Spinning Yarns
"Spinning Yarns" is a collective of text, technology, and textile authors active from 1994-1998, as imagined with the assistance of ChatGPT and DALL-E, inspired by the missing and vanishing histories of feminist electronic literature. This project is a tribute to that imaginary remembrance: a collective of digital and material artifacts – a speculative design that looks to our lost pasts instead of our hidden futures – envisioning early experiments in spinning an electronic literature tale that could have been.
This imagined hub is inspired by the real works of Deena Larsen, Judy Malloy, and Shirley Jackson, but considers potential pre-histories that could have intersected with their works and traditions. Through this act of imagining and memorializing, we seek to draw attention to the histories we have lost, what could have been, and the lines we draw when we envision histories of electronic literature through a predominantly computational lens. Our methods combine the computational and generative with the feminist and material, and envision an extension of early, often overlooked, experiments with textiles and technology. The results are filled with gaps and glitches and present an incomplete portrait of a collective that could have been, telling a story through fragments and incomplete documentation.
This experiment is as much about process as product: to that end, all of the conversations (including frustrations and miscommunications with the machine) that produced the text, html files, stylesheets, and images contained within are documented here:
- The First Commit
- Profile Pictures
- Describing Literature
- Profile Pages
- Imaginary Screenshots
- Gallery and Contact Pages
