Vernissage Kodade trådar
Free admission
Welcome to the opening of Coded Threads!
“The first computer was a loom. Weavers were the first programmers, and textile fabric of the digital”. Amalie Smith
The exhibition “Coded Threads” follows threads from the origin of the digital, the woven fabric, into today’s and tomorrow’s digital reality. The loom is the basis of binary coding: the thread can go over or under the warp, be a one or a zero. The thread is coded and acquires meaning, becomes an image, a pattern, a calculation, an algorithm. Everything can become data through the thread in the warp. The exhibition brings together three artists who work with coded threads in their art in completely different ways. All artists allow the artistic process to expand by using self-created or collective systems.
In the exhibition, Amalie Smith shows a suggestive installation with digitally dreamed images. Filipa César follows the intercontinental slave trade and the historical routes of the textile industry. In its wake, she finds woven threads that are coded with resistance. The art group Metahaven investigates the conditions for today’s digital deep learning, quantum mechanical pathways, and cybernetic technology in their jacquard-woven tapestries. They have created a new artwork for the exhibition that builds on sketches from the museum’s collections.
Rather than describing a linear history of technology, the exhibition wants to see how coded threads weave contexts that are social processes. It is only when technology operates in everyday interpersonal life that it gains meaning. Threads that live together in stories. The exhibition also presents several historical works of art from the museum’s collections. They form an exhibition within the exhibition, an inner processing room that functions as a memory center with possible connections that branch out into the contemporary parts of the exhibition.
In 2025, Metahaven has implemented an artist residency at Skissernas Museum thanks to generous support from the LMK Foundation.
