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N/A-A

Pressed craft cardboard and threads, 99x1800cm

2024

"N/A-A" (2023) is an installation in which the punch cards of Jacquard looms are reproduced. The empty and filled spaces on the cards correspond to zeros and ones, as well as presence and absence on a grid (matrix) system.  The patterns created by the Cellular Automaton algorithm, which reproduces itself according to neighbourhood relations in matrix systems, become a form of reproduction capable of weaving itself.
As a historical tool in human hands, control is applied in centralised and vertical forms. In cybernetic systems, however, self-control no longer needs to be subordinated to anything. For there is no self, machine or other system to control: Instead, both the human being and the machine become elements of a cybernetic system, a system of control and of communication. Zeros and ones are used as a means of recording memory and producing difference in both weaving and computer technology. Dualities and multiplicities are created simultaneously in both systems. This is the common ground between self-organising systems and autonomous machines. This is what led Ada Lovlace, considered the first programmer, to realise that the punched cards used in Jacquard looms were a means of recording memory and data: The possibility of acting without central control, an agency that does not require any kind of subject position.

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