Kate Pemberton: Tracert
Artist(s):
Title:
- Tracert
Exhibition:
Creation Year:
- 2005
Medium:
- Cross stitch: grey embroidery silk, black aida
Size:
- 30 inches x 18 inches (framed)
Category:
Artist Statement:
My practice addresses the cultural effects that technology has on society by examining the influence of the machine and digital technologies. My work ranges from interactive electronic installations, computer animations, digital photography, and collaborative projects to canvas-based work and textiles. My current interest is in the status of craft objects in an age of electronic consumerist culture. I identify crossovers between computer graphics and craft techniques, and explore them by making tangible art objects. My latest projects suggest an emotive, quirky, humorous aspect of functional computer graphics and electronic devices by drawing parallels between their form and function, and the techniques and meanings embraced in traditional needle crafts. For example, I have recently completed a project that allows wallpaper designs to be sent to mobile phones via W AP technology. The designs can also be downloaded as patterns for cross-stitch samplers. I concern myself with the visual appeal of machines and electronics. I am interested in how they are considered as objects of desire, in terms of their fabrication and capabilities, and the status they give the individuals who own them. The catalogue section of endfile.com includes visual and written references to my individual projects. Tracert is an examination of how traditional craft ideas translate into the modern multimedia networked world. The sampler has been cross-stitched from a transposed graphic of a tracert DOS command. Tracert can be seen as a modern metaphor for the crafted tradition of creating cross-stitch samplers. Essentially samplers were a method of learning to stitch, and they were also used to express important details of your life in a pattern of simple icons and symbols that represented what you had accomplished, or endured. Samplers included icons for how many children you had and where you lived. and included symbols that suggested emotional events (for example marital infidelity – a duck – and luck – a horseshoe). The tracert DOS command is the command users enter into a DOS window to trace the network points that join them with another computer on the internet. Typing “tracert www.endfile.com” into DOS will print a numerical display of where a small packet of data travels between the computer where the command was entered and the computer that is www.endfile.com. In tracert, the IP address relates firstly to my computer in the UK, then the internal network in my house, then the local telecom exchange down my road, then the larger exchange, and so on until it reaches the www.endf i l e.com computer in America. As each point is reached, its time is relayed in milliseconds. These points have significance to me, as they contain personal, locative data in the journey to find my web site. These events, written in numbers that account for a journey through a network, are contrasted with the idea of traditional narrative samplers.
