PALIMPSEST

Palimpsest converts a live camera feed into the warp and weft of a digital loom, weaving each second directly over the one before it. The loom is not chosen for its texture: Jacquard's punched cards stand at the origin of both automated weaving and computation, so the grid that records a place and the grid that clothes it descend from the same machine. Within that grid an assault cannot appear as a tear, since a tear is a hole and a hole can be noticed. It appears as a fold, a nodule of fibres stacked at high frequency until it acquires real optical thickness, while the weaving continues around it and daily life resumes above it. The nodule does not disappear, it becomes unreadable, and those are not the same condition. The efficiency of such a system rests precisely on its refusal to delete: deletion leaves an absence that can be audited, covering leaves a smooth surface that can be archived and declared complete. What accumulates on screen is therefore not an image of a place but an image of the labour by which a place stays legible to itself, and the cost of that legibility is carried entirely by whatever had to be woven over.