Glitching the Pattern: The Poetics of Weaving and Computation

Practice-based artistic Mads Øvlisen Postdoc Fellowship awarded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, 2025

Technological tools—from computers to AI—play increasingly significant roles in our lives. Yet, as users we often lack the ability to understand how they function. In this postdoc project, I aim to explore historical, theoretical, and material connections between programming and weaving. I will transform traditional weaving techniques through algorithmic systems, and use weaving as outset for algorithmic art, thus connecting the analog and the digital in ways that not only offer new perspectives on art historical material but also propose new understanding of contemporary digital realms.

The project will be housed by the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) and involve collaborations with Arts at CERN and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (ACT/MIT). With an outset in works by Anna Thommesen and Ragna Braase from SMK’s collection I will explore weaving as a kind of programming, a tool for dissent, disruption of categories, and (gender)political reflection.

The project’s purpose is twofold: To use technology artistically and subversively to create artworks that ignite new understandings of art-craft-technology connections and analog-digital entanglements, and to propose a new art historical framework for artistic use of weaving and programming. Through artistic experimentation and critical reflection, the project thus connects craft and technology, algorithms and weaving patterns, bodies and machines, authorized and under-recognized subjects, cosmic and meteorological cycles, local and global strata, past and future.