Difference, Along a Line

Acrylic Yarn and Laminated Card, 2023

For Royal College of Art. Tutor: Lynn Phylis Seeger

A single thread of yarn rebounding upon itself to form a totalised surface. In evading a stitch, a difference is encoded. 

Digital Difference consists of a mechanically knitted textile. The knitting machines if fed information by punchcard. Perforations on this card denote data to direct a single thread, pulled back and forth over the machine, to create a surface. The knit archives the perforation through tucked (missed) stitches along the interweaved surface. 

The machine is fed data by human and given motion by human. These functions were historically gendered; The computer was once female. Computer was a job title, the individual who “computed” data. Before the computer as machine or as labourer existed, its antecedents were found in textile mills. Gendered divisions of library preceded and produced an industrial logic based in binaries; Male:Female, zero:one. The man inputted the data, the woman inputted the movement. 

The knit takes a binary, of present card and absent holes, and synthesises this through its singular yarn. Data has been computed into it, I as the computer and as the labourer. This binary data is read into the knit, but stresses the discretion of binary rhetoric. The output is queered by its source material - myriad fibres coalescing about themselves as one thread, entwined to create a surface of knits, in which 2 states of data can manifest, not as 0 or 1, but as a difference in stitch, a deviation in the fibre’s contortion. The delineation that binary aspires to is enforced through tense contortions, but the subjected substrate does not comply. 

Beyond the process, its output appears unintelligible or imperfect. The making and therefore the maker are obscured.