My journal article ‘Weaving Codes / Coding Weaves: PenelopeanMêtis and the Weaver-Coder’s Kairos’ is now published in Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, Vol.15, Issue 2
A PDF of the article can be downloaded here.
Abstract: Drawing
on my experience as ‘critical interlocutor’ within the research project Weaving Codes / Coding Weaves, in this
article I reflect on the human qualities of
attention, cognitive agility and tactical intelligence activated within live
coding and ancient weaving with reference to the Ancient Greek concepts of technē, kairos
and mêtis. The
article explores how
the specificity of ‘thinking-in-action’ cultivated within improvisatory live
coding relates to the embodied ‘thought-in-motion’ activated whilst working on the loom. Echoing
the wider concerns of Weaving
Codes / Coding Weaves, an attempt is made to redefine the relation
between weave and code by dislodging the dominant utilitarian histories that
connect computer and the loom, by instead placing emphasis on the potentially
resistant and subversive forms of live
thinking-and-knowing cultivated therein. I address the Penelopean poetics
of both live coding and ancient weaving, proposing how the combination of kairotic
timing and timeliness with
the mêtic act of
‘doing-undoing-redoing’ therein offers a subversive alternative to – even
critique of – certain utilitarian technological developments (within both
coding and weaving) which in privileging efficiency and optimization can delimit
creative possibilities, reducing the potential of human intervention and
invention in the seizing of opportunity, accident,
chance and contingency.