Coded threads

Filipa César (PT), Metahaven (NL), Amalie Smith (DK)

The Museum of Sketches
December 4, 2025–May 3, 2026

“The first computer was a loom. The weavers were the first programmers. Textiles are the basic fabric of the digital.”
Amalie Smith

The exhibition “Coded Threads” follows threads from the origin of the digital, the web, into today’s and tomorrow’s digital realities. The textile web is the basis of binary coding: the thread can go over or under the warp, be a one or a zero. The thread is coded and takes on meaning, becomes an image, becomes a pattern, becomes a calculation, becomes an algorithm. Everything can become data through the thread in the warp. The exhibition brings together three artists who work with coded threads in their art in completely different ways. All artists allow the artistic process to expand by using self-created or collective systems.

Amalie Smith The exhibition shows a suggestive installation with digitally dreamed images. Philippa Caesar follows the historical routes of the intercontinental slave trade and the textile industry. In its wake she finds woven threads that are coded with resistance. The Art Group Metahavens Jacquard-woven textile artworks, created with modern computerized looms, can be read as fictional maps or thought systems. For the exhibition, they have created a new artwork with two parallel weaves and moving images. The artwork builds on sketches in the museum's collection.

Rather than describing a linear history of technology, the exhibition wants to see how coded threads weave contexts that are social processes. It is only when technology operates in everyday interpersonal life that it gains meaning. Threads that live together in stories. The exhibition also presents several historical works of art from the museum's collections. They form an exhibition within the exhibition, an inner processing room that functions as a memory center with possible connections that branch out into the contemporary parts of the exhibition.

In 2025, Metahaven has implemented an artist residency at Skissernas Museum thanks to generous support from the LMK Foundation.