The Craftswoman’s Eye

An important theme in Kristina Pashkova’s work is the connection between weaving and the history of computing. It can be traced in her textiles, which are expanded through visual poetry, video, and sound.

The installation The Eye of the Mistress (the title refers to Italian philosopher Matteo Pasquinelli’s book The Eye of the Master about the sociology of AI) consists of jacquard pieces, video projections, a soundscape, and visual poetry. Pashkova wove the jacquard pieces on a TC2 semi‑automatic digital jacquard loom, which combines elements of digital and hand weaving.

The labor‑intensive process of threading the loom and developing a digital sketch rhymes with the history of cybernetics as told by Sadie Plant in her text The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics . Punched cards‑a tool that allows the transfer of information and determined the way binary code works in digital technology‑were used to create ornaments in looms, and Plant's subject, Ada Lovelace, was the first programmer to use them in a computing machine project. Pashkova expands the habitual patriarchal narrative around the history of technology through the inclusion of the perspective of the “mistress,” thus supporting a feminist critique of media and technology which does not separate digital environments from manual labor and corporeality. Together they create complex economies of attention and violence.

For example, in her work Enemy target , she links algorithms of digital violence (protocols of automated identity recognition and surveillance, systems of polarization of society, and so on) with the practice of weaving. In one jacquard piece she reproduces a video‑game code describing the work of a turret that identifies an enemy target on the battlefield.

In her video Pashkova combines the cyclical nature of machine code and weaving and the laboriousness and ambiguity of this practice, with her visual poetry, which is also based on repetition.