The Industrialisation of Patterns
Workshop
- Public event without registration
- Datum: 22.05.2026
- Uhrzeit: 09:30 - 19:00
- Vortragende(r): Workshop
- Ort: Villino Stroganoff, Via Gregoriana 22, 00187 Rome
- Kontakt: katja.hackstein@biblhertz.it
With the advent of deep learning, over the last fifteen years, images have been massively collected, and organised into datasets, to train artificial intelligence algorithms. Decomposed through chains of mathematical filters, they are treated as visual patterns, to optimise analytical and generative models.
Echoing the visual economy at the heart of the digital industry, this workshop invites us to look back at the production, and circulation of patterns in the nineteenth-century textile industry. What could such an archaeology teach us? What nodes of tension – of convergence, and divergence – should be followed, to sharpen a critique of the computational regime we live in?
SPEAKERS
Philip Sykas (Manchester Metropolitan University), Ellen Harlizius-Klück (Research Institute for the History of Technology and Science -Deutsches Museum), Birgit Schneider (Universität Potsdam + Fachhochschule Potsdam)Jesse Lockard (University of Oxford), Sophie Cras (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Tristan Dot (University of Cambridge), Meekyung MacMurdie (University of Utah)
Program
9:30 – Opening Remarks.
9:35 – Philip Sykas (Manchester Metropolitan University): ‘Witnesses to the vanity, refinement, and caprice of the world’: Printed Pattern as Industrial Design Resource.
11:00 – Ellen Harlizius-Klück (Deutsches Museum): From Ordered Substance to Simulation and back again: The World Championship Soccer Ball as the Houndstooth of Sports Equipment.
12:30 – Lunch (speakers only)
13:30 – Birgit Schneider (Universität Potsdam): Silk Roads through Flatland? Textility, Patterns and AI.
15:00 – Tristan Dot (University of Cambridge): The Cloud and the Grid: Textile Designs as Ungraspable Motifs.
16:30 – Jesse Lockard (University of Oxford) & Meekyung MacMurdie (University of Utah): Patterns of Evidence: Riegl and the Problem of the Sample.
18:00 – Final Discussion
Scientific Organization: Tristan Dot (University of Cambridge), Sophie Cras (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Leonardo Impett (Bibliotheca Hertziana)