Chepertom, LoVid, Nam June Paik, Rune Brink, and Travess Smalley trace computing's binary logic back to Joseph Marie Jacquard's 1804 punch-card loom, treating the digital pixel grid and the woven textile grid as two versions of the same structure.
The exhibition opens with a line from media theorist Rosa Menkman:
"The glitch is a momentum: that moment that makes you pivot and reflect. It grabs you, but you don’t know what is going on... It’s when an object slides from a normal operation into something different—a powerful confusion that forces the user to reevaluate their understanding of media, its materials, and conventions."
Curator Valentina Buzzi builds the show around a historical fact: Joseph Marie Jacquard's automated loom, built in 1804, used binary punch cards, grids of holes and blanks, to direct threads into woven patterns, decades before anything resembling a modern computer existed. Ghost in the Thread argues that the digital pixel grid and the woven textile grid share the same underlying structure, asking how an ephemeral digital signal gets captured and given physical or phygital form.
LoVid, the duo of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus, works between video, sound, and hand-sewn textile and DIY electronics, treating analog and digital tools as equally tactile materials.
Nam June Paik, who first worked with television circuitry in the 1960s, anchors the exhibition's historical end with his 1994 work DO NOT WATCH TV.
Rune Brink works with LED installations under a practice he calls Spøgelsesmaskinen, the ghost machine, shown previously at bitforms gallery Berlin and Galerie Data during the Istanbul Biennial.
Travess Smalley builds generative computational systems that have taken the form of plotter drawings, modded Minecraft assets, and handwoven rugs under the title Pixel Rugs. Chepertom, the working name of Thomas Collet, translates digital pixel drawings, glitches, and generative compositions into custom Jacquard rugs on a TC2 loom, where compressed files replace pixel weavings as source images. His recent project What Wrong Means is built around a custom AI studio of specialised roles and shared memory, treating his own artistic process as a cybernetic system shaped by increasingly autonomous tools.
