Diane Cescutti's artistic pratice traces the history of coding to become entangled with that of weaving. In the other direction, following the interwoven fibers of her loom, she eventually reaches its ethereal form, the algorithm.

Her practice combines weaving, dyeing, sculpture, installations, interactive installations, video games, video and 3D imaging in a transmedia approach that rethinks, redefines and questions our relationship with these technologies.
Her practice is rooted in the tradition of situated knowledge, examining in particular how objects function as tools for transferring information, storing data and transmitting tradition and spirituality.

Since her discovery of ethnomathematician Ron Eglash's work on vernacular algorithms and environmental scientist Donella Meadows' thinking on system dynamics, she has been fascinated by the idea of seeing the combination of looms, textiles, machines and humans as complex andextended computer systems.

Diane Cescutti's work brings to light the hands, the humans, the craftsmen and women, the weavers who built the digital and reflects on the ideas of encoding, algorithm, computation and technologies before electricity, before binary code, before the punched card of the jacquard loom.

Her works invite viewers to delve into the tangled history of textile craftsmanship and computers, to engage with the structure of the systems they encounter, whether they aremade of threads, machines or humans, to see the beauty in this simple principle:
 

If you imagine two sets of opposing threads crossing at a right angle to form a flat cloth.

Let's call the vertical threads: warp.

And let's call the horizontal threads: weft.

Now imagine, when a thread of the warp goes above a thread of the weft, you call that a "0" and when a threads of the weft goes above a thread of the warp, you call that a "1".

Here you have the most basic principle of both weaving and computation and from that simple binary, an infinity of algorithms and fabrics.