Moon Tapestry by Althea Rao
NOT POCKET SIZE ; NO PUSH NOTIFICATIONS ; CURIOSITY AND HUMAN INTELLIGENCE REQUIRED.
Meet Moon Tapestry – possibly the world’s most idiosyncratic and inefficient menstrual cycle tracker NOT powered by Artificial Intelligence. Its small-but-mighty memory will proudly remember only 28-days of your Basal Body Temperature, which you will measure and input every day*. Emerges across the entire length of the tapestry is a subtle, ambiguous temperature curve consists of obscure, thermally activated moon phases, which you will observe and reference** to remind yourself of important bodily events such as menstruation and ovulation***.
*Thermometer not included.
**Knowledge of symptothermal birth control method is required. By using Moon Tapestry, you confirm you are knowledgeable of this method or agree to learn more about it.
***As human bodies are not computers, accuracy of Moon Tapestry is not guaranteed.
Moon Tapestry is a 28-day calendar that one can use to produce and document their daily Basal Body Temperature. Input of one’s body temperature will activate the heating elements embedded inside the tapestry, causing thermochromic patterns of moon phases to slowly emerge or disappear. Across the length of the tapestry, a temperature curve of daily moon will form. An individual knowledgeable of the symptothermal birth control method may observe from this curve important bodily events such as ovulation, menstruation, and fertility period. The tapestry is entirely offline and can remember 28 days’ of value at most.
Most consumer FemTech apps and devices require individual users to produce intimate datasets about their bodies. These tech based products streamline data collection, input and processing with user-friendly wireframes and sleek design. They interpret our data for us; in exchange, we voluntarily surrender our data to opaque, algorithmically-driven, centralized, cloud-based servers owned by for-profit companies.
Moon Tapestry is a speculative vision of a FemTech otherwise: a design that doesn’t increase our digital dependency or harvest/broadcast massive biometric data; that’s low-tech, open-source and transparent about its algorithms; that’s fun, perhaps a bit dysfunctional, but encourages its users to reframe themselves and the world they live in, bringing meanings to one’s own data and contextualize how they are accessed or understood by others. While the tapestry holds “encrypted” intimate data locally, it can also be displayed in plain-sight as an ornament.
Textile making, softness and the tactile experience have for a long time been culturally associated with craft, domestic space, and women’s work. Far away from the current sleek, high-tech, cool girl ‘FemTech’ aesthetic, Moon Tapestry centers craft-based methodologies, aesthetics and embodied ways of knowing that womxn themselves are experts of. Its idiosyncrasy and intentional lack of usability invite gestures of curiosity and caring when tending to our body as it evolves through various stages of life.
