Class material for course taught at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (KADK) together with Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology & Mace Ojala.
This class for bachelor students in the fine art department serves as an intro to programming & weaving. The course covers the history of the computer, feminist theory, technology criticism and the connection between programming and crafting techniques.
Textile techniques led to the invention of the first computer. Even today, textile techniques are potent metaphors for understanding the 'web' and everything digital. With this workshop, participants will be introduced to the Jacquard machine and the story of how punchcard weaving technology evolved to modern day computers.
Participants will be offered a hands-on weaving demo to fully understand the connections between warp and weft and the most basic concepts running devices today (the binary system). This workshop highlights the history of computers, the tactility of programming and last but not least sheds light on an under-appreciated connection between craft traditions and innovative technologies.
- Sadie Plant: Zeros and Ones - special focus on page 1-55.
- Paul Dourish: The Stuff of Bits. An Essay on the Materialities of Information (MIT Press 2017), chapter 1. Introduction: Information as Material.
Visit to a textile workshop. Discussing textile not just as the dusty past of technology but as the possible place of its most utopian future. Textiles and materiality as our only understanding of concepts from blockchain to AI -the driving force behind perhaps innovations that are yet to come.
- Susan Kuchera: The Weavers and Their Information Webs: Steganography in the Textile Arts
- Wendy Chun: On Software or the persistence of visual knowledge
- Ross Anderson: Losing the thread