Binary Threads: Textiles, Translation, and Code
A research exploration of computational thinking through the lens of historical textile technologies and colonial linguistic practices. I'm developing this work through the DesignInquiry Design Research Fellowship, with support from the Texas State IDEA Center.
Syncretism Library — a library I built for this design research; it is the tool I use to organize and navigate materials for Binary Threads.
Research — publications, demos, and sites from Binary Threads.
This project investigates the intersection of textile craft and computational thinking through the lens of colonial language transitions. By examining how Indigenous languages like Nahuatl and Maya encoded complex worldviews, and how those were transformed through Spanish colonization and eventually into contemporary programming languages, we explore the politics of translation and encoding.
The work synthesizes theory-based research into linguistic micropoetics and material culture with hands-on practice—translating semantic concepts into digital patterns (bitmaps, ASCII) via Python/Processing, then manually reinterpreting these patterns through traditional textile techniques: weaving, knitting, and crochet.
This methodology forces a tactile inquiry into the relationship between signs and material surface, honoring Indigenous epistemologies that understand writing not as abstract symbol but as material practice—whether carved in stone, painted on bark, or woven into cloth.
How do pre-Hispanic weaving techniques and colonial linguistic transitions inform contemporary understanding of code as a material and cultural practice?
This question examines the parallels between textile patterns as encoded information and programming languages as colonial inheritances, investigating how Indigenous material practices offer alternative epistemologies for understanding computational thinking.
Can the manual reinterpretation of digitally-translated linguistic concepts through traditional textile methods reveal new insights about translation, materiality, and technological determinism?
By moving from text → code → bitmap → textile, this practice-based approach creates a feedback loop that questions the assumed transparency of digital translation and foregrounds the embodied knowledge required to materialize abstract patterns.
Analytical Engine
1Babbage's Analytical Engine (trial model), 1834-1871
2Punch Cards in the Style of Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine (1837) represents one of the first mechanical computers1, conceptualized to perform any calculation through punched cards2—a technology borrowed from textile manufacturing. Ada Lovelace recognized its potential beyond mere calculation, envisioning it as a medium for composing music and creating art.
The connection between weaving and computing is not metaphorical but historical: the logic of programmable patterns originates in the loom. This project reclaims that lineage, examining how gendered labor (textile work) and colonial language hierarchies have shaped our contemporary relationship with technology.
Analytical Engine conceived
Punched cards from Jacquard loom
Ada Lovelace's algorithmic poetry
Jacquard Loom
1Jacquard loom punched cards
2Jacquard loom mechanism
Joseph Marie Jacquard's programmable loom (1804) revolutionized textile production by using punched cards1 to control complex weaving patterns. Each card represented a single row of the design, with holes determining which warp threads would be raised—effectively creating a binary system encoded in physical material.
This technology emerged from centuries of textile knowledge, predominantly held by women and colonized peoples. The Jacquard loom2 represents a pivot point where embodied craft knowledge was abstracted into mechanical process—a pattern that would repeat in the digital age, often erasing the labor and epistemologies that made such abstractions possible.
Programmable loom, 1804
Craft knowledge to mechanical process
Stored-program logic prefigures modern computing
Pattern as Program
The Jacquard loom established the fundamental logic of modern computing: stored programs, sequential execution, and binary encoding. Understanding code as textile pattern rather than mathematical abstraction offers a more embodied, materially-grounded epistemology.
Linguistic Resilience
1Mayan phonograms and glyphs
Mayan Phonograms
Maya writing distinguished between media: tz'ihb (painting) versus carving, recognizing that material substrate shapes meaning—a principle erased in digital abstraction.
2Colonial Nahuatl text manuscript
3Colonial poetry in Nahuatl script
Colonial Nahuatl Poetry
Texts like the Tlatelolco Aesop's Fables or Huei tlamahuiçoltica show how Nahuatl adapted to Latin script while preserving semantic complexity—hybrid documents of resistance and survival.
Mayan Phonograms
Maya writing distinguished between media: tz'ihb (painting) versus carving, recognizing that material substrate shapes meaning—a principle erased in digital abstraction.
Colonial Nahuatl Poetry
Texts like the Tlatelolco Aesop's Fables or Huei tlamahuiçoltica show how Nahuatl adapted to Latin script while preserving semantic complexity—hybrid documents of resistance and survival.
Indigenous Mesoamerican languages like Nahuatl and Maya survived Spanish colonization through adaptation and resistance1. These languages encode worldviews fundamentally different from European linguistic structures—concepts like "hypertrophic words" in Nahuatl 2 that compress entire narratives into single morphological units, or Maya distinctions between writing systems based on material substrate (painted vs. carved).
Examining these linguistic transitions—and their preservation in colonial-era texts—reveals how translation is never neutral. Each layer of encoding (Nahuatl → Spanish → English → code) 3 carries colonial power relations, yet also preserves traces of resistant epistemologies.
Language survival through adaptation and resistance
Hypertrophic words compress complex narratives
Nahuatl → Spanish → English → code
Hypertrophic Words
Nahuatl "micropoetics" creates compound words that function as compressed narratives. A single word can encode subject, action, object, location, and temporal relationships—a form of information density that challenges Western assumptions about language as linear sequence.
Data & Methods
Synthesized Approach: Practice-Based + Theory-Based
Data Collection (Theory)
Linguistic Data (Nahuatl/Spanish)
Review texts on micropoetics/hypertrophic words (Nahuatl) and cultural translation/syncretism in colonial Spanish texts, including Aesop's Fables (Tlatelolco), Popol Vuh (K'iche), and Huei tlamahuiçoltica (Mexico).
Material/Technical Data (Maya)
Research pre-Hispanic techniques (backstrap weaving) as analogues for code, examining how Maya terms like tz'ihb and u-xul differentiate writing by material medium (painted vs. carved).
Experimentation (Practice)
Digital Translation
Linguistic concepts translated into sequential patterns (bitmap/ASCII) via Python/Processing, creating a dictionary of stitch patterns derived from semantic structures.
Manual Reinterpretation
Coded patterns realized via weaving and knitting, forcing tactile inquiry into the relationship between signs and material surface, informed by Maya emphasis on materiality.
Documentation
Process documented through visual archives, field notes, and synopses to ensure traceability and critical reflection.
Translation Pipeline
Each stage introduces a new layer of translation — and a new site of loss.
Linguistic Text
Source manuscript
Python/Processing
Code output
Bitmap Pattern
Generated grid
Stitch Dictionary
Mapping chart
Physical Textile
Finished piece
Significance & Limitations
Significance of the Work
Provides a critical mapping of gender, technology, and colonial power structures, revealing how textile labor and linguistic hierarchies have been systematically devalued in the history of computing.
Contributes new perspectives to media art outside hegemonic scientific paradigms, centering Indigenous epistemologies and embodied knowledge practices.
Integrates Indigenous forms of knowing into contemporary design practice, enhancing visual literacy and offering alternative models for human-computer interaction grounded in material thinking.
Limitations
Subjectivity in translating complex semantic concepts (like hypertrophic words) into simple binary inputs (code). The translation process itself embodies the colonial violence it seeks to examine—a methodological tension that cannot be fully resolved.
Scope is limited to selected linguistic terms and textile methods, requiring further expansion. The project represents a starting point rather than exhaustive documentation, with many cultural contexts and weaving traditions yet to be explored.
Critical Reflection
This project acknowledges its position within colonial knowledge systems even as it attempts to critique them. The act of translating Indigenous knowledge into academic discourse and digital media risks replicating the extractive logics it examines. The methodology prioritizes process documentation and collaborative knowledge production as partial strategies of accountability, while recognizing that no research can fully escape its complicity with institutional power.
Works Cited
De Berduccy, S., & Montero, V. (2021). Spinning the Conductors of an Indigenous Tradition: Textile Computing and the Algorithmic Loom. Leonardo, 54(4), 412–417.
Kolesnikova, D. A. (2025). From Loom to Code: Rethinking Interfaces Through Cyberfeminist Practices. Design Studies, 89, 101234.
Leeming, B. (2014). 'Micropoetics': The Poetry of Hypertrophic Words in Early Colonial Nahuatl. Hispanic Review, 82(3), 281–301.
Matsumoto, M. E. (2022). Qualia of Proximity and Materiality in Classic Maya Hieroglyphs. The Art Bulletin, 104(2), 6–28.
Vis, D. (2021). Research For People Who (Think They) Would Rather Create. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers.