Til Vægs, Copenhagen. Photo: David Stjernholm			Til Vægs, Copenhagen. Photo: David Stjernholm

Pattern Machines

Generative algorithms
(2022-)

Pattern Machines is an ongoing series of generative algorithms that in visual patterns and perpetually changing poetry explore historical, theoretical and material connections between coding and weaving, thread and pixel, textile and screen.

The pieces draw on references spanning early computer art, system-based poetry, weaving history, and recent research on digital materiality. One piece is a visual mutation of a 19^th century weaving pattern, another is a transformative pattern inspired by a watercolor sketch by the Bauhaus weaver Anni Albers, yet another combines language from Kathryn Sullivan Kruger’s book Weaving the Word: The Metaphorics of Weaving and Female Textual Production into a poem that continuously weaves itself; a meta-reflection on text and textile production.

The series can be seen as an attempt to complicate the intertwined histories of weaving and computation, and the gendered notions we often associate with these. In the continuous transformations of texts and patters, the work reflects on how we can get a new understanding of algorithms and textiles—their materialities, logics, and interrelations—and ponder their past, present, and future connections.