Weaving Codes/Coding Weaves: Penelopean Mêtis and the Weaver-Coder’s Kairos

Abstract

Drawing on her experience as “critical interlocutor” within the research project Weaving Codes/Coding Weaves, in this article Emma Cocker reflects on the human qualities of attention, cognitive agility and tactical intelligence activated within live coding and ancient weaving with reference to the Ancient Greek concepts of technē, kairos and mêtis. The article explores how the specificity of “thinking-in-action” cultivated within improvisatory live coding relates to the embodied “thought-in-motion” activated whilst working on the loom. Echoing the wider concerns of Weaving Codes/Coding Weaves, an attempt is made to redefine the relation between weave and code by dislodging the dominant utilitarian histories that connect computer and the loom, instead placing emphasis on the potentially resistant and subversive forms of live thinking-and-knowing cultivated within live coding and ancient weaving. Cocker addresses the Penelopean poetics of both practices, proposing how the combination of kairotic timing and timeliness with the mêtic act of “doing-undoing-redoing” therein offers a subversive alternative to—even critique of—certain utilitarian technological developments (within both coding and weaving) which in privileging efficiency and optimization can delimit creative possibilities, reducing the potential of human intervention and invention in the seizing of opportunity, accident, chance and contingency.