The woof and warp of the Web

La Bête de la mer
Tapisseries de l’Apocalypse 1

I use the metaphor of weaving and specifically the tapestry form as a representation of both the world of ideas and the process through which ideas are expressed, preserved and performed. The “woof and warp” of a tapestry represents to me a perfect structural relationship, intimately related to the way humans picture life since prehistoric times. And by life I mean not only the quotidian but the mental, the mythological, the magical and the unknown. Moreover, from a technical point of view, tapestry and its substrate, weaving, has demonstrated, as a paradigm, its direct lineage with the ‘whole’ , which is both future and past at the same time.

Weave patterns

As so called “social systems”2 evolve in the ambit of the internet, users (more than a billion of them as of 2007) participate in providing the system (including governments, marketing firms, power groups etc.) all the information that constitutes the knowledge base accumulated throughout the evolution of the species as well as atomized patterns of behavior broken down to the minute (e.g. Twitter), of millions of individuals who choose to share their most banal or trivial moments, snippets of behavior that, when aggregated will conform, in terms of data, all the information necessary to model and synthesize a machinic consciousness.

Although this state of affairs seems far removed from the Tapisseries de l’Apocalypse with which I started this post, I only see a stylistic difference in the treatment of subject matter, and of course an evolution of the technology that preceded the emergence of the web as we currently know it.

But as the name clearly states, a web it is, of relationships, the waft and woof of which take simply another dimension to connect and establish the patterns that tell the stories that hold us accountable for who we are and for what we are doing to ourselves and the world at large.

The morphology is similar, but the material utilized to weave the pattern resembles more and more the stuff of dreams, the eternally changing and moving stream that we call consciousness. This time in the form of an exo-consciousness that will reflect the other, the one that we fear since time immemorial, the one we tell stories about in the dark of night as we get ready to face our dreams or our worst nightmares.2

1- “And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads, with ten diadems upon its horns and a blasphemous name upon its heads. And the beast that I saw was like a leopard, its feet were like a bear’s, and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth. And to it the dragon gave his power and his throne and great authority.” (Revelations 13:1-2). Note that the symbol the dragon gives the beast bears the fleur-de-lis, an explicit reference to the passing of French power to the English (source). I added a “digital” artifact to signify a modern transfer of power.


2- Researchers plunder social networks (link)


3- In his seminal essay “The Uncanny” Freud describes this fear of the unknown ‘…everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.’

The above text is adapted from my paper "Roboethics and Performance" © arturo sinclair 2008