Beyond the objectives of explicating the digital nature of weaving, and the role of the loom in the history of digital technology, a key movement of the PENELOPE project has been towards the understanding of coding as practiced manipulation of material whose outcome is at once the (weaving) pattern and the code itself. That is, rather than an abstract existence, code is always an expression of the material that is being coded. Moving codes across media of weaving, music, poetry makes its material embeddedness visible, pointing to the material affordance of different media, and their amenability to being coded.
Further, the focus on the practices of coding allowed to establish a conversation with complex livelihood practices of contemporary weavers in the global south. Given the nature of binary decision making on the loom, the comparative program allowed us to explore how choices that seem to be limited to binary outcomes are in fact complex decision trees, both materially and aesthetically, and constantly evolving in response to creative urges of the coder/weaver. Through explicating the common digital ancestry of both the loom and computer coding, a key outcome is to encourage and shape public engagement in Europe and India (as compared weaving culture) regarding the nature of knowledge of weavers, through representing weaving knowledge as a technical mode of existence.
The PENELOPE project established the new concepts of homo textor, (wo)man as weaver, and histomorphism, capturing the specific composition mode of patterns at the loom. Furthermore, a conference format, the Panathenaic encounters, was developed where scholars and practitioners mutually verify their practices and knowledge.
