I found really good instructions on how to use the top spindle from youtube and finally got the hang of it. Of course I dont look very expert - but the job gets done.

Am currently using twisted.etsy.com ’s rodney colorway roving that I got way back in spring of 2008 and am practicing handspun yarn. Its very “artsy”:)

will post pictures of the unevenly wound first attempts once I crochet it into something.

My mother will be ever so amused when I tell her I can finally use a spindle (she is quite the expert [at least in my eyes] - even now when she can barely see, her fingers are nimble - - spinner of khadi cotton yarn on her ancient charkha used when she and my father moved with Gandhi followers way back when…).

who’d a thunk it - my writing with neices leads me back to mapping roots and routes …

“my nostalgia for the rural is so unexplained by my actual life experiences…or on second thoughts maybe not unexplainable at all… while some may locate my yearning/nostalgia in roots in kakaraparru - it may be that the smells of burning wood and mud huts is actually taking me back to rural Africa…? or the rural Thai and Indonesian habitats that were still tucked in the backyards of urbanity of Bangkok, Jakarta, Bandung and even in the touristiness of Bali back in the late 60s and 70s”

So now I am at ICA - up at 4 am thinking of how to frame the loom.

I guess I used it to “rupture” the idea of “virtual” “global” and “technology”  in my precon presentation and my OU presentation - but now I have to put forth what S and Sh have articulated with me and once again make pleas to rearticulate the notion of global…

is there a point to trying? Is this the audience that will be receptive to these ideas - always the same questions, eh:)

oh well - it must be presented and then we shall see.

meanwhile - the book signing for the South Asian Technospaces is today.

In other news - unrelated to ICA and more about the technologists and professionals in my family who are simultaneously globetrotting this week to things like Brain conferences and what not in the Montreal neighborhood….

M gets here in the afternoon - maybe I will get to see him for lunch. S gets here at night - so no sleep for me. But I get a head start on my Hyderabad trip.

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interesting how even this most recent article took me back to theorizing pvt and public through postcolonial feminist lenses - and I really wasnt looking to directly go there…

and of course the ubiquitous tension/dialectic of accountability to and oppression within community v individualization and illusions of liberation….

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Note: This is not meant to be a perfect “seamless” experience of being in secondlife - but rather it is meant to show the breaks and ruptures…This is one version - I will have more with more ruptures inserted…layered…

When you ACTUALLY truly shift the lens of benefit to look at issues of sustainable livelihoods, accessible democratic practices and sharing of resources with future generations…… THEN what would we think of a progress? I keep thinking of the senior citizen who asked about why we were not improving our (US) railways - and why we always focus on better flying and fighting technologies (at least that’s the gist it seems of what he said). And of the rickshaw pullers that disappeared from the streets of Hyderabad from one visit to the next “back home” (India)…. 

DEADLINE EXTENDED:

PLEASE SUBMIT ABSTRACTS BY DECEMBER 1, 2007.

Title: Everyday 3D Lives: Digital Embodiment, Performativity and Globalization

Editor : Radhika Gajjala

[ http://personal.bgsu.edu/~radhik ]

In the recent past, there has been much talk of “web 2.0 “ and “web 3D” as new media. Educators and researchers all over the world are debating the pros and cons of such environments. MMORPGs (Massive(ly) multiplayer online role-playing games) such as World of Warcraft (WoW) and online 3D environments for social and economic activity. Immersive environments such as secondlife are being examined from multiple disciplinary lenses. This edited will include articles based in examinations of embodiment, performativity, gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality and globalization critically, and will be open to multiple disciplinary intersections.

What sorts of convergences, conjunctures and connections emerge in relation to embodiment, identity and globalization specifically in 3D environment (such as secondlife) and MMORPGs? Researchers examining presence and absence or voice and voicelessness are increasingly mobilized to speak of identities emerging online, while binaries such as embodied/disembodied and global/local are deployed unproblematically in both utopian and dystopian viewpoints regarding the Internet. Performativity begins to shape exposure and privacy. Thus while claims are being made that the Internet is a “public sphere” in a Habermasian sense (Poster 1995) corporate privation and surveillance comes upon us in Internet mediated environments and we learn to negotiate our speaking within interstices of presences and absences, cooperation and isolation, community engagement and individual consumerism. Simultaneously hegemonic structures invested in particular ideologies of globalization and “free” markets learn to co-opt diverse identities and voices. Voice thus becomes a strategic construct in both cases. Notions of voice/voiceless and empowerment/participation in such instances are appropriated by status quo discourses and are themselves mobilized for the oppression of the subaltern (Gajjala, forthcoming 2008).

In the book on “Pedagogies of the Global”, the editor, Arif Dirlik writes that

“Rather than erase difference by converting all to Euro/American norms of modernity, however, capitalist modernity, as it has gone global, has empowered societies once theoretically condemned to premodernity or tradition to make their own claims on modernity on the basis of those very tradition to make their own claims on modernity on the basis of those very traditions, as filtered through experiences of colonialism, neocolonialism, or simple marginalization by the forces of globalization “(Dirlik, 2006, 3).

Digital media plays a significant role in aiding these connections and shaping these re-presentations. I am interested in research that examines these connections, representations and productions through critical theoretical lenses based in postcolonial theories, feminist theories, critical race theories and so on.

500 word abstracts due by December 1, 2007 and full articles of no more than 8000 words length due by September 2008.

Email me with any queries - radhika@cyberdiva.org.

anyway - am working on copyright issues to do with images in the edited collection - while I crochet - and got to wondering about the layers of creation and the individual nature of copyright….

again.

S writes - “Master weavers did pick up this technology…true, it was more for furnishing products, especially when markets opened out….but I again come back to narayanpet, where master weavers have framelooms, and are making sareees on it. It does have a clear product identity (unlike a more universal fursnishing fabric), but I think what matters is the existence of a market niche or demand which drives entrepreneurs to exploit the potential (of higher productivity) in frameloom technology. But if we go back in time to consider its introduction, then it was definitely an agenda of modernization and not market demand.”

Okay - so here I am a (not seasoned and quite ruptured and awkward) consumer of saris.. a consumer of fabric…

asking if the apparel shapes me or I shape the apparel?

if I wear a sari - where must I loose weight? if I wear jeans where must I loose weight?

Did the loom make the sari or the sari make the loom?

what kinds of looms allowed what kinds of saris (we know that as they exist looms are structured around the sari concept so it is difficult to adjust them to work with fabric for other garments etc)

how did the loom shape fashion and convention

and how does our distance from the loom in the market “freeze” notions of sari as tradition - even while it is a living shifting fashion/style practice in everyday life -

as also does bollywood and tollywood (and the fashion industry internal to India) shape the notion of the correct or chic way to wear a sari …

or dupatta…

What I write below may make absolutely no sense - but I have to insert this in the conversation - will elaborate later:

I am designing and producing saris on an online 3d social and technologically mediated environment (called secondlife) where people buy and sell clothes etc. - I have several stalls and shops and a studio there where I make these saris and sell. However different consumers respond differently to my way of designing saris (using handloom textures bought mostly from Dastkar Andhra). Some of them have museumized the notion of sari as traditional indian wear in a very particular way - and they have developed “traditions” of what it means to design and create a sari in secondlife - so they have begun to lay down the rules on what layers a sari must contain (and yet each of the sari sellers on secondlife makes them differently - some have bollywood style transparent flowy “fabric” others have pleats attached and so on) so when I adapt and shift the notion it is to experiment with how I can shift the fashion of sari wearing in that environment through providing a slightly different product - but also because of how I use the technologies that help produce these “saris” - such as digital imaging software, digital cameras and the actual building in secondlife after the raw “fabric” has been created offline and imported in….

of course there is the whole other aspect of the sari consumer on secondlife who is part of the Gor…and I dont what practices of sari designing that privileges…

Depending on who the consumer is and their prior experience with saris on secondlife I get different kinds of responses about how a “real” sari should be designed on secondlife and what sorts of practices secondlifers are used to and have come to expect in a sari.

Thus my virtual “loom” (a combination of a situated social panopticon and the digital technologies used to construct the product) shapes my particular style of sari (shall we call it “rad Zabibha pEta cheera”?;-)) - and also my offline practice and experience with sari wearing shapes the way I visualize saris - but some of the people setting the precedent for the “Tradition” of sari making may have actually never worn a sari in their life…

which version of sari is tradition and which authentic - and why

so to get back to the master weavers and niche markets - markets are formed in interaction with what the weaver can produce - that was when loom was the only technology that produced the cloth for the sari….