't want anyone to see. for me, that circle came down in the left lower quadrant, far from the other circles, which was good, as i hate to have this word touching any of the positive words. and the word for that circle was trump. i used couching, i think wanting to keep that embarrassing evil clown under control, limiting him and tying him down. that stitch came to me naturally and intuitively as well. funny how those last two circles were the most intuitive, like i had to have warmed up to the stitching before i could let myself go.

and i thought a lot about stitching outside the circles and i can see now that others have done so - stitching connections between them and such. and i thought i wanted to do that as well. but as i began - trying to make a joyful spray of stitches surround my favorite circle at the top - they came out awkward and not at all how i envisioned them, so i picked them up. i think it would have worked if i could have used french knots, but alas, they weren't allowed. so, i decided i was content to only show what the data showed and keep the rest of my lovely, chaotic, messy, awesome life for myself.

i'm so happy i got to participate after all and i'm very grateful to my friend for giving me her kit. it meant a lot and the meditative stitching time was just what i needed during a very busy time at work. i can't wait to see how my work will fit into the larger work that astrid skibsted puts together at trapholt this autumn.  it will inevitably be a dialogue with the many other embroiderers and the whole will be so much greater than the individual parts and yet they will be beautiful and unique on their own. and i'll bet it will be harmonious and lovely, messy and chaotic, just like all the lives that went into the data that went into all those stitches. and we will all belong exactly where we are in the work. 

this awesome, beautiful, fabulous life

i submitted my dataspejlet work to trapholt electronically today, so now, i only have to drop it off. i still need to write a post about how i got my hands on a kit, but i'll do that next. 

they have a form to fill out where you can write a 1000 character description of your work. that's a crazy small amount for all the thought and hours that went into it. here's what mine said:

i loathe facebook, but have been there for many years, so it made sense to use it for my dataspejl. interestingly, the data did rather accurately reveal what's important to me - husband (yes, i call him that, like it's his name) and daughter, their circles overlapping, very fittingly. the next circles, all very close in size represent other things i love - like cats and ships and LEGO. my #2 circle featured words like "time" and "reality," which surely come from reading and posting about Murakami books. i chose to do one circle in white, as the frequent word there is one i'd like to forget - trump. it's also an outlier on my grid - away from the others, which seems right. but to end on a happy note, the circle where i used all three colors in a crazy quilt sort of pattern was full of words like "story," "fabulous," "beautiful," "sunshine," "awesome" and again, "reality," - leading me to my title and to the realization that yes, my colorful, loud, messy life is rather fabulous.

submitted this process photo - as i thoroughly enjoyed sitting in the sunshine in the garden, stitching away last weekend.

* * *

you also had to fill out which words you chose to work with and mine were:

husband, sabin (which i submitted as daughter, for the sake of anonymity), cats, ships, LEGO, time, reality, story, fabulous, beautiful, sunshine, awesome and yes, trump. 

so weird to boil my life down to 8 circles and a dozen or so words. it seems so paltry and yet still, it did capture something. i tried stitching outside the circles a bit, to indicate that my life is much more than just those 8 confined and sometimes overlapping circles, but took it away again, because it felt like it didn't capture it. instead, i chose to go with the snapshot those 8 circles offer and keep for myself the messy chaos of the rest of this awesome, beautiful, fabulous life. 

of data mirrors and a sense of belonging

part of the dataspejlet (data mirror) project at trapholt museum is small piece of personal embroidery. you actually download your data from facebook and your search history from google chrome and send it in to a model/algorithm that the museum has created for the project, and it returns a quadrant diagram with circles on it representing the words that appear most frequently. if you click on the numbered circles, the words change, so you can select the ones you wish to think of while you embroider and create your personal "data mirror." 

i think because the algorithm is surely set to danish, it has returned some weird words for me - like "lov" which is surely actually "love" in my posts and not "promise" if it were danish and the "ll" that's surely from "we'll" and "it'll" and other contractions. i have no idea what the placement of the circles on the quadrant means. 

the museum had kits available in set colors - you get two colors to use, plus white, which you should use for the words that appear a lot, but which you don't want to count in your stitched picture of your data. unfortunately, i didn't get my hands on a kit, not imagining that there were only a few available, but i suppose it makes sense since the artwork can only be the size it can be. i have felt more disappointed than is warranted that i didn't get a kit. i plan to work with the graphs on my own anyway and this way, i get to keep them. and decide to use as many colors as i wish.

and i am getting to participate in the woven part of the work, so i am still a part of the larger work. in my disappointment over not getting a kit, i realized, once again, that being part of a community is important to me. i wanted to see my stitched data mirror in dialogue with all the other stitched data mirrors - to have a visual depiction of how and where i fit in the scheme of things. to contribute to something beautiful that only becomes more beautiful in dialogue with everyone else's work. i feel genuinely sad that i don't get to be part of that. and it triggers that old familiar feeling of being on the outside (i really should get therapy for that).

i think i also wanted something beautiful to come of all that data i stupidly gave to facebook all those years. it was nice to think that something good would come it somehow, when they've used it for nothing but evil and nefarious purposes. 

my chrome history diagram is much less interesting since it's so full of work-related stuff like kitchens (in no less than four languages) and dashboards and the project management software asana - which i visit regularly. i wanted to submit my blog data, but their algorithm couldn't handle the amount of data. i don't think my google visits say that much about me as a private person, but they do say something about me as a work person. 

but i guess that whatever i make of it is for myself. and maybe that's ok. but i would have liked it to be part of something bigger. sigh.

dataspejlet :: weaving community

i spent the weekend at the loom. our weaving group is part of an art project at trapholt museum. fiber artist astrid skibsted is working with trapholt on a project called dataspejlet. it's in two parts - one is woven and one is embroidered (i'll write more about it in another post). for the woven part, our weaving group was chosen to participate. we received all the yarn we needed in colors that were chosen for us and a warp that was ready to put on the loom. when i arrived at the museum on saturday, it was already nearly ready to start weaving. 

it's strange in a way to write about weaving, as it's something i learned in danish and therefore, i don't really know the terminology in english. so i don't know how to express the part of threading it and putting it into the comb. and on some level, i don't really want to even google it, as it's something that danish and i have together.  i realize it makes me sound like even more of a beginner than i even am (and after ten years, i still feel like a beginner), but that's just how it is. 

the last thing that needed doing was the fishing line along the sides. it's there for stability, but plastic fishing line is very different than the linen threads beside it, so we struggled a bit to get it right. luckily, there's a facebook group where everyone who is part of the weaving is helping one another and we learned that we needed more weight on the fishing line at the other end.  but on saturday, we didn't know that and we struggled with the fishing line and keeping it taut so it would lay nicely on the edge.

we were given a cream colored yarn to use as a test section. it's this very cool japanese yarn that's actually flat, rather than round. and it takes working with it a bit to get it right. and that fishing line teased us.

but on sunday, after following advice from others in the group, we put on more weight and we got weaving in earnest. our edges looked beautiful and i got to weave the whole first section. the whole pattern is prescribed and since we are quite a large group, everyone needs to have a chance. i did a small timelapse of my weaving. my phone was fastened to the loom and it slowly turned over the course of the timelapse.

as always, i feel like the loom teaches me lessons that i can't learn anywhere else. it's the most honest thing - you can't trick it or fool it or hide anything. it will show clearly any tricks you try to pull on it. it will always be totally honest with you - and show you clearly your mistakes. but when you correct them, it will also show you all its beauty. and when it does, there's really nothing like it. tiny threads, woven together, become something strong and beautiful. it rather takes my breath away. and to be part of a larger work that is the work of so many others gives a real sense of community. even solving frustrating problems is part of the story that we're weaving into the work and it will all be there in the threads when it's done. what a privilege to be part of it.