Tangling the Digital: Weaving, Printmaking, Computing

About

Digital objects are often seen as alien to craft, as though no hands had shaped them. They can be copied endlessly and exactly, bereft of the maker’s touch. Yet weaving and printmaking are among our oldest technologies of reproduction, fixing patterns so they can be repeated and circulated. The printing press and the Jacquard loom initiated processes of automation that displaced human hands—and that still animate our digital tools.

Warp and weft describe not just a textile structure but a logic of making, where two distinct threads cross, hold, and pull against each other. This exhibition inhabits that intersection, where historic technologies of encoding meet their digital descendants. Printmaking and weaving become contact zones between traditional craft techniques and computational processes, recording and recoding gestures across media: photographs compressed and reassembled as strips, atomized prints woven into textile, and thrown clay fused with digitally printed forms.

Where does resistance live in a material, and how do we encounter it? How do different materials choreograph their maker’s creative gestures through this resistance? As creative workflows migrate into digital space, something of that friction transforms. Tangling the Digital asks what becomes possible when that resistance is embraced rather than engineered away. A working loom lives in the gallery, bearing witness to the evolution of craft as weavings unfurl over the course of the exhibition.

Together, the works invite visitors to locate the human body—as maker, as observer—in what they see.

On View: September 29–December 4, 2026 Coulter Art Gallery, 355 Roth Way Gallery Hours: Monday–Friday, 1–5pm Opening Reception: Thursday, Oct. 1, 4–6pm Curated by Vanessa Chang

FACULTY ARTISTS: Camille Utterback Hideo Mabuchi

STUDENT ARTISTS: Navya Agarwal Calla Bai Kelsey Chen Rosemary Jiang Jiayi Luo Skylar Sledd Sarah Teaw

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Tangling the Digital is made possible by generous support from the MacArthur Foundation, Funding Good Chaos, the Department of Art and Art History, the Stanford Arts Institute, the Product Realization Lab, CESTA, and the Silicon Valley Archives.

This exhibition grows out of Weaving & Printmaking: Tangling the Digital, a Spring 2026 course taught by Camille Utterback and Hideo Mabuchi. Special thanks to Stanford Arts Institute Visiting Artist Jaya Griscom, Studio and Sculpture Lab Manager Richard Haley, Experimental Media Arts Lab Manager Defne Beyce, and Course TA Bailey Scieszka for their invaluable contributions to this project.