Interweaving Poetic Code Links Textiles with Coding

While the project centred around an exhibition in Hong Kong at the former cotton spinning mills housing the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (CHAT, 30 April–18 July 2021), it kicked off with a Zoom symposium, Poetic Emergences: Organisation through Textile and Code (16–19 April 2021), that foregrounded the work of weavers, programmers, philosophers, and community workers investigating the transformative processes of textile and code. Keynote speaker Alexander R. Galloway, a New York-based media studies professor, discussed the innovations of two female mathematicians at the intersection of weaving and computation: Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), who theorised that Jacquard loom punch cards could store data in an analytical machine (i.e. Moderator Amy K.S. Chan, a Hong Kong-based professor and scholar, introduced Nüshu (literally: 'female script'), a syllabic script that was written and embroidered by women in Imperial China to compose fiction and correspond undetected by male family members. In'Session 2: Metaphors of E-Textiles', scholar Annapurna Mamidipudi discussed the PENELOPE project, which aims to integrate ancient weaving into the realm of digital technology, through the lens of her work with handloom weavers in South India. Mamidipudi riled against the pure academicians who confine the practice of weavers as'some kind of embodied ethno-mathematics that are not universal', and described weaving as a'technical mode of existence' that performs digital intelligence.