“the analytical engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”
- ada lovelace , 1843


from knits and purls to ones and zeros, modern computers are inextricably tangled in the logic of fabric. so too are the societal consequences surrounding their automation: the parallels between the rise of generative ai/llms and fast fashion run deeper than convenience alone, extending to the human labor they obscure. there is a myth, with automation, that it somehow supplants labor; that we will work less. in reality, it only transforms it: the definition of “we” changes, and an acceptable distance is created. human hands still sew your shirts. human hands wrote the code that your llms train on and generate. 

in “knitware” (2026), i draw inspiration from the jacquard loom as a precursor to modern computation, framing the contemporary computer as a descendant of textile craft. this philosophy extends into the very structure of the algorithm i wrote. i love coding shaders- types of graphics programs that run in parallel to compute the color of every pixel on the screen all at once. the code behind knitware is a complete refutation of this approach. it’s built on a concatenation of turing machines, a fundamentally sequential architecture that cannot be efficiently parallelized. the image must be produced row by row, as cloth is woven weft by weft. in this way, the screen becomes a type of loom, collapsing the distance between cloth and code to reveal software not as immaterial abstraction, but as part of a long history of craft and deeply human labor.