I own all of Lynda Barry‘s books and I’ve read them all, like, hundreds of times. I totally love them and think she is totally awesome. Seriously.

I was first introduced to her work in the 1988 documentary, Comic Book Confidential. She was one of very few female comics artists represented, and I was impressed because she told stories about girls that were really funny instead of really pathetic. (Spending time in Marlys’ world is still one of my favourite things to do.)

But it wasn’t until 2002′s One Hundred Demons that Barry’s work hit me on a visceral level and became relevant to my research. The book gathers seventeen influential demons from Barry’s childhood and adolescence, like “Girlness” and “Hate.” Barry calls this kind of storytelling “autobifictionalography” and it was the first time I think I really understood that there is a productive, evocative, telling space between fiction and non-fiction.

The second revelation came with 2008′s What It Is and 2009′s Picture This. Both are ‘how-to’ books, the former on writing and the latter on drawing, but they are also, and sometimes even more so, ‘why’ books. They are about creative experiences, and how even the most “non-creative” people always already have them. They represent, to me, the triumph of everyday creativity and the polar opposite of elitist (professional?) art and design.

Writing this now, I wonder why I don’t cite Lynda Barry as often as I cite, say, Sarah Pink? Both have taught me how to tell stories about my research, but I give formal (i.e. academic) credit to one more than the other and that’s just not cricket. (Sorry Lynda!) I’ll definitely correct that in the future.

Anyway, if you want to get to know her work, Drawn&Quarterly will be publishing Everything! later this year and here’s Barry’s Amazon page. And if you’ve never heard/seen her speak, it’s a real pleasure:

Lynda Barry–Cusp Conference 2009 (Pt 1)

Lynda Barry–Cusp Conference 2009 (Pt 2)

When research is officially only 40-50% of my academic workload, I’m learning that it’s easy to start feeling like nothing’s getting done. I’m hoping that these progress reports not only communicate to others what we’ve been doing, but also help me keep things in perspective.

First of all, our super awesome summer scholarship student Samantha has been hard at work bringing The Story of NZ Merino video series to life. The first video tells the story of how NZ merino wool made the shift from commodity to brand, the second video tells the story of the NZ “ethical wool” brand, and the third video poses questions about how ethical producers and consumers are socially constructed. I’ve been responsible for the story and writing, and Sam has been responsible for visual design and video production. This year, VUW’s Summer Scholar Scheme has organised a poster competition as a way to help students understand that “communicating research and scholarly findings to a general audience is an essential part of academic and professional life” and earn some extra prize money. Given that our project has focussed on how media design can directly inform such activities, I’m fully supporting Samantha’s participation and the final videos will be made publically available in March under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license. In the meantime, I’ll be looking for ways to distribute the videos for educational use. It’s our hope that the videos are well suited to secondary and early tertiary curriculum, as well as for museum public education programmes. We’ll be working to ensure that the videos are also fully accessible to the vision and hearing-impaired, and look forward to seeing what kinds of learning activities our work can support. If you, or anyone you know, might be interested in working with us on this, please email me.

In other news, I attended KiwiFoo last weekend and had the opportunity to facilitate a thoughtful discussion on rural computing (a.k.a. RFID+Sheep). There was a fair amount of interest in how pervasive computing could be used to support farming activities like herd/flock and pasture management, as well as the potential to establish NZ’s capacity to deliver these technologies to market. Given my own focus on social research and cultural content creation, the hard business talk was more than a little out of my league–but it was fascinating to see how people with different interests could still support and benefit from each other’s work. I met some really good people with whom I hope to work in the future, and I’m looking forward to visiting John and Karen‘s Lifeboat Farm in the Wairarapa to experience some farm tech and sunshine. (As an aside, after eating their happy lamb I now understand why people like it so much; it’s a fine fine meat.)

Continuing on the event front, a few days ago I attended Scott McCloud‘s Writing with Pictures workshop at Webstock. (To be honest, I wanted to attend David McCandless‘ workshop on How to Make Information Beautiful, but I couldn’t afford it.) And since I’m such a huge comics fan, and have used Scott’s books in class for years, I was really looking forward to it. Plus, I have a lot of visual communication to do in the next couple of years and was eager to learn. Now I’m quite glad I went–Scott’s a friendly guy who is happy to answer questions–but he didn’t cover a lot that I didn’t know from his books and I was disappointed that we didn’t tackle the art of storytelling, with the exception of a lovely exercise in which a couple of people read a comic out loud and Scott deconstructed bits of the story. I also learned a bunch of fascinating things about facial expressions, like anger+joy=cruelty and that resentment=anger+weakness (looking away) while defiance=anger+strength (looking straight ahead). And in terms of practice, I learned that even though I cannot actually draw–everyone thought my giraffe was a brontosaurus–I can make funny scribbles on paper. Unfortunately, my “abstract” style does not lend itself to the communication of complex information, and it looks like I’m going to have to find a different way to up my game in these areas.

I’ve also been making slow but steady progress on my research and writing. I’ve got a draft version of a paper on the social construction of ethical wool, as well as one on international livestock traceability programmes and the politics of RFID. I also submitted an abstract on how to imagine rural computing to the Fibreculture Journal special issue on networked utopias and speculative futures, so hopefully more on that later.

And last, but not least, it looks like our C&T2011 workshop on ethnographic fiction and speculative design has received a fair amount of initial interest and we’re hoping that will translate into some interesting submissions. There’s still plenty of time to get in an extended abstract and we’ll send out reminders two weeks before the deadline. I’m also excited to see that the workshops have been scheduled over two days, so I hope to participate in the Food(ing): Between Human-Computer and Human-Food-Experience workshop or sneak a rural computing paper into the locative media, memory and presence in the city workshop.

Just a reminder that abstracts are due 20 Feb 2011 for the Fibreculture Journal special issue on networked utopias and speculative futures. I find the description a bit opaque, but if you’re interested in such things, the list of possible topics seems to leave quite a bit of room to manoeuvre.

Important dates
Abstract deadline: February 20, 2011
Article deadline: May 30, 2011
Publication aimed for: November, 2011

I’ve been looking at “farm to fork” food traceability in an attempt to articulate how “grower to garment” wool traceability is similar and/or different. (Don’t get me started on what either has in common with surveilling, er, tracing people…)

Here’s how IBM’s Smarter Food initiative frames the food problem and solution:

“Food is as fundamental as it gets. And our relationship with it has changed with every year. Just ten years ago, most consumers were focused on eating a diet low in fat. Biotechnology was extremely limited in its application and considered somewhat dangerous. And few people knew what organic meant or why it mattered. Today, the picture is one of heightened challenges. Food prices are soaring. Shortages have sparked unrest the world over. The threat of salmonella poisoning prompts the recall of millions of U.S. eggs. And every year, ten million people die of hunger and hunger-related diseases. At the same time, consumers are hungrier than ever for information about their food. They are better informed about nutrition and more aware of the environmental and societal impacts of everything they buy … With innovative digital technology and powerful solutions, IBM is making sure food is traced properly as it passes though an increasingly complex global supply chain. IBM is also making that food heartier through biological research. The future of food starts today.

Pet food. Lettuce. Peanut butter. Baby food. Milk. These are just some of the high profile recalls we’ve seen in the last year. Consumers worldwide are worried—and rightly so. Is their food safe? And where did it come from? One solution is track and trace technology, including 2D and 3D barcode and radio frequency identification (RFID). This allows us to track food from “farm to fork.” And now government regulations and industry requirements for quality and traceability are driving food producers worldwide to provide more detail on products. With an increasingly global supply chain, that detail must be comprehensive and reliable. And with that detail, companies can realize added value as well, such as a streamlined distribution chain and lower spoilage rates. In fact, consumer product and retail industries lose about $40 billion annually, or 3.5% of their sales, due to supply chain inefficiencies.”

IBM: Setting the Table for a Smarter Planet (pdf)

And here’s a series of articles on traceability:

Ten examples of brands dishing up details on food origins
App for shoppers rates how brands address forced & child labour
Swedish dairy uses tracking numbers as a ‘still-made-here’ marketing tool
Supermarkets offer increased food traceability, for info and safety
Site alerts consumers to product recalls that affect them

Or how about a more DIY, hands-on approach?

C&T2011 Workshop > Food(ing): Between Human-Computer and Human-Food-Experience

But the question remains: do people want or need the same information about products that they don’t eat, like clothing?

Tracing the history of what you buy
Zque: Ethical Wool
Icebreaker: Sustainability + Baacode
Patagonia: Footprint Chronicles
Rapanui Clothing: Traceability in Textiles
TEDxZurich: Robin Cornelius wants to make clothing traceable

And is there a difference between what we want to know and what we need to know?

Update: Siobhan O’Flynn extends this from “field to fork to feet,” or “bags at least”: You Gonna Eat That? And Wear It, Too?: A Restaurant in Brooklyn Sells Bags Made From the Hides of the Very Animals It Serves on Menu

People who read this blog are well acquainted with my interest in pervasive computing and sheep, but I’ve been working on a smaller project for a few years and this year I want to turn it into something more substantial.

I’ve been thinking about it as technologies of menstruation, but I think that menstrual machineries is much catchier, and actually more in sync with what interests me. Machines comprise any number of devices that turn, shape, mold or finish things, and machinery refers to the machines constituting a production apparatus. Menstrual machineries, then, comprise all the devices (material and social) that produce menstruation, and by extension, the menstruating woman.

A quick look through the Museum of Menstruation will give you a sense of the incredibly rich visual and material culture associated with menstruation throughout history, and existing cultural histories range from the  academic to the popular. But I find myself imagining something more along the lines of a catalog of machines: absorbing machines, collecting machines, cleansing machines, relaxing machines, etc.

One of the reasons I find menstruation so interesting is because it makes me wonder about inconspicuous consumption; the $13 billion a year feminine “hygiene” industry produces vast amounts of materials that are effectively hidden from (public) view. Rebecca Ginsberg published an interesting 1996 article on the topic: in “Don’t Tell, Dear” she explains that the consumption of tampons and pads does not lend itself to expressing identity or status as clearly as the consumption of other products because their use is expected to be as discrete as possible. These acts of discrete consumption put women into particular relationships with their bodies, as well as offering other people particular ways of understanding the menstruating woman.

[Image: Screen capture from Libra Invisibles TV advert.]

The “Aisle 8a” episode of animated sitcom King of the Hill does a brilliant job of showing how uncomfortable certain people can be around menstruation, even if it only means going down the feminine “hygiene” product aisle at the local store. And, indeed, any time I’ve lectured on the topic there have been men who expressly tell me that 1) they are uncomfortable with the subject, or 2) the subject is inappropriate for public discussion. I’m fine with the first–all sorts of things make me uncomfortable. But the second quite offends me; I don’t like the idea of shrouding biological processes in mystery and I don’t like the idea of censoring people’s everyday experiences. And it’s that last point that drives this project for me.

What form does this story need to take in order to discourage people from dismissing it out of hand?

Related: Cultural discomfort as design challenge?

The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney is home to the Bill Montgomery Vintage Wool Collection.

“[The collection] consists of approximately 7000 samples. In the older part of the collection there are 5000 samples from Australian sheep fleeces grown between 1856 and 1906. The samples were collected by the Museum at a time when scientific research was prominent in the Museum’s activities. In 1979, when the Museum’s focus changed, most of its wool collection was transferred to the teaching collection of Mr Bill Montgomery, a wool classing teacher at Newcastle Technical College. When Bill retired from the College, the collection was again in danger of being thrown away. He took the entire collection home and stored it in his garage for 15 years. His Collection also contains approximately 1500 wool samples grown between 1950 and 2000 and collected by Bill himself. It includes 147 examples of faults and stains occurring in Australian flocks, 20 pigmented wools and 33 rare and extinct breeds from around the world. The Museum purchased the entire collection in 2003. Bill Montgomery died on 7th July, 2007.”

“The wool collection held by the Powerhouse Museum contains thousands of wool samples collected between 1804 and 2003. These samples provide a record of wool growing in Australia. The different fleeces reflect the breeding programs and environmental conditions under which the fleeces were grown and, as such, they provide a valuable history of the areas of Australia in which sheep were grazed. Sheep were introduced into Australia in 1788 from Cape Town in South Africa. Since then sheep from other countries, including the Spanish Merino were imported into Australia and selectively crossbred. Careful crossbreeding, paying particular attention to the impact of the environment on both animal and fleece, led to the evolution of the Australian Merino. It is an excellent example of the engineering, through selective breeding, of a domestic animal. Wool went on to become the mainstay of the Australian Economy from 1807 to 1960.”

I’d like to work with this collection…

Last night I went to the launch event for the Year of Chemistry, not least because it included a Merino Gold Fashion Show.

For the past five or so years, researchers from Victoria University’s School of Chemical and Physical Sciences and MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology have been researching gold and silver nanoparticles as colourants for high fashion textiles. Supervised by Prof. Jim Johnston, recent PhD graduates Fern Kelly and Kerstin Lucas [née Burridge] pioneered ways to embed nanoparticles of gold and silver in New Zealand merino wool.

“When the precious metals are reduced to the nanoscale (a nanoparticle is one billionth of a metre in diameter) they scatter light in different colours with silver appearing as yellow, peach, pink and purple and gold producing a range of brilliant hues. That means textiles in many colours can be created without using traditional—and mostly synthetic—dyes, adding to the sustainability of the innovation. Repeated testing by Drs Kelly and Lucas has shown that the gold and silver are bound to the wool with an ultra strong bond making the textiles totally colourfast and ensuring they do not fade in light or with repeated washing. In addition, the textile products incorporating silver nanoparticles have strong anti-microbial properties meaning they resist bacteria and pests, like moth larvae, that live in carpets. They also reduce the build-up of static electricity.”

Pretty exciting fibre science, to be sure. But I’m also completely fascinated by how it taps into broader cultural values. When NZ merino wool is already a high-prestige brand, the addition of precious metals only further stresses that quality. Drawing on the 100% Pure NZ brand, the fashions last night were introduced with terms like “pure merino,” “pure gold” and “pure luxury.” And sure enough:

“The initial target market for the golden wools is high end fashion accessories, fabrics and floor coverings. While it is around 100 times more expensive than wool coloured with organic dyes, there is interest for niche applications such as scarves, exclusive apparel and luxury carpet for residences, hotels or super yachts … ‘It’s had enormous market acceptance from the start. “Wow” is what people from across the wool industry say what they see what we are doing to add significant value to the New Zealand wool clip’.”

There’s a lot about the marketing strategy that deserves unpacking, and I think I’ll add a section to the paper I’m writing on NZ merino branding. In terms of sustainability, I understand that moving away from traditional (esp. synthetic) dyes is a big deal environmentally, but I don’t know enough about the process to know if the product isn’t automatically implicated in the environmental and health issues associated with gold mining. I mean, the gold has to come from somewhere, doesn’t it? I’ll definitely have to follow up on that.

I’d also like to talk with them about working with designers, and how they understand the connections between science and creative practice. For the fashion show they worked with final year students from Massey University Fashion Design, and Greer Osborne won the fashion show competition with her “ready to wear look inspired by the New Zealand environment and in particular the merino wool product.” Dr Lucas was quoted as saying “It’s been fantastic getting creative minds on to exploring the possibilities,” but I’d be surprised if she thought that scientists weren’t also creative. I’ve always been fascinated when artists and designers say that scientists (or other academics) aren’t creative, as if creativity belongs to some professions (or people) and not others. I know plenty of scientists who object to that characterisation and, when the description is reversed, just as many creative practitioners who do not appreciate being told their work lacks intellectual or experimental merit. Surely the boundaries are much blurrier than all this suggests! For example, the MacDiarmid Institute asked researchers from around New Zealand to “enter the most interesting images from their work in a competition”–which effectively put creativity in the hands (or eyes) of scientists–and then the best images were put on display in The Art of Nanotech exhibition. Sure, “interesting” might not be the same as “beautiful,” but it is just as much a part of creativity or creative practice.

In any case, I’ve got loads more to think about now and I hope to arrange some time with the chemists before classes start up at the end of the month.

Further reading:
“Going for Gold, and Silver.” Twist, October 2008 (pdf)