PENELOPE A Study of Weaving as Technical Mode of Existence
During our recent project residency at Textiles Zentrum Haslach, we had the opportunity to work at the TC-1 looms there. As an experiment I used my TidalCycles software, which is normally used to create music, to...
In the frame of the PENELOPE project my aim is to explore instances of weaving imagery in archaic and classical Greek literature as revealing a distinctive mode of composition, one that reflects fundamental features of ancient...
Once we acknowledge that weaving and programming are part of the same technological timeline, we can begin to look at the history of weaving as a eight thousand year long tale of human relationship with digital...
I’m writing this on the train with a slightly sleep deprived brain fizzing and popping from thoughts, ideas and conversations from this year’s Algomech festival in Sheffield. The Penelope project took a significant role in the...
Since the most ancient times, weaving is an epistemic art and an applied knowledge, and represents both a material and an intellectual technology. This double feature determines the specific relationship between the textile artefacts, the...
AlgoMech is the festival of Algorithmic and Mechanical Movement, taking place 8-12th November in Sheffield UK, with myself (Alex McLean) as lead organiser on behalf of the PENELOPE project, collaborating with a range of organisations including Museums...
We’ve been busy making a new tangible interface – the Pattern Matrix is part of the ERC Penelope project, which explores mathematical proofs embedded in (weaving) pattern, and how technology defines our relationship with the world....
This Friday morning a new weaving project took off in our laboratory at the Museum for Plaster Casts: Sylvia Wiechmann, a weaver who founded the Damascweaving workshop in Munich twenty years ago, now weaves coptic tunics...
Our PENELOPE project looks to integrate ancient weaving into the history of technology. One part of this work is to create new technology, such as the Pattern Matrix, incorporating designs for new interfaces based on ancient...
The study of ancient weaving and its technology can benefit enormously from the growing interest in the materiality and contexts of textile production in antiquity: a vast array of cross-disciplinary research in the last ten years...
Since May, the first prototype of the pattern matrix is at work in our laboratory at the Museum for Plaster Casts at Königsplatz in Munich. Dave Griffiths already is working on enhancements that resulted from our...
A few weeks ago we kicked off the new Penelope project, and while in Munich one of our first jobs was to deliver the prototype pattern matrix to the Museum of Casts of Classical sculpture for...