Digital Tenderness (2024-2025) consists of woven pieces produced by me on a hand-operated digital TC2 Jacquard loom as well as pieces created on a fully automated Jacquard loom. The motifs are based on photos and sourced imagery, which are first digitally layered and merged, accumulating visual information before undergoing a process of reduction—large amounts of data are condensed in the weaving process, a process that is sometimes taken so far that the legibility of the motif becomes secondary. The process translates manual gestures and traces of touch into structured, coded patterns, preserving the imprints of bodily knowledge while navigating the intersection of handcraft and digital production. The images push the edge of legibility, while simultaneously playing with and subverting readability, questioning the dominance of alphabetic structures as the singular form of knowledge production and embracing alternative, embodied ways of knowing.
Weaving as a technology embodies algorithmic processes: the precise interlacing of threads follows systematic, rule-based patterns, making it one of the earliest forms of algorithmic thinking, deeply embedded in tangible, everyday life. Digital Tenderness extends this connection further by exploring how weaving can articulate and cultivate sensuality, perception, intuition, and well-being within digital contexts. Using textile processes to penetrate surfaces, skins, and interfaces—layer by layer—the work engages, challenges, and transforms them, laying down traces of words as a form of counter-coding that moves beyond zones of violence and binary oppositions.
The display of the tapestries is based on my collection of individual hand drawings by weavers describing their craft. The drawings capture their movements when working—subtle and often intuitive gestures that have become ingrained in their practice over time. Drawing directly from the embodied knowledge of women working with textiles, the scaled-up versions of the sketches serve as the foundation of the display racks for the woven pieces.
I am interested in exploring the future of embodied knowledge within the information age, challenging prevailing Western concepts that assume digital information to be abstract, detached, and inherently opposed to physical presence. From this perspective, algorithms are often treated as tools of Western technological imposition—disembodied processes that apply abstract mathematical ideas to concrete data. However, the genealogy of algorithms reveals their roots in material practices—everyday activities that partition space, time, labor, and social interactions.
Is it possible to preserve local, marginalized, or opaque knowledge systems while resisting the dominance of universalizing structures? By transforming digital designs into the tactile reality of handwoven textiles, Digital Tenderness bridges these opposites, questioning what happens between 0 and 1, and how embodied practices can offer pathways to new modes of interaction and being.
Thread lightly.
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