Rachel Keller Digital Quilter

              Rachel Keller

Thursday 27 March 2013

Digital Quilter

http://highwire-dtc.com/rachelk/

Rachel is currently completing the final year of her Phd at Lancaster University where her proposal for research fulfilled a required brief to contribute towards the digital economy. The agenda was to be “disruptively innovative". 

Rachel was happy to illicit an antagonistic response as its multi-layered stories resulted in hidden potentials and richer meanings and is, as a result, an activist piece demonstrating personal and profound richness and a re-using of resources with history.Rachel felt there was an initial lack of interest from some quarters until it became apparent what craft had to offer.

 Rachel discussed the fact that some countries have Fine Craft and the fact that the same processes  are followed in craft as those of the great artists.   Her choice of the quilting process was as a vehicle mechanism for exploration into how communities bond and that the stories behind an artefact lead one to cherish it more fully, therefore adding to its longevity and sustainability. 

Rachel studied psychology to degree level and has had an interesting career in human resources and creative practices. She is strongly driven to find innovative ways to address issues in society having a visionary outlook for a better community. This purpose led to some Phd work in developing a prototype community website   in order to more fully engage the ‘voice’ of the community and look into the notion of collaborative consumption and social capitol. We discussed the fact that the term social engineer had been levelled at her and the fact that she enjoys applying ideas to situations with improvement value in sight.

The quilt has twelve sections each representing people, experiences and values. She considered having a literacy with the textiles themselves revealing information such as the miles the fibre/fabric travelled the water used etc but opted for a more personal reflection, a key formative life response. Rachel realised that to a large extent we amass digital material, photos, video footage etc but rarely come up to ‘smell the roses’ and link our digital information to our personal materials. Her quilt unlocks a collaged insight into  her own musings, her daughter singing “All kinds of Everything”, snapshots of significant memories all  using particularly poignant fabric from her own history.

To develop the technology of the quilt she firstly looked at the ubiquitous QR code but felt it was too outstanding and ‘clunky’. So the next step was to collaborate with the university computer programming department to develop near field communication based on radio frequency identification. A black button in each section will ultimately contain the software (it has been trialed but is in the final stages of development) which contains pre-set content that Rachel has loaded into the software which reads the radio frequencies. With a revolution in manufacturing to a more personal ‘Fab Lab’ production of personalised design and localised production Rachel’s strategic development has immense potential.

Her quilt is due to be exhibited at Olympia in London this summer.