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HOOK-UP
Design Studio BArch3- Michelle Howard, Eva Sommeregger
What direction would technology have taken if the skills that are normally attributed to women and other anomalies2 were given the attention they deserve?
Anthropologists are increasingly critical of their own biases and more receptive to theories that challenge heretofore established dogmas. We now know that prehistoric diets contained much more grain than meat and that our first tool was not a weapon, but a woven carrier bag. So then, we need no longer be defined by a grunting lone individual bashing a bone, his sedentary group cowed into submission as per Kubrick’s famous scene3, but rather by a sociable collective – gathering edible, beautiful and useless things to share, enjoy and construct together while telling stories and moving from place to place.
In Kubrick’s scene, the aggressive bone bashing led to lone astronauts in satellites above the Earth monitoring the aggressive behaviour below. Where could we have been led if technology had taken the path of the carrier bag? The path of the line – walking, weaving, observing, storytelling, singing, drawing and writing all proceed along lines4. Lines can be interrupted, but they all have the potential to reconnect, inter-weave and eventually become endless.
In the turn from spinning a thread to stretching it from point to point lies the ‘hinge’ between bodily movement and abstract reason, between the textilic and the architectonic, between the haptic and the optical, and between becoming and being. Perhaps the key to the ontology of making is to be found in a length of string.1
1 From Lines: A Brief history, chapter 2 Traces, Threads and Surfaces by Tim Ingold, ISBN 9781138640399, Published April 11, 2016, by Routledge
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