Early on in my career as a weaver, I began noticing striking similarities between the designs incorporated into traditional and ethnographic textiles, on the one hand, and contemporary technological design, on the other. Ancient, primitive and traditional cultures have often used the complexity afforded by strong design not merely for aesthetic purposes, but also to record complex information pertaining to such important matters as hunting lore, epic battles, genealogy, the spirit world and sacred rite.

The complicated patterns of microchips have a parallel purpose - to facilitate the recording and manipulation of information through complex, digital pathways; but the designs themselves are often remarkably similar to traditional, ethnographic design.

An Instinctual Basis for Design

Is there an instinctual design capability hard-wired into the human brain to explain these similarities? And does man enlist this fundamental "design instinct" for purposes not only aesthetic; but also for the expression, organization, manipulation, storage, and communication of ideas and concepts?

There are some tantalizing theories to support the view that a wide range of knowledge structures are innate to human cognition. In his book, The Language Instinct (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1994), MIT Professor Steven Pinker argues:

Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains. . . I prefer the admittedly quaint term "instinct." It conveys the idea that people learn how to talk in more or less the same way that spiders know how to spin webs.

In the realm of mathematics, Ron Eglash, Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, has found that in textiles, art, architecture - and even hairstyles - the peoples of Africa have followed the complex rules of fractal mathematics:

In some cases Eglash found that fractal designs were based on pure aesthetics - they simply looked good to the people who used them. In many cases, however, Eglash found that step-by-step mathematical procedures were producing these designs, many of them surprisingly sophisticated. ("Intriguing math patterns surface in African designs", The Beacon Journal, February 17, 2000, p. A2)

Has man also harnessed the facility to envision complex design - derived from innate mental templates - to develop designs used in information processing? Carver Mead, the Caltech Professor who invented new types of transistors used in the most advanced computers, has recognized the role of beauty in the design of integrated circuits. Of one design project, he said:

It took half a day to get this circuit right. . . Of course, I could have made it work by brute force. But then it would have been ugly - and that tells you there is a better way to do it. ("The man who crafts cathedrals of sand - Carver Mead's intuitive approach has revolutionized the world of computers". Time, October 21, 1991, p. 80-83).

Returning to Pinker, perhaps the ability to design computer chips and circuitry is not merely a "cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works." Perhaps it also, in significant measure, entails the development of an instinctual design capability as basic as the way "spiders know how to spin webs," which helps explain the reason that good circuit design is also inherently beautiful. And perhaps these are the same instinctual abilities traditional and ethnographic weavers and textile designers have applied in making their textiles.

Image Transformations - An Evolutionary Process

My weaving serves another function. It highlights not only how some forms of information are represented or facilitated through design; but also underscores the increasingly diverse ways in which information - both ideas and images - are transmitted and transformed.

One of my weavings, for example, began as a paper plot created years ago in a computer lab in San Jose, CA; was transformed into a rubylith, photographed, and transferred onto a silicon wafer to become a microchip (EPROM); then photographed, color-separated, and printed for a catalog for an art exhibit in New York City; then transferred to a weaver's graph, and woven in Ohio; then photographed, printed again in a new format, and scanned into the Internet; may now be downloaded anywhere in the world, manipulated, printed again; to be further transformed in recursive cycles.

Duchamp forecast this increased capacity to recycle images and information nearly a century ago with L.H.O.O.Q. The advent of copiers, color copiers, photoshop and the Internet have sped the process geometrically. (See, e.g: Hillary L.H.O.O.Q.).

All information is now subject to these transformations, cycling recursively at ever faster rates of transmission. Information no longer exists as discrete, single facts or single books or single paintings. A single idea or image may now move, transform and take on new meanings with increasing speed. And importantly, it is just those ideas that spread and transform with the greatest speed and facility, and that stick best at the places where they land, that establish the physical and intellectual parameters of our evolving culture - and govern our world.

My weaving is not just about craft or tradition. It is part of that ongoing transformative process.

W. Logan Fry
April 12, 2000 (revised: May 18, 2003)