Code, Thread and the Long Patience

The loom fills half the room. Its punched cards have been replaced by a laptop running software Amaya Khoury wrote herself. On it, a tapestry slowly emerges, its pattern generated from twenty years of the city’s rainfall data.

Amaya grew up around looms in Beirut, then spent nine years building a developer tools company in Montréal. When it was acquired she was offered a large role at the buyer. She declined and went home to the craft she had left.

The oldest computer

A Jacquard loom, she points out, was a programmable machine a century before the first electronic computer. Her studio writes open-source software that lets weavers treat datasets as patterns, with version history for every thread.

Forty textile studios now use her tools. Her own work hangs in two national collections, and she still gets bug reports, which she answers personally.

Both crafts punish shortcuts, she says. A missed thread shows up a metre later. So does a missed test.