My work and research is situated within the unfolding relationship between ancient weaving technology (the loom) and modern computers. I approach this intersection as a traditionally trained weaver, but also as a digital native. Sharing the same language of binary code, I see this relationship as both fraught and fruitful. Using the digital TC2 (Thread Controller 2) Jacquard loom, I manipulate, hack, confound, and fracture design software to explore and test the boundaries of how cloth is typically conceived. I push design software to the point of rupture or failure, capturing the physicality of these behaviors as the warp and weft of hand-woven textiles.
The resulting weavings often display frenzied patterns: distorted, agitated, or corrupted. I revel in the conflicts that arise between the digital and the physical, between traditional forms and emerging technologies, and I am always sensitive to the presence of the ghosts in the machines I use. Additionally, I work to create new software, drawing tools, and self-generating, parametric systems that employ “computational creativity” to make weaving patterns independently from a human designer. My visual language relinquishes much formal determination to the algorithmic operations I choose. I collaborate with this computational creativity to weave cloth that is neither entirely human nor completely machine in origin. What emerges is often an alien visual language, a vernacular of line, color, and shape that surfaces from the interior, computer world of algorithms. Ultimately, I am interested in the soft world of machines and their programming, obscured by the rigidity of technocracy and the structures of capital; a queer and cyborg theory emerges from the intimacy of dissecting the machine or electing programs as collaborators. I question the subject/object relationship generally established between maker and tool, and I contemplate the possibility that tools form the maker as much as they are wielded, teaching their users what is possible within their disciplines, and physically influencing the products and outcomes of the studio.
Speaking in the vernacular of geometric abstraction, color, composition, line, and the formal concerns of painting are at the forefront of my process. And yet, I diverge from individualistic decision making: first by employing the strict parameters of the loom, and secondly by the algorithmic properties of the software I engage. The loom is an engine of abstraction, condensing the physical, material world into the grid and its intellectual and cultural order. And yet this order can also be tested, ruptured, or un-made, a process of loosening or reversal not available to the material of paint, which undergoes irreversible chemical transformation. Thread can always be unwoven, and I emphasize this looseness, erratic and irregular as it may be, to resist the fixity and stasis associated with the picture plane of Modernity. Thread, which is the vehicle of color in my practice, betrays the illusionistic quality of the painted  image. From a distance, threads appear as fields of color, but on close inspection the objecthood of the phenomenon of color becomes self-evident. Each discrete thread remains an identifiable and unique physical instance despite its place in the matrix of the cloth.

-Jovencio de la Paz, 2019 - 2024