In Spindle the archetypal weaver — a spider — converses with an artificial intelligence. They speak about the history and future of technology, about the importance of mystery versus information, about the lost traces of textile history — and with it of women’s work. 

The link between two seemingly disparate domains, digital technology and weaving, is found in the punched card, an invention that made industrial weaving in the 1800s more efficient and complex. The punched card later formed the inspiration for the first programmable computer — designed partly by the mathematician Ada Lovelace, being the first female computer programmer. So weaving can be considered the earliest binary technology. As a thread goes either up or down, it carries zero’s and one’s just as the digital language.

As in earlier work Oona Libens uses several kinds of projection techniques, shadows and light effects to create an ephemeral yet tactile, audiovisual experience with sound design by Vica Pacheco and Jürgen De Blonde.

75 min
in English

Oona Libens (°1987) is Belgian-Swedish artist whose work revolves around media-archeology
and the history of the (moving) image. Light and shadow is her medium whether it is used in
performative work or in two- or three-dimensional objects. She first studied music in Sweden before graduating from the School of Arts (KASK) in Ghent in 2012. Since then, she has made a series of poetic-scientific performances about the universe, the sea, time and the body.

https://oonalibens.com