Through recent experimental weavings, I have learned that weaving is the most effective strategy to truly understand an object’s material properties. Is it strong or weak? Does it stretch or snap? Is it flexible or rigid? Does it bend before breaking? I see this work as a playful, curious reengagement with the physical world, after so much isolation and screen-mediated interactions throughout COVID. It is ironic, then, that I have also begun to ask AI to imagine this work for me.
What began as an experiment in sketching has evolved into a critique of the limitations of AI, and the impossibility of its machine understanding of human experience. After completing each experimental weaving, I describe the event and its results to Midjourney AI, who – in a matter of moments and with no visual input from me – produces an invented image. The multi-sensory, hours-long, knowledge-building experience of weaving is reduced to a bizarre, flattened representation lacking all of the nuance and depth of the original.
Jeana Eve Klein 