Weaving Codes
What happens when we apply a five-thousand-year-long view of technology to programming? What are the parallels between investigations into weaving as thought and livecoding performance? Both represent new ways of approaching human activities otherwise reduced to purely "utilitarian" roles, but which are central in all our lives.
"Weaving Codes – coding weaves" is a collaboration between Foam Kernow, Alex McLean at the University of Leeds, and Ellen Harlizius-Klück at the Danish Centre for Textile Research.
Modern computation has its roots in the Jacquard looms of the 19th century. Can we trace these threads of pattern manipulation right to today's CPUs? Going further back to the weavers of antiquity, who used warp-weighted looms and rotated tablets to make their patterns - can we study their methods in order to understand their ways of thinking? Is weaving - perhaps the first digital artform humans engaged in - actually itself a computational process?
This project is funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Digital Transformations Amplification award. This is our source code repo.
Created: 06 Feb 2015 / Updated: 15 Jul 2021
