Alex McLean

I’m off to the RMA study day on “Embodied Research Methods in Music & Sound” in Liverpool on Tues 18th May.

I stopped using ‘social media’ for a while now for the usual reasons — it’s an inhumane way of interacting with people, is fully controlled by billionaires who seem hellbent on destroying democracy and life in general, is terrible for mental health, in ce…

Lately I’ve been exploring 8-shaft weaving trying some things inspired by Laura Devendorf, focussing on ‘crackle weave’ using the AdaCAD software, embracing failure on the loom, eventually managing to thread a pretty cosmic crackle weave pattern I’d desig…

After my previous warping catastrophe, I started again with some fresh yarn (I’m not sure if I’ll be able to recover any of the previous mess), this time in two halves of 90 warps each, which made it easier to handle.

I’ve made the below crackle weave design in AdaCAD, but have run out of ‘warp’ threads on my loom, and want to put a new single-colour warp on anyway.

Last year I noticed the freezers in my local co-op store sounded quite nice.

I’ve been having fun trying to understand crackle weave more, after weaving one of Ralph Griswold’s algorithmically generated patterns.

I’ve used some samples of different speech synth voices saying “algorave generation, we love repetition” for a while.

Continuing the weaving theme I was happy to see that Laura Devendorf has not only included the ‘bitfield’ feature I contributed into the excellent new 5.x release of AdaCAD, but written some great documentation for it, as well as used it as source material

After a bit of time off from weaving after the PENELOPE project, it was great to visit Kristina Andersen, Pei-Ying Lin, Femke Vorselen and co in Wearable Senses lab in Eindhoven last year and explore hacking the TC/2 loom.