Concealing her face, concealing her form,
Changes and transformations every hour, every moment,
Falling upon her even when she sleeps.
From Walt Whitman’s “Debris”
In "The Future Looms: Weaven Women and Cybernetics," Sadie Plant draws a connection between women and weaving. Because woman cannot be anything, she imitates intelligence, autonomy, beauty—anything man values. Woman weaves her own disguises to this end. Like a computer, woman appears as whatever the man needs her to be to complete a specific function. The transparent becomes the opaque. She weaves her veil to wear for him. Similarly, the matrix is only understood as it is made opaque, like this page. But underneath this grey pixelic exterior lies something altogether different and complicated.
Sherry Turkle investigates this idea of the transparent versus the opaque in her oft-quoted book Life on the Screen. Online communication gives us the same ability to weave opaqueness. IRC, MUDs, MOOs, virtual communities, chatrooms—all allow us anonymity or a new visage, a new interface or mask to wear.
Are we weaving for men, for ourselves as women, or to hold the threads of life | matrix together?