Weaving: A Generative Artwork – A Continuous Practice in Generative Art Since 1995.

Weaving is a generative artwork that has been featured in major international exhibitions in both public art and contemporary art fair contexts. The work was presented as a large-scale facade projection at Dong Gallery in Taipei, and was a featured installation at the PLUGIN section of Contemporary Istanbul 2018.

On the Nature of Weaving

Weaving

When weaving, structure is built out of the iteration of a few relatively simple basic processes. Complexity emerges and generative potential is bred. In LIA’s Weaving, formal minimalism and procedural restraint are braided into an open-ended, shifting, gnarly, and mesmerising composition.

Weaving and computation first converged when Charles Babbage was inspired by the Jacquard Loom to use punch cards for recording information. Jacquard’s cards stored a notation for the motion of the loom, a choreography from which weavings would be produced. Babbage’s cards stored software, data and code. Data to be fed to the Analytical Engine, or data output by it. Most significantly, they could also store program data that would put the Engine in motion, so that it could compute, or as Ada Lovelace put it, “weave algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

The roots of software are therefore also to be found in weaving and particularly in the Jacquard Loom, a machine that transcoded patterns and movements, that transferred control and structure from human bodies and minds to machines. And that while doing this, not only automated processes, as it reclaimed agency.

Text by Miguel Carvalhais