Text—iles

Text-iles is an on-going research exploring the deep, often overlooked connections between weaving, writing, and computing. It reveals the shared structures and stories between ancestral crafts and the digital— giving space to the essential role of working with threads in how we build, record, and understand the world. Weaving predates both written languages and the invention of computers. The words “text” and “textile” share an etymological root, but long before alphabets, textiles held stories. They carried meaning, symbols, and encoded knowledge—without a single written word. Long before the first computers, weaving already contained the logic of binary code. To weave is a music constructed by sequence of binary choices: up or down, 0 or 1. Threads cross or pass, forming patterns—visual languages built from a binary system, much like the digital systems we rely on today. In this way, weaving quietly foreshadowed the logic of computation, reminding us that technology is not always a rupture from the past, but sometimes, a continuation.