Weaving a history of our current connectedness: Amalie Smith’s hybrid text Thread Ripper (2020) as a techno-philosophical treatise

Abstract

This presentation is meant to demonstrate how central aspects of our current networked digitalization are represented through intermedial literary fiction. 

The organizing theme in artist and writer Amalie Smith’s hybrid literary text Thread Ripper (Danish original 2020, English translation 2022) is weaving. In Thread Ripper text and images weave intricate patterns of autobiography, reflections on artistic practice and techno-historical events. Weaving is understood both as producing textiles, but it also refers to the notion of the written text, and Smith also sees the World Wide Web as a “universal loom”.

Smith connects Clytemnestra’s weaving in Homer’s Odyssey to Ada Lovelace’s 19th century ideas of an analytical machine or engine (aka a computer) and to our contemporary understandings and experiences of a World Wide Web. Lovelace: “the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

Smith’s intermedial experiments becomes a techno-philosophical work of art that reveals that human thinking and creation are aspects of a universal wide web that existed way before our contemporary computers and digital networks.