Jane Burns, Movement (Arrest 3), 2024, Jacquard hand weave, 155 x 135 x 6 cm, Flax, recycled lurex, cotton (woven on the Thread Controller 2, designed and produced by Digital Weaving Norway).
The rise of “vibe coding” thanks to AI tools has prompted a counter-trend of manual programming, while hand-weaving is now embracing digital tools.
In 2008, Richard Sennett published the first of his homo faber series about the relationship between making things and social relationships. The Craftsman make a considerable impact by broadening the value of craft beyond adornment. This meant re-examining the concept of “maker” beyond material production to the relatively new field of software programming. He focused particularly on Linux, an open source platform whose community of developers shared information about issues that needed improvement.
In the Linux network, when people squash one ‘‘bug,’’ they frequently see new possibilities open up for the use of the code. The code is constantly evolving, not a finished and fixed object. There is in Linux a nearly instant relation between problem-solving and problem-finding. Still, the experimental rhythm of problem solving and problem finding makes the ancient potter and the modern programmer members of the same tribe.
In this case, writing software involved an immersion in the process, much like throwing a clay pot. Sennett’s sociological reading of craft has encouraged a broader interest in what happens beyond the studio, particularly in industrial craft, as reflected in the work of Ezra Shales and Jesse Adams Stein.
But the concept of programming craft was not followed up on. We didn’t see the creation of a Software Coding Guild. It is only now, with the rise of AI, that the concept of artisanal programming comes to light.
As with text, image and video generation, AI has offered radical new possibilities for software programmers. Rather than writing the code themselves, it is possible to “prompt” the creation of software. Say, “Create an app that will analyse cat whisker movement to determine its emotion. ” This practice of coding through prompts was christened by Andrej Karpathy as ‘vibe coding’, which involves a focus on feeling rather than mechanics. The aim is to “blink software into reality”. This is the antithesis of craft, which involves going beyond one’s subjective being to engage in dialogue with the material.
We are now witnessing a fascinating backlash to “vibe coding” from programmers who feel this leads to poor-quality programs. David Heinemeier Hansson compares learning code to mastering a musical instrument:
“If you’re learning how to play the guitar, you can watch as many YouTube videos as you want. You’re not gonna learn the guitar. You have to put your fingers on the strings, actually, to learn the motions. And I think there is a parallel here to programming, where programming has to be learned in part by the actual typing.”
As AI-generated material is often referred to as “slop”, vibe coding is seen to produce “spaghetti code” that is very difficult to untangle when you need to correct for bugs.
At the Knowledge House for Craft, we hosted a conversation about this between an Indian software developer and a Melbourne-based weaver/coder. Vikas Gorur spoke about coding craft and the need to keep learning by turning off AI: “It is purely enjoyment for me.”
Daisy Watt reflected on the human cost of increasing abstraction in computer programs, such as the Australian Robodebt, which utilised algorithms to serve debt notices with often inaccurate and tragic results. She brings her experience as a weaver to her current role developing software for organ donations:
[I was ] a weaver who played these strings and fabric and pattern for a living for the majority of my life. Now I was sitting in this chair, maintaining critical systems. [This] labour gave me deep respect for coding in the same way that weaving does with cloth.
Daisy’s perspective is a sign of the growing importance of weaving in our understanding of what’s happening with AI.
I saw a glimpse of this 20 years ago when putting together an exhibition called Offline for the Jam Factory, which presented handmade as a space of immediacy defined in contrast to the growing interconnectivity of the World Wide Web. I came across a US artist who also worked as a programmer with Microsoft, Gwendolyn Zierdt. She translated the section of the Unabomber Manifesto about the decline of hand skills into binary code that she then wove. This hinted at an essential path for weaving as a defiance of the machine, harkening back to the Luddites.
Vibeke Vestby with the first TC1, from Digital Weaving Norway
But there is also, today, an integration of weaving and software. In the 1990s, a Norwegian weaver, Vibeke Vestby, developed the Thread Controller loom that enabled software control of a jacquard loom. While the weaver still manually moved the shuttle across the weft, individual threads would be automatically raised according to the software. This was heralded as “every weaver’s dream”. Since then, TC2 has been released as a module, more akin to a desktop printer than a traditional wooden loom.
Digital weaving is not new. Louise Lemieux Bérubé at the Montreal Centre for Contemporary Textiles developed an industrial-scale Jacquard loom that could scan photos and mechanically render them into a woven form. It was used by master weavers such as Liz Williamson. However, unlike the TC2, the actual weaving is done by machine rather than by hand.
Many weavers are embracing this technology. Norway recently hosted a conference, Digital Weaving – Innovation Through Pixels, featuring the work now being produced by many weavers.
Like “vibe coding”, the TC2 seems to facilitate greater creativity by weavers. It can be seen as yet another stage in the evolution of weaving technology, dating back to the warp-weighted loom of the Neolithic era. It bypasses the tedious labour of setting up the loom.
This raises many questions about the process. Garland articles by Sara Lindsay have celebrated a very extended process of preparing the loom oneself. Might we see a bifurcation between manual and digital weaving? What difference does it make whether the shuttle is controlled by hand rather than a machine?
We live in a time when the value of craft is suddenly energised, just as it was with the introduction of Edward Cartwright’s mechanical loom in the Industrial Revolution.
