Last week the weavecoding group met at Foam Kernow for our Cornish research gathering. As we approach the final stages of the project our discussions turn to publications, and which ideas from the start need revisiting. While they were here, I wanted to give local artists and researchers working with code and textiles a chance to meet Ellen, Emma and Alex. As we are a non-academic research organisation I wanted to avoid the normal powerpoint talks/coffee events and try something more informal and inclusive.
One of the original ideas we had was to combine weaving and coding in a performance setting, to both provide a way to make livecoding more inclusive with weaving, and at the same time to highlight the digital thought processes involved in weaving. Amber made vegetarian sushi for our audience and we set up the Jubilee Warehouse with a collection of experiments from the project:
- The newly warped table loom with a live camera/projection from underneath the fabric as it was woven with codes for different weaves on post-it notes for people to try.
- The tablet/inkle loom to represent ancient weaving techniques.
- The pattern matrix tangible weavecoding machine and Raspberry Pi.
- A brand new experiment by Francesca with a dancemat connected to the pattern matrix software for dance code weaving!
- The slub livecoding setup.
This provided an opportunity for people to try things out and ask questions/provide discussion starting points. Our audience consisted of craft researchers, anthropological biologists, architects, game designers and technologists – so it all went on quite a lot longer than we anticipated! Alex and I provided some slub livecoded music to weave by, and my favourite part was the live weaving projection – with more projectors we could develop this combination of code and weaving performance more. Thanks to Emma for all the videos and photos!
