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.