Technology is said to be an extension of the functions of the body. The quilt takes clothing as a second skin and refashions it as a technology for social memory.

Can the structure and aesthetics of the quilt be used to develop a technology for creating voice? Do the actions and tactics of quilters provide clues to agency for silenced people? The structural characteristics of the quilt, the quilt-making ritual and the quilt metaphor all provide a conceptual framework for a collaborative communication technology. The quilt enhances the individual perspective by providing a space for the voice of the individual and allows for the storage, retrieval and dissemination of personal narratives.

Van Hillard hints at the dialogic nature of the quilt, its method of production by individual and collective means, and its promise of establishing communication in the midst of fragmentation. Hillard also believes that quilts offer complex visual solutions for deriving unity from diversity; they represent the enactment of co-existence, the value of differences acting together to shape a new whole, greater than the sum of its parts (116). The quilt becomes an apparatus of organizing knowledge that provides a rich, visual display of narratives and imagery.

The quilt brings together geometry, mathematics, and the preciseness of measurement. The sum nor the parts are greater in the quilt creation. Each works together in "dialogue" - on different scales - to create a sense of connectedness. The quilt provides a framework which holds the personal narratives without forcing conformity among the parts. "In other words," says Michel de Certeau, " 'stories' provide the decorative container of a narrativity for everyday practices. To be sure, they describe only fragments of these practices. They are no more than its metaphors. But, in spite of the ruptures separating successive configurations of knowledge, they represent a new variant in the continuous series of narrative documents which form folktales providing a panoply of schemas for action" (de Certeau, 70).

As a narrative mapping system, quilts have a distinct advantage over writing and numbers for conveying information. The quilt:

• Increases knowledge by reducing the image of the world to patterns and textures.
• Increases information density by precisely filling in the blanks with local knowledge.
• Increases accuracy by closely representing important narrative elements.

Walter Benjamin's idea of history is one of a constant state of emergency where "those without a name" work the scenes of fragmentation and repression to reinvest history out of the debris and waste material of an epoch (Tierney and Lincoln, 237). Benjamin brings to mind the craft of quilt making, used by centuries of women, to recycle intimate artifacts into whole cloth. The silenced thus are resituated within the larger narrative and participate in its recreation.