Needlework and computer coding might seem to be incongruous pursuits, but for the Dutch artist Anna Lucia Goense, the combination has provided infinite creative possibilities.
“If you look at cross-stitching or working with a loom or even knitting patterns, they are always binary systems on grids,” said Ms. Goense, 33, who is known professionally as Anna Lucia. Her focus is generative art, a process that involves designing systems, manipulating parameters and fine-tuning algorithms to create artworks that can range from browser-based animations to textiles such as quilts and embroidered fabrics.
The idea of stitch or no stitch is a perfect real-world metaphor for the binary 1 and 0 logic of computing, she said. After all, Ada Lovelace, the mathematician known as the first computer programmer, made a similar connection in 1837 when her collaborator Charles Babbage unveiled his plans for the Analytical Engine, a calculating machine seen as a first prototype of the computer. She wrote that the machine “weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.” (Developed in the early 19th century, the loom was equipped with punch cards that indicated through the presence or absence of holes which threads to use to create a desired pattern.)
“Coding and textiles intersect in many ways,” Ms. Goense said. “They are both daily materials; we engage with computer code and textiles in our life all the time, and yet one is completely intangible and often perceived as masculine, and the other is something entirely material and traditionally associated with femininity.”
Ms. Goense’s path to the art world was not straightforward. After a brief stint studying fashion design, she trained as a civil engineer, gaining a master’s in water management at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. She worked as an engineer, including for four years in Cairo, but felt she lacked a creative outlet.
Then in 2018, she stumbled on an open-source code software called Processing. “I didn’t know what generative art was, and it was only when I started sharing stuff on Instagram that I found this community of people creating in this way,” she said, adding that she was immediately hooked. “It really chimed with the mathematical, analytical side of me.”
Initially, Ms. Goense used code to create digital artwork, but in 2022, she began to introduce themes of weaving and textiles. “Loom,” a generative art project she created that year, “translates the logic system of a hand-weaving loom into computer code,” she said.
The following year, she began using textiles and embroidery and was invited to collaborate with the celebrated community of African American women quilt artists in Gee’s Bend, Ala. The project came about after Robert Hill, who worked with the organization representing the quilters, chanced upon Ms. Goense’s “Loom” project online and connected them.
Working with four quilters, Ms. Goense devised an algorithm based on their traditional patterns and created 500 NFTs (nonfungible tokens) on the digital arts platform ARSNL.art. Anyone who buys an NFT can have its pattern made into a quilt by one of the women.
“Immediately, I could see the relationship between their practice and my work,” Ms. Goense said. “They often work from the same complex pattern, but over generations, they give their own spin, and there is also an element of randomness because they work with the fabric available to them — nothing is precisely predetermined, and that is where the beauty lies.”
At times, the art world establishment has exhibited a measure of suspicion about both digital and textile-based art. The former has been perceived as lacking creativity; the latter, dismissed as craft.
But digital and generative technologies “can be essential tools for now,” Elissa Auther, the chief curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, wrote in an email, especially for an artist “trying to blur distinctions between past and present, analog and digital or handmade and machine-made.”
And Leyla Fakhr, the artistic director at Verse, a marketplace for digital artworks, said “attitudes are changing slowly and the art world is becoming less linear and prescriptive.”
Ms. Fakhr, who spent eight years specializing in modern and contemporary acquisitions at the Tate in London, now works on digital projects at Verse with everyone from meme artists to established names such as Laurie Simmons. “I made the leap into digital because as a curator, I wanted to understand where other types of creativity are being formed,” Ms. Fakhr said. “Tech is inherent to the times we’re in, and tech is an extension of us — it would be crazy to think it’s not part of the art world.”
She noted that Ms. Goense’s code-based artworks reminded her of pieces by the celebrated German visual artist and printmaker Anni Albers. “I also think Anna Lucia’s work perhaps shows that we are a lot more similar to machine than we like to admit,” she added.
Ms. Goense — who named Vera Molnár, a Hungarian artist who worked in Paris, and Charlotte Johannesson of Sweden as two artists who have inspired her — said the final hurdle in the acceptance of artwork such as hers would be shifting attention away from the process and more toward the final product so that programming language could be seen as just another artistic tool.
“My work is made with code, but I want that to be the least interesting thing about it,” she said. “It’s like, if you look at the painting, the first question isn’t about the paint brushes they used. I don’t think we’re there yet.”
Ms. Goense’s recent projects, including “Oefenstof,” an exhibition in mid-April at Galerie Met in Berlin, used 19th- and 20th-century needlework sampler patterns as their starting points. Last year, the exhibition’s 52 works were unveiled as NFTs and then, using a programmable machine, were turned into embroidered samplers for display.
Also included was “Thread” (2025), a digital artwork displaying the same patterns as the samplers but as blocky, pixelated animations that changed each time the browser refreshed. “I wanted to show how medium can also dictate the aesthetic,” she said.
Ms. Goense described her process as a finely calibrated dialogue between creator, algorithm and machine and was careful to distinguish her generative art from that produced by artificial intelligence. “The systems that I work with are not a black box. I know what every line of code does in my system, and ultimately, it’s what moves me that gets translated to the physical world,” she said.
As for the future, she said she planned to continue combining traditional craft techniques and coding. Her latest purchase was a domestic knitting machine from the 1990s that she bought on eBay: “It takes floppy disks and I’m still trying to figure it out, but I’m super-excited about the possibilities.”
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