From Loom to Code: Rethinking Interfaces Through Cyberfeminist Practices

Abstract

This article explores the historical continuities between weaving technologies, early computational systems, and contemporary interface design, uncovering the often-overlooked roles of gender, labour, and materiality in digital culture. Challenging the conventional perception of interfaces as neutral and purely functional, it argues that they encode power structures, inheriting legacies from textile production to algorithmic governance. Drawing from feminist cybernetics and media theory — including the works of Sadie Plant, Luce Irigaray, and T’ai Smith — the paper reconceptualizes interfaces as dynamic sites of resistance, performativity, and alternative knowledge-making. These are spaces where interaction is not only understood but embodied through experiments, bodily techniques, and artistic practice. By weaving together insights from media theory, cybernetics, interface design, and textile history, this study examines how interface patterns operate structurally, cognitively, and performatively. Engaging with the works of Anni Albers, Doris Langley Moore, and Philip and Emily Morrison, it interrogates the parallels between weaving, computation, and interface epistemologies. Using case studies of cyberfeminist artists such as Kristina Pashkova — who works with digital Jacquard weaving, glitch aesthetics, and algorithmic textiles — the article extends Ada Lovelace’s vision into the present, questioning who controls computational systems and how textile labour translates into digital infrastructures. By positioning the weave as both a material metaphor and an analytical framework, this research unravels the deep connections between textiles, computation, and the politics of interface design.