Letter Cloth

[tl;dr turned twill is colored by letters, switches blocks on whitespace]

I can't resist the provocation of string. Feel it wrapped around a cone. Tow it between your fingers. Flexible infinity. This is where I usually start in my weaving, though the material has required extraordinary effort to get to even this point. Plants and animals have grown the fibers at molecular speed, for their own ingenious protection, and humans have harvested and spun and transported and dyed it into something continuous and far more literal.

I'm curious how the word "string" is repurposed to describe written text in electronic computing. This is not unlike other metaphors linking fiber and language, e.g., "spinning a yarn," an English idiom for telling a story. Strings are a fundamental type in many programming languages, but are they ever instead called, simply, "text"? When I truly noticed this terminology for the first time, in plain sight, without taking it for granted, it struck me as unexpectedly poetic.

I can't resist the provocation of structure either, for that matter. HTML tags envelop plain strings, transforming them into a tree, each part of which has its own style and role in the organism. This is how a long line becomes differentiated, bends, stretches laterally. On the loom, a nest of deflections holds plain strings in place between one another. Their calculated waviness creates sites for friction to do its work. The string becomes a surface.

This is about something else though— a convenient abstraction. Weavers of history have developed sundry forms of notation to plan and document their work, of which this page references but one. In this, the grid-based drawdown, a textile is reduced to a digital cross-product of its warp and weft. Its sensuous bends and slippages are flattened in favor of a binary neatly contained in orthogonal cells.

This page takes the "string" type literally. Here, you can enter two phrases to use as raw materials for a drawdown. Each character has its own warp end (column) or weft pick (row). Spaces and linebreaks are not shown, but dictate when the structure switches direction. The weave structure, a turned twill, is one that I chose for simplicity and for the blocks that are visible from farther away. At each point in the grid, the thread that is on top is denoted by its character. Try long and short phrases and zooming in and out.

Translating words into cloth is often a lossy operation. In this (abstracted and dematerialized) case, the textual content is not strictly lost. Read the diagonals! However, these redundant, combinatorial, gently rolling surfaces reject the linear order of reading. Instead, my eyes amble around, looking for patterns that are almost there, but not. Familiarity swells up and subsides back into the surf.

https://www.are.na/rosemary/letter-cloth