Plain
(row + col) mod 2
Over one, under one, reversing every pick. The tightest possible interlacement, the checkerboard, the truth table of cloth. It is the AND gate of weaving: strong, flat, and dense.
Loomstate · a textile-computing studio · Ghent
Cloth is the
oldest code.
Before the punch card ran a census, it ran a loom. Warp over weft, weft over warp: two threads, two states, one and zero. This whole page is woven from that idea, in real time, from code, without a single image byte.
01000011 01001100 01001111 01010100 01001000 · scroll to string the warp
The lineage
One and zero, over and under.
At every crossing a weaver makes one decision: does the warp lift, or does the weft pass over it. Raised or lowered. There is no third answer. A drawdown, the grid a weaver plans on, is therefore a page of ones and zeros drawn a century before anyone called them bits.
In 1804 Joseph Marie Jacquard fed his loom a chain of punched cards. A hole meant lift, no hole meant stay. The cloth obeyed the card. Herman Hollerith borrowed the card to count a census, IBM borrowed it to sell machines, and the stored program borrowed the idea from all of them. The thread you are reading runs loom, card, tape, memory, screen.
over = 1 · under = 0 · a letter = eight decisions
A plain-weave drawdown. Blue squares raise the warp and read one; pale squares let the weft cross and read zero. Nothing here is a photograph. It is a matrix, drawn.
The signature
The punch card is the program.
Every square is one bit: raised lifts the warp, lowered lets the weft cross. Flip cells, choose a structure, or weave a word, and the cloth redraws in real time.
Twill 2/2
Draft · 8 × 8
Structure
Each letter becomes eight bits, one card row: how a Jacquard loom reads a name.
Structure is information
Three floats, three logics.
A weave structure is a rule that decides every crossing at once. Change the rule and the cloth changes its hand, its strength, its sheen. Each of these is a short equation you can hold. Each thumbnail below is that equation, run and drawn to canvas.
Twill
((col − row) mod 4) < 2
The warp floats over two, under two, and the float shifts one thread each pick. The shift is a diagonal you can feel with a fingertip. Denim is a twill. So is the ramp function, drawn in thread.
Satin
((col − row · 3) mod 8) = 0
One warp float per pick, scattered by a move number that never lets two floats touch. The surface goes smooth and bright because the interlacements hide underneath. It is the art of the deliberate gap.
The studio
A loom needs no pictures.
- Studio
- Loomstate, Ghent
- Founder
- Adaeze Okonkwo
- Practice
- Woven structures as programs
- Image bytes shipped
- 0
I am Adaeze Okonkwo. I trained as a mathematician and spent nine years with my hands inside Jacquard looms in Lancashire, oiling the card chains that told the machine what to think. I never stopped seeing the cloth as a program, because that is exactly what it is.
Loomstate designs woven structures the way you would design a small, honest piece of software: choose the logic, prove it on point paper, then let the threads execute it. We work in real dye, real fibre, and the plain arithmetic that connects a bedsheet to a memory chip.
This site is the argument, not a brochure for it. A photograph of weaving would hide the computation and show only the surface. So there are no photographs. Every mark you see, the cloth, the punch card, the wordmark, the diagrams, is drawn from code the instant you ask for it. The asceticism is the point: the pattern is the picture.
"Show me your draft and I will tell you what the cloth will think."
Bring the studio a word.
A name, a date, a line of a poem, a small dataset. We turn it into a binary draft and weave it into real cloth: a scarf, a bolt, a wall panel that carries your data in its structure. Tell us what should be woven, and into what.