S A R A H   R O S A L E N A

Data Weaving as Cultural Text was a workshop with Scopelab at UCLA Design Media Arts in 2017. Nine participants explored data visualizations with code to discuss weaving as a method to exit information programmed with the computer. The mission was to combine cre­ative code with fem­i­nist and de­colo­nial prin­ci­ples to weave im­mi­grant hate crime data in the brows­er, using the loom as a plat­form to dis­cuss bias against women in com­pu­ta­tion, the Jacquard loom, Ada Lovelace, and the ENI­AC. Par­tic­i­pants learned Dineh and Pueblo weav­ing meth­ods to em­ploy a de­sign called the spir­it line. It is an in­de­pen­dent line cre­at­ed to re­lease weavers from the ob­jects they cre­ate and pro­duce new pat­terns. Dur­ing the rise of Trump, hate crimes to­wards im­mi­grants sky­rock­et­ed along with de­mands for a new US/Mex­i­co bor­der wall. Data col­lect­ed from 2015-2017, such as hate crime, vic­tim race, vic­tim sex, place, of­fend­er race, and of­fend­er sex were used as vari­ables. Spir­it lines were added as a form of glitch and re­lease. Col­lec­tive de­signs were put to­geth­er as a data quilt, cre­at­ing new con­struc­tions of Amer­i­can iden­ti­ty and politic.