Ebru Kurbak ed. (2018) and other related authors・Stitching Worlds and other related works

Rina Chen’s living notebook on digital craft and design.

Perhaps what we needed was not a digital revolution but an evolution based on the needs of individual human beings: the natural person, not the legal person. Let’s imagine that a computer was something that women handcrafted. What would an industry founded on such fundaments have to offer the world? (p. 94)

Stitching Worlds makes an important artistic statement that questions the foundations of the digital and takes a unique approach in deconstructing “digital” from the viewpoint of the arts-based research project. (p.93)

What if electronics emerged from textile techniques such as knitting, weaving, crochet, and embroidery? How would technology be different if craftspeople were the catalysts to the electronics industry, via textiles manufacturing? The project expands on the tension created by the use of highly traditional textile techniques for making functioning electronic technology. By revealing unexpected potentials of often-undervalued knowledge and skills, Stitching Worlds questions commonly accepted societal value systems and their implications.

The research was organized in four parallel and interconnected tracks: (1) hands-on “experimentation” on creating textile-based electronic components, (2) “theoretical study” into the broader, “transdisciplinary topics of the project, (3) continuous speculation” through prototyping objects and installations, and discovering new and stimulating forms of artistic expression, and (4) “reflection and dissemination” towards understanding our own practice within the larger field of contemporary modes of artistic production.

Mari introduced open source before open source was even an idea; he was motivated to provide access to processes of making for everyone. What if as designers we could provide access to processes of imagining? Ideas that challenge and expand possibility, opening up alternative realities that previously would have remained unimagined.

[!NOTE] Enzo Mari Frustrated with the growing culture of consumerism in the early 1970s, Enzo Mari embraced a new approach to the design of everyday objects. His manual Autoprogettazione offered easy-to-construct models of tables, chairs, beds, and other household furniture from ready-made cuts of lumber. A precursor to the open-source movement, the published drawings and instructions in the manual meant to empower people to become their own makers and perhaps in the process to modify his designs and become their own designers. This approach to design is both pedagogical and political. The objects people would make from his designs were intended to be more valuable because of their own participation, including the knowledge and skills that were to be gained. Meanwhile, this activity creates a vision of design decoupled from centralized control over production, the generation of false desires, and the exploitation of profit central to a consumer-capitalist system. Mari: “The first problem facing a designer is to define his own model of an ideal world, and not to create an aesthetic. … The designer cannot fail to have his own ideology of the world. If he has none, he is a fool who only gives shape to other people’s ideas.” from Design After Capitalism

Design as empowering

Perhaps, as designers, unreality is the only thing we have left—a tool for loosening the grip of the reality we find ourselves within, to help think beyond known frameworks, and to shift our thinking.

Design as outing the box

What sets Stitching Worlds apart—and also makes it art—is thus the intentions behind the project. Artistic and critical intentions that shape creative processes that “do something to us, set us in motion, alter our understanding and view of the world, also in a moral sense.”1 Intentions to which we hold on throughout the whole research process, by letting continuous self-reflection guide us.

It’s an art by intention, it guides a reflection throughout.

One of the main premises of the project is a refusal of the typical, uncritical understanding of research and invention as progressive, utilitarian, and therefore unbiased processes.

What gets less attention is that every invention is highly political already in the making process it introduces, in resonance with the Foucauldian sense of knowledge and power.

post-positivism x constructivism, transforamtive ![[Pasted image 20260301132934.png]]

The medium of textiles was deliberately chosen because of the extremely provocative medium it provides in challenging our assumptions, expectations, and desires about what constitutes technology.

[!NOTE] Rancière In Jacques Rancière’s terms, “the distribution of the sensible” (French: le partage du sensible) refers to the way a society organizes what can be seen, heard, said, thought, and done—and who is allowed to participate in that field. It is one of his central concepts, especially in The Politics of Aesthetics.

The research carried out in Stitching Worlds, in other words, should not be understood as solely instrumental in creating expressive art objects and installations. In addition to the instrumental dimension of the research, the research process is conceived as art practice. The project proposes the creation and presentation of knowledge in the marginal space of needlework as artistic strategy.

Design/Art as Research

About textile

But what is this thing? It is somehow just material, or just form, or just a textile formula that collapses form and material into a non-form and non-material something.

What could it mean, then, to take textile thinking elsewhere?5 That is, to take elsewhere ideas about a design object characterized by waiting to be a thing, building things, localizing form, defining itself.

[!NOTE] Localizing form Form is not an abstract whole imposed on matter, but something that emerges from situated material relations.

it is easy to find examples, such as a perspective on city planning where we focus only on the connections of streets, letting the city grow on its own or really any form of network where we focus only on the form of connection: how things connect and fit together rather than their places in an already planned, comprehensive thing. It is very easy here, and perhaps tempting, to think in political terms, but it is a way of thinking that is much more difficult than it might appear to be.

Precision is not about being able to say in detail, and with “ordinary” precision, what will happen when the textile is blowing in the wind, but to know what that is as a textile thing: experience, tacit knowledge, the mystical knowledge of practice. There is really nothing mystical here, no mystical tacit knowledge developed by unreflected practice. (p. 23)

So what does it mean to be precise about this textile thing from the perspective of textile (design) thinking? It is not to be able to describe a complex, dynamic system in mathematically precise terms. It is how to understand the simple thing, not the complex thing. The mathematically precise description of the textile blowing in the wind as a complex, dynamic system is certainly something that deepens our understanding, but it talks about something else. A complete acoustical analysis of a performance of, say, a cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach does not tell us very much about the music.

Indescribable

Precision = The exactness of the relationship between rule and material execution that makes complex expression possible.

That we change perspective in form thinking, from the global shape, the global structure to the local neighborhood, the local connections. That we change perspective in design thinking from the ready-to-use things to the waiting material.

its historical roots still show, and lawyers agree that written text and images are copyrighted while this is usually not the case for textiles. T he neglected role of textiles may be due to the dominance of the printing press over the weaving loom. The printing press has always been used to inexpensively replicate and disseminate information, a crucial role in an informationdriven society, but the role of textiles has been mostly reduced to one of functionality.

textiles do have the potential to encode all kinds of information including images, and when they do they become subject to copyright law.

While it is possible to register textile designs (such as patterns printed on textiles) and collections of jewelry, fashion is excluded from US copyright.6 Of course there are other ways in which textiles may be protected, such as patent law which provides a dedicated class for textile inventions but the time and cost for filing a patent are impractical for the average knitting pattern.

[!NOTE] Article 27 of the United Nations’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Authors should be credited.

Authors should be paid.

But cultural participation should not be blocked.

Companies are trying to limit and control the fundamental act of copying, which is, and always has been, the basis of biological and cultural evolution. Especially in the realm of craft and fashion, which is so deeply rooted in human cultural expression, keeping individuals from spreading or copying patterns or styles, should be considered equally frivolous as inhibition of free speech or freedom of religion.

Most copyright laws have special clauses to allow culture to flourish, such as exceptions for private use, science or education, but these exceptions are often eroded by lobby groups, or rendered invalid by technical means of protection (DRM). Even though copying is often looked down upon as a lowly derivative act, it is the basis of all creative and human culture and copyright should be considered a fundamental freedom rather than a law to protect commercial enterprises.

As mentioned before, the sequence of knitting stitches conveyed in a pattern sheet is not copyrightable in and of itself. So, if a group of freedom hackers decided to unleash knitting patterns from their copyright-infested pattern books by turning the instructions into pure code of knitting stitches and sharing them on the internet, copyright won’t stop them. Computer formats for hand and machine knitting are readily available (see KnitML14 and Knitting Assembly Language15 ).

Now, by combining the ideas of knitwork as data-storage and knitting instructions as code, we can create what is known as a quine in computer science.

A quine is a computer program that can print its very own code. 21 Correspondingly, a quine fabric is a piece that has the instructions of how to create it built right into it.

[!NOTE] Quine textile If the instructions are:

Embedded in the fabric

Structurally necessary

Impossible to remove Then:

You cannot copy the pattern without copying the instructions.

You cannot remove authorship without destroying the textile. It’s a thought experiment about copyright protection.

based on their properties, different traditional metallic threads can be used to create different electronic components, such as connectors, resistors, capacitors, coils, switches, and sensors.

![[Pasted image 20260331164517.png]]

Craftspeople, whose textile handcrafting skills are currently undervalued, provide a rich resource to explore as potential production landscapes for textiles with new functions.

despite how entirely dissimilar their manufactured goods seem, there are striking resemblances in the nature of the making processes, machines, and techniques. Addressing the challenge of the industrialization of textile electronics, the Industrial Cross-Pollination Map is a methodological proposal for identifying links between the two industries as potential points of intervention.

![[Pasted image 20260301151347.png]]

I can try wet felting, and weaving/knitting for the construction I have tried machine embroidery, some shortfalls:

a bit challenging for the machine, lots of hiccups
embroidered line is rigid, and hard to extend

Crafting realities:

be transparent, and more importantly,
critical exploration not on functions

“Crafting Realities” is a critical exploration, which probes an alternative profile, the textiles craftsperson as the producer of electronic technology. If, as Richard Sennett suggests, craftsmanship is “the desire to do a job well for its own sake,” what kind of electronic artifacts should we expect this basic human impulse to breed? (p. 72)

By involving actual skillful craftspeople, technology meets handcrafted finesse, delicacy, and self-expression. New tools and new criteria emerge.

[[PCBs_Easter Eggs

The function of non-function]]

woven random-access memory actually qualifies as a handcrafted digital artifact

I am interested in considering textile routines and materials as constructive for technological artifacts, and exploring what this might make us alive to.

The example of the gloves demonstrates the use of materials genuine to a textile crafting practice to build a functioning electronic circuit. Skilled hands and knitting needles form the materials into a three-dimensional object, following a pattern that defines the arrangement of the conductive and insulating material into the functional and visual artifact.

![[Rehmi Post and Margaret Orth, “Smart Fabric, or ‘Wearable Clothing’,” First International Symposium on Wearable Computers, Digest of Papers.pdf]]

The latter corresponds to the functionality of a relay, an electronic component first developed around 1835 6 and later used to build the first programmable, fully automatic digital computers. (Designed by Konrad Zuse, the “Z 3” was presented in 1941 and included over 2000 relays. It is assumed to be the first working, programmable, fully automatic digital computer. See Walter Conrad, ed., Geschichte der Technik in Schlaglichtern (Mannheim: Meyers Lexikonverlag, 1997))

One is efficiently packaged, engineered for the widest possible application, mass-produced, and sealed in a black box. The other is laboriously crafted by hand, has a single function and is hardly usable in any commercial application; it is a unique artifact whose pattern reveals its function. Still, both have essentially the same use; both are integrated circuits, ICs that can implement a logic XOR function. For other logic functions, the legs of the chip need to be connected differently; in the embroidery the pattern must change so the individual relays are reconnected to implement a different function. If the according changes are made, both are capable of implementing all logic gates. They become building blocks for any digital device.

Finding the correct material, though, required a lot of testing, as the electronic quality of a metal thread is not something of historic importance, and thus not part of the knowledge traditionally passed on with the craft.

Handcrafting digital and electronic objects demands foremost crafting skills, a fundamentally different prerequisite than other electronic making/assembly practices. It incorporates crafts and materials not previously connoted to the electronic or computational domain and manifests itself in how the artifact comes into being, and consequently in its visual appearance and possible use.

David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship

David Pye describes craftsmanship as using any kind of technique or apparatus, in which the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends on the judgement, dexterity and care which the maker exercises as he works. The quality of the result is continually at risk during the process of making.

Contrary to that, during mass production, the quality of the result is predetermined. This might require a large degree of judgement, dexterity, and care before the production process starts, but once started there is no possibility for variation.

The function as well as the form depend on the maker’s choices and skills that render a design into a physical artifact.

The resulting material or object, rather than component, is a unique handmade electronic or digital artifact.

When crafting electronic artifacts, these materials, patterns, and stitches not only define the visual and haptic appearance, but also the invisible as well as intangible electronic qualities.

If adequate tools are used, the electronic changes can be observed during the textile making, allowing a reflective integration of aesthetic as well as functional aspects in the practice.

Also, if not crafting an artifact oneself but looking at the final craft object, its scale provides a possibility to visually and tangibly retrace the electronic and digital construction.

Craft is expanded into dealing with the invisible aspect of a material, but craft has also been dealing with both visible and invisible nature of materials since the beginning. It’s a continued space.

considering not only the final function but also the making to be a relevant aspect of a human’s interaction with technology

The success of neoliberalism is wired into the digital realm, from the society of control to algorithmic governance, to labor and self-exploitation.

Media art lost its critical stance due to the ubiquity of digital technology and its penetration into everyday life, the institutionalization and commercialization of the media art scene

Media art lost its political stance, while Nake onec voiced: There Should be No Computer Art.”

In the 1970s, Nake criticized his generations of artists—and himself—for legitimizing the big machine through art.

Through seeing their work, one starts to imagine the digital—industry—differently, as an industry based on sophisticated female labor and knowledge without compromising its relationship with the social context and tradition.

his is not only about science, or more specifically, technology; it questions the premise of the “digital revolution.” When and how did we realize that we needed such a revolution? We know from world history that revolutions are not sustainable without a cost. Indeed, we are suffering from the consequences of the digital revolution, which brought about the rise of neoliberalism.

Knowledge about the material and the technique that structures it reveals the essential laws of physics underlying the electronic components. If adequate tools are used, the electronic changes can be observed during the textile making, allowing a reflective integration of aesthetic as well as functional aspects in the practice.

Practitioners are involved, with ethnographic research component, “a participatory art practice. “

n their practical work, Ebru and Irene collaborate with women; they learn from and develop together with them. They extend their practical knowledge and experiments by working with women from different cultures, from Europe and Turkey to China, South America, and beyond. They collect different traditions and techniques of textile handcrafts while developing new knowledge by combining their experiences with new technologies.

This collaboration brings high technology down to earth among the people, not as a commodity, but, on the contrary, as a tool and medium with which to work/develop things and ideas.

In that sense, it is also a good example of what artistic research is or can be; it requires high-level scientific and technological knowledge, engineering, and experimentation. However, when the artists decided to take their experiments to another level by producing electronic components through textiles, they needed the type of knowledge that the textile industry or, typically, women had to offer.

I am doing this research in the midst of Doug Ford pointing at basket weaving as an unwanted training/job, benefitting from the Material Art and Design education from 100 McCaul.

As an artistic choice, the artists started working with women, and this choice eventually brought new openings and new directions to their work; questioning/implying the value of craft, tradition, DIY, women’s labor, the type(s) of knowledge rendered insignificant, knowledge-power relations, non-commodity oriented research and development, and last but not least, digital technology itself. Of course, this is my speculation on the flow of things; it could also go in the other direction or—most probably—continuous mutual interaction of all parts; but all of this was (and is) only possible through artistic research. Not many artists work in this way and likely no scientist or technologist does, either.

Crafted Logic does not take digital technology as a given; it is much more radical than that. On the one hand, it recreates digital technologies; it poses fundamental ontological questions on the other.

While making it, I felt like walking through the history of computation that happened in the past 200 years, the time that I didn’t witness became vivid and tangible.

produce a political discourse

Crafted Logic is doing what media archaeology does in a different, reversed way; lead from today to an imaginary beginning. Artists do not take an obsolete technology and research it as—at least some—media archaeologists might do; instead, they create a highly elaborate but actually obsolete technology to do the same; to narrate their stories of the digital.

Crafted Logic is not one such digital artwork that utilizes given digital technology to criticize the digital condition; on the contrary, it suggests another technology in which a holistic critique (critical approach) is embedded in and through the interrelation of science and technology. To conclude, I would add, Ebru and Irene recreate anew “the big machine” with its myth inverted; they propose reading the whole story backward.

…

Embroidered computer

Through its mere existence, it evokes one of the many imaginable alternative histories of computing technology and stories of plausible alternatives to our present daily lives.

In its complete design, the computer includes a total of 369 switches, constituting an 8-bit computer with 1-bit ALU multiplexed to four registers with an 8-bit register width and two additional storage registers.

The products of textiles and electronics industries are diverse; but at a closer look, these seemingly separate worlds are linked to each other in many aspects. First of all, as both industries have largely migrated to the same low-cost countries since the 1980s, their manufacturing facilities are mostly located in close geographical proximity, albeit the conception and design phase is still left in the West.

it is also not uncommon for the same people, especially the low-skilled workers, to shift between jobs in the two industries and get acquainted with parts of both processes. And, finally, despite how entirely dissimilar their manufactured goods seem, there are striking resemblances in the nature of the making processes, machines, and techniques. Addressing the challenge of the industrialization of textile electronics, the Industrial Cross-Pollination Map is a methodological proposal for identifying links between the two industries as potential points of intervention.

T he Industrial Cross-Pollination Map was created through identifying the individual processes of electronics and textiles industries. These were then mapped and connections were drawn between the processes of two industries in terms of materials, machines, and techniques, which were in turn linked. These links provide inspiration for imagining possible new methods in industrial textile electronics. (p. 67)

Today’s consumer electronics industry is engrossed in mass-producing “black boxes,”—technological objects that conceal the messy electronics under glossy outer shells, designed to be made and used without any knowledge of the internal workings. This style is countered by some DIY and “maker” approaches that suggest “transparent boxes,” made by individuals that prioritize technologies that are self-made and open; however, they often content themselves with sole functionality. “Crafting Realities” is a critical exploration, which probes an alternative profile, the textiles craftsperson as the producer of electronic technology. (p.70)

I am interested in considering textile routines and materials as constructive for technological artifacts, and exploring what this might make us alive to.

Handcrafting digital and electronic objects demands foremost crafting skills, a fundamentally different prerequisite than other electronic making/assembly practices. (77)

Contrary to that, crafting electronic or digital functionality inherently results in custom form and functionality. The function as well as the form depend on the maker’s choices and skills that render a design into a physical artifact. As individually fabricated objects, these decisions do not have to consider standardized values or connections for easier integration with other elements of the artifact, as all of it is custom made to fit a specific goal. Customizing a design to fit precisely the actual needs does not manifest in additional manual work, but rather spares the crafter from producing parts of a function that will never be used. The resulting material or object, rather than component, is a unique handmade electronic or digital artifact.

When crafting electronic artifacts, these materials, patterns, and stitches not only define the visual and haptic appearance, but also the invisible as well as intangible electronic qualities. Which materials are used, if they are conductive, resistive, or insulating, and how they are arranged with each other, results in specific electronic functions. Usually invisible digital and electronic qualities become defining conditions to the pattern that forms the function in electronic textile crafts.

T he interplay of conductive, resistive, and insulating materials to form specific electronic functions becomes a tangible experience and way of understanding, paired with an active engagement into how we assume and desire making and experiencing digital and electronic technologies. It has the potential to offer insight into the underlying structures of technological artifacts, to question aesthetic and functional qualities that we’ve grown accustomed to, and to potentially enable new forms of interacting with technology, both in the making and the using.

[!NOTE] Title Instead of “designing outputs” Think: defining systems that produce outputs Instead of: “material vs code” Think: material = code written physically Instead of: “final form” Think: continuous becoming

In reading Quine Fabrics: Explanation of making a quine fabric

What’s happening in that sentence is a two-step encoding process, and the string
kp kp kp kk pk pk kp kp pp pk pk pk is the result of translating instructions into stitches.

Let’s go slowly and make it explicit.

1. Step one: You have a tiny “programming language”

The language has 4 symbols:

k = knit
p = purl
[ = start repeat
] = end repeat

Example program:

[[[k]][[p]]]

This is not the fabric yet—it’s the instruction.

2. Step two: Turn symbols into binary (2 bits each)

Why 2 bits?

Because:

2 bits can encode 4 things (00, 01, 10, 11)
You have exactly 4 commands

So you assign each symbol a binary code.

For example (this is the implied mapping):

Symbol	Binary	Knit version
`[`	00	kk
`]`	01	kp
`k`	10	pk
`p`	11	pp

👉 Each command becomes two stitches

3. Step three: Encode the program symbol by symbol

Your program is:

[ [ [ k ] ] [ [ p ] ] ]

Now replace each symbol with its stitch pair:

Symbol	→	Stitches
`[`	→	kk
`[`	→	kk
`[`	→	kk
`k`	→	pk
`]`	→	kp
`]`	→	kp
`[`	→	kk
`[`	→	kk
`p`	→	pp
`]`	→	kp
`]`	→	kp
`]`	→	kp

4. But the text gives a different sequence—why?

The given sequence is:

kp kp kp kk pk pk kp kp pp pk pk pk

So clearly, the author is using a different encoding scheme.

Let’s reverse-engineer it.

5. Reverse-engineering the mapping

We know:

There are 12 symbols → 12 pairs
The first three symbols are [[[
→ first three pairs must represent [

In the given sequence:

kp kp kp …

So:

👉 [ = kp

The 4th symbol is k

Sequence:

… kp kp kp kk …

So:

👉 k = kk

Next two symbols are ]]

Sequence:

… kk pk pk …

So:

👉 ] = pk

[[ again:

… pk pk kp kp …

So confirms:
👉 [ = kp

p:

… kp kp pp …

So:

👉 p = pp

6. Final mapping used in the text

Symbol	Stitch pair
`[`	kp
`]`	pk
`k`	kk
`p`	pp

7. Now the full encoding makes sense

Take:

[[[k]][[p]]]

Convert symbol by symbol:

[ → kp
[ → kp
[ → kp
k → kk
] → pk
] → pk
[ → kp
[ → kp
p → pp
] → pk
] → pk
] → pk

Result:

kp kp kp kk pk pk kp kp pp pk pk pk

✔ That matches exactly.

8. Why this matters conceptually

This step is crucial for quine textiles:

You now have:

Instructions → encoded as stitches → inside the fabric

So the textile can literally contain its own program

9. The deeper idea (important for your research)

This is doing something very specific:

Turning syntax (language)
→ into material structure (textile)

So:

Knitting is no longer just executing instructions
It is also storing instructions

10. One-sentence explanation

That sequence exists because:

Each symbol in the knitting “program” (k, p, [, ]) is encoded as a unique pair of knit/purl stitches, and the full string is just the program [[[k]][[p]]] translated symbol-by-symbol into those stitch pairs.

It collapses a distinction:

Normally	With quine fabric
Object ≠ Instructions	Object = Instructions
You can copy objects freely (in many cases)	Copying becomes legally risky
Craft knowledge is shareable	Knowledge becomes locked

1. What a quine requires

A quine must do:

Output exactly its own source code

So we want:

program → output = same program

2. The key rules (only these matter)

Rule 1 — Normal repeat

[x] → xx

So:

[kp] → kpkp

Rule 2 — Unclosed `[`

Produces nothing

Rule 3 — Extra `]` (the crucial one)

If there is an extra closing bracket:

Output:
original code + interpreted result

Formatted as:

(original code) ][ (interpreted result)

3. Apply rules to `[kp]]`

Break it down:

[kp]]

[kp] → valid
last ] → extra ❗

Step 1 — Interpret `[kp]`

[kp] → kpkp

Step 2 — Extra `]` triggers quine operator

So instead of just kpkp, we get:

(original code) ][ (interpreted result)

Substitute:

original code = [kp]]
interpreted result = kpkp

Result:

[kp]][kpkp

4. Now we test if it’s a quine

We must check:

If we run the output again, do we get the same thing?

So now treat:

[kp]][kpkp

as a new program

5. Evaluate this new program

Split it into two parts:

[kp]] [kpkp

Part A: `[kp]]`

We already know this:

[kp]] → [kp]][kpkp

Part B: `[kpkp`

starts with [
never closes

👉 Rule: produces nothing

6. Combine results

From Part A:

[kp]][kpkp

From Part B:

(nothing)

Final output:

[kp]][kpkp

7. Compare with input

Input:

[kp]][kpkp

Output:

[kp]][kpkp

✔ They are identical

8. That’s why it’s a quine

Because:

program → runs → produces itself

9. Why this works (intuitive insight)

This system cleverly splits the job:

The first part:

[kp]]

→ generates the whole program

The second part:

[kpkp

→ is silenced (due to unclosed bracket)

👉 So:

One part produces everything
The other part prevents duplication

10. The hidden trick

The extra ] does something very unusual:

Instead of just closing something, it says:

“Print me AND what I would normally produce”

That’s exactly what a quine needs:

access to its own code
access to its output

11. One-sentence explanation

This process produces a quine because the extra closing bracket forces the program to output both its own source code and its evaluated result, while an unclosed bracket suppresses any extra output—so the system stabilizes into a loop where the program reproduces itself exactly.

┌──────────────────────┐
│  PART A: Generator   │
│  → prints full code  │
└─────────┬────────────┘
          │
          ▼
┌──────────────────────┐
│  PART B: Silencer    │
│  → prevents extra    │
│    output            │
└──────────────────────┘

When encoded into stitches:

One region of fabric = instruction generator
Another region = suppressed execution

So the textile becomes:

A stable, self-reproducing informational structure embedded in material

But with this conversion, I don’t get to create the pattern I originally wanted to create, I only get the instruction design, isn’t that a problem?

Yes—this is exactly the right objection, and it gets to the core tension of the whole idea.

Short answer:

Yes, it is a problem—unless you deliberately design around it.
And that “problem” is actually what the whole quine-textile concept is exploring.

1. What you’re noticing (correctly)

When you do this:

Take a pattern
Turn it into instructions ([[[k]][[p]]])
Then encode those instructions into stitches

👉 You end up knitting:

the instructions themselves, not the original visual pattern

So instead of:

kkkkppppkkkkpppp (a rib pattern)

You get:

kp kp kp kk pk pk …

👉 Which looks completely different

2. So yes—naively, the pattern is “lost”

At first glance:

Form (aesthetic pattern) ❌ lost
Instruction (code) ✅ preserved

This seems like a failure if your goal is:

“I want to make a specific textile design”

3. But here’s the key: there are actually two layers

A quine textile is not trying to be just a pattern.

It’s trying to be:

Layer	Role
Instruction layer	stores the code
Execution layer	produces the pattern

4. The trick: separate “reading” from “seeing”

Think of it like a QR code:

Visually → random blocks
When scanned → meaningful data

👉 Same idea here:

Visually → weird kp/kk/pp structure
When interpreted → instructions → pattern

5. How to recover the original pattern

You don’t get the pattern directly—you get:

fabric → decode → instructions → execute → pattern

So the textile is:

a compressed, executable representation of the pattern

6. So is it a problem?

It depends on your goal.

If your goal is traditional craft:

“I want a beautiful rib stitch”

Then yes:
❌ This is inefficient and distorts the design

If your goal is computational textile:

“I want fabric that contains its own logic”

Then:
✅ This is the point

7. The deeper design challenge (this is the real insight)

The text hints at this later:

“if the stitches coding the instructions are the ones that hold it all together…”

This suggests a more advanced idea:

✨ Merge the two layers

Design a textile where:

The instruction encoding
ALSO produces the desired visual/structural pattern

That would mean:

Instead of:

encoding destroys aesthetics ❌

You get:

encoding = structure = aesthetics ✅

8. Analogy (very precise)

Think of:

Early computers

Machine code → unreadable, ugly

Modern design

Code → also produces visuals (e.g., shaders, generative art)

👉 Same transition is possible here

9. Why the text calls copyfuck a “toy”

Because:

It does NOT solve this problem

It keeps:

instruction layer separate
pattern layer separate

So you can easily:

remove the instruction
rewrite it
“break” the copyright

10. The real ambition (important for your research)

The final paragraph hints at a more radical idea:

Make instructions structurally necessary

Meaning:

If you change the instruction stitches
→ the textile falls apart

So:

Property	Result
Instruction = structure	inseparable
Structure = pattern	aesthetic preserved
Pattern = code	fully unified

11. Your insight, sharpened

What you’re really identifying is:

There is a conflict between representation and appearance

And the research challenge is:

Can a textile be both legible as code and meaningful as pattern at the same time?

12. One-sentence answer

Yes—it’s a problem if you expect the encoded textile to directly look like the original pattern, because the process prioritizes storing instructions over visual outcome; but the deeper goal is to eventually design textiles where instruction, structure, and pattern are unified rather than competing.

“cybercraft”

This connects to:

Craft + hacking + computation
Open experimentation

![[StitchingWorlds_Book_Kurbak_Ed__1_May2019_PDF-A.pdf]]

![[art.9.1-2.23.1_Lewis1.pdf]]

Visual aesthetics emerge from material and structural decisions made regarding colour, pattern, sheen, visual weight and visual texture, while tactile aesthet- ics emerge primarily from surface texture, weight and fibre properties

Thus, textiles may be considered assemblages of materials and forces combined with structural logic that demonstrates a particular expres- sion inseparable from its constituting elements where the material and imma- terial spaces of the textile conjoin (Lee 2020).

Expressions of texture, surface and visual aesthetics (e.g. colour and pattern- ing) are determined by yarn properties such as fibre type, yarn thickness, yarn number and twist. Yet for smart textile designers, the design variables increase. While the focus on structure, material and expression are maintained, further variables are introduced: time-based, state-changing and recursive and recur- rent behaviours (Worbin 2010; Kettley 2016; Heinzel and Hinestroza 2020). These behaviours expand the textile design space to include computational and electronic states that are incongruent with the natural passage of time, and that change under certain conditions as a result of external triggers.

Twills produce dense textiles as the yarns are able to sit closer together in the structure, and where conductive yarns are used, this is beneficial as it can allow for an increase in electromagnetic field strength. In this sample, the woven textile is a 1/3 weft-faced twill (6 cm × 10cm) designed with a striped pattern which alternates between areas of dielectric cotton with conductive copper yarn.

he textile is woven with a dielectric cotton warp and conductive copper yarn weft (10 cm × 25cm) (Figure 11). Using the textile surface scanning method, ten sequential sensor readings were made and a visualization of the electromagnetic field across the surface of the textile is presented in Figure 12. The textile was scanned horizontally over the course of fifteen seconds. The visualization reveals strong variations in the electromagnetic field, where density changes in the conductive yarns are expressed as changing electro- magnetic field strength across the surface of the textile. The electromagnetic field extends approximately 5–6 mm from the textile surface.

reflecting on the passage of conductive yarns within the textile structure and how they corresponded to peaks and valleys in the graphical plots. To do this requires knowledge of both woven textile structures and a basic understanding of non- frequency electromagnetics, and the ability to consider what is occurring at the scale of the electron with what is occurring across the textile surface.

Wherever conductors laid densely together either through adjacent weft passes or through layering and floats, the magnetic field strength increases, and where dielectric yarns separated the conductive yarns either through adjacent weft passes or through layering and floats, the magnetic field strength would conversely decrease. These density changes in the textile structure, regardless of its surface texture or visual appearance, would be

he suggestion of an electromagnetic texture offers a new notion for the design of textural qualities that expands the textile convention of visual and tactile sense. Much like the conventional quality of texture in woven textiles, electromagnetic texture is dependent on the structural and material selec- tions of the textile, yet it is both designed and expressed in different ways. Electromagnetic texture is an overall surface expression of the electromag- netic field across a textile (Figure 16).

lesser degree of electromagnetic texture may present as very small differences in the field expression, i.e. the electromagnetic field across the surface of the textile is more flat rather than expressing pronounced peaks and valleys, whereas a higher degree of electromagnetic texture across the surface expresses as peaks and valleys. Therefore, to increase the electromagnetic texture of a woven smart textile, a textile designer might look to incorporating strong contrasts between conductive and dielectric yarns (Figure 16A), for example in stripes, waffles, herringbone and other patterns distinguished by changing yarns.

It also seeks out new means for producing artistic expressions of electromagnetics through textile design methods, and argues that electromagnetism is a non-visual design material to be worked with in this context.

These designers have recognized that engaging with electronic and computational materials within textiles opens to new qualities and properties of the textiles that effect or are effected by the textile’s basic structural elements. Working towards identi- fying, characterizing and naming these qualities and properties has been addressed by the smart textiles design community to some extent, though rarely towards electromagnetic phenomena (cf. Beuchley 2008; Worbin 2010; Korooshnia 2017; Bredies 2017; Greinke 2017; Townsend and Mikkonen 2017; Friske et al. 2019; Scholz and Greinke 2021).

Basic knowledge of electromagnetics that present in this work can be incorporated into the textile thinking that woven textile designers engage in when ideating, sampling and designing woven textiles such as these. Using these notions and terminologies, woven textile designers can anticipate certain electromagnetic expressions that result from decisions made using tangible textile materials. Furthermore, these new notions and terminologies can be seen as interdisciplinary communication tools where electromagnetic and electronic engineers (for example) who may pair with smart textile designers on a collaborative work may share this hybrid understanding and new notions of the tangible and intangible qualities of a conductive textile.

Example3 An example of visualization my name is audrey brello i’m a textile designer and researcher based in france i’m also one of the co-founder of data

0:25 palette which is a collective and accurate space dedicated to research on textile technologies and soft

0:32 materials my name is afroditipsaram and i’m a

0:44 multidisciplinary artist and an assistant professor of digital arts and experimental media at the university of washington in seattle

0:53 i’m originally from athens greece but the last four years i have been residing in the united states

1:06 my work is dedicated to the positive impact of emerging technologies on the preservation of textiles craftsmanship

1:16 i’m focusing on non-verbal communication transmitted by textiles which represent for me an entire culture

1:24 and even a substitute of writing to do so i rely on anthropological researches up to the paleolithic