The Digital Poetics and Politics summer institute convened in Kingston, Ontario in August 2004. This weeklong gathering was organized and hosted by the Department of Film Studies at Queen’s University. For me, the experience was a refreshing change from the rather bloated international conferences I’d been more used to attending, which often involve hundreds – or even thousands – of academics in one cavernous hotel, multiple concurrent sessions, a constant flow of panel-hoppers and unfocused question periods, all organized around an everything-and-nothing umbrella theme.

DPP (or ‘digipopo’ as it quickly became known) involved a group of about thirty of us. We were able to focus our collective attentions on a set of shared themes and issues, with everyone – artists, activists, media-makers and scholars – making some kind of presentation of work-in-progress to everyone else during the week. We also had break-out workgroups, demos, performances, installations, and one cracking barbeque.

Sometime in 2005 the idea emerged to gather the work produced at digipopo in a special issue of the journal Public. Working with Susan Lord, Dorit Naaman and grad student Kristy Holmes at Queen’s, a design and production team (comprising myself, Glenn Gear, and Miriam Verburg) set out to create the new issue. The three of us worked together on a common overall theme that attempted to capture the sense of work-in-progress and anti-technicism that permeated the event itself.

The overall format was borrowed (with permission) from Emigre, a digital type foundry that, until recently, published its own highly influential graphic design magazine. The format allowed us to represent all of the work that came out of digipopo – papers, images, soundworks, videos, films, web and interactive works – by creating a printed booklet, a DVD, and a website. (A dummy of Public #31 can be seen here.)

Glenn (an incredibly talented artist/animator) ultimately took care of designing and authoring the DVD; Miriam (who has her own web design company) designed, programmed and populated the website (with a little last-minute editing help from Paul Hanlon); and I took on the sleeve and 32-page booklet (pdf here).

The issue is now out (phew!) and we look forward to feedback (and hopefully a small launch party).

During my stay at the Digital Poetics and Politics institute at Queen’s University, I learned all about the radical potential of knitting from Kirsty, one of my co-participants. An unlikely combination, perhaps, until you actually start to think about it more deeply.

Knitting is, in itself, a remarkably rich metaphor when considering issues of gender and power; hitch this up to a discussion of computer viruses and things really start to blossom. Kirsty, for example, took the binary code from an existing virus called Code Red and converted it into a piece of knitting (in red wool, of course). Rather than rendering the virus harmless, this act was actually a form of re-encoding; one could imagine it being carried invisibly (ie worn as a garment) until the wearer decided to decode it.

There’s also a certain kind of circularity at play: the earliest programmable computers were based on the Jacquard Loom’s innovative use of punchcards. The Loom itself marks a key moment in the industrialization of craft skills (cf knitting).

Finally, at the institute, we began to imagine a moment in the future when radical knitting is itself gradually co-opted, or ‘mainstreamed’.

Since last Tuesday I’ve been in residence at a week-long institute on digital media, art and culture. Digital Poetics and Politics was organized by the wonderful folks in the Department of Film Studies at Queen’s University.

We’ve shared creative work and critical ideas, had friendly and productive debates, and developed a remarkable sense of community in just a matter of days. This might be because we were all asked to present work in progress, rather than finished projects; or, because there’s such a diverse mix of talents and interests and personalities; or it could be that the organizers just managed to get it right. Perhaps it’s all three.