Orígens

Origens was created for the third edition of the Mostra d’Art Generatiu de Barcelona (MAGBa3), a group show held in summer 2026 at Palo Alto, a former textile factory in Barcelona’s Poble Nou district. The exhibition took origins as its theme: each invited artist was asked to develop a new work in conversation with a piece from the journal Computer Graphics and Art, a publication that documented the emerging field of computer-assisted art in the 1970s. The chosen reference for Origens is Tapestry I (1976) by Ken Knowlton and Lillian Schwartz, an early example of algorithmic image-making produced at Bell Laboratories — a key center for the development of computer-generated imagery at the time.

Origens engages with Tapestry I (1976) by Ken Knowlton and Lillian Schwartz, an emblematic work of algorithmic art. It exists in two incarnations: a real-time generative animation and a physical edition woven on a Jacquard loom, in collaboration with Jacquard Lab, a manufacturer in Chieri, near Turin, in an area of long-established textile industry, parallel to that of Catalonia.

The physical work is a single frame extracted from the animation, one choice among the algorithm’s infinite manifestations: following Knowlton’s thought, the artist is not an executor but a curator of systems. Bursting into the continuous flow, the author crystallizes that algorithmic instant and delivers it to the loom. As in the computational art of the 1970s, the physical object remains the proof that the algorithm has encountered matter.

The image is entrusted to that type of loom specifically because the Jacquard, in the early nineteenth century, is the mechanical progenitor of automatic computation: the algorithm returns to act upon the machine of its own origins.

A single thread runs through time across Turin, the artist’s city of origin, Barcelona, and Palo Alto itself - once a wool-spinning mill, now hosting the exhibition: algorithmic writing, made textile, recovers its own origins.