GHOST IN THE THREAD
"The glitch is a momentum: that moment that makes you pivot and reflect. It grabs you, but you don’t know what is going on... It’s when an object slides from a normal operation into something different—a powerful confusion that forces the user to reevaluate their understanding of media, its materials, and conventions."
Rosa Menkman, The Glitch Moment(um), 2011
Nam June Paik, Chepertom, LoVid,
Rune Brink and Travess Smalley
Curated by Valentina BUZZI
September 11th - October 18th , 2026
Long before the advent of the silicon microchip or the modern digital screen, the fundamental logic of computing was born on a weaver’s loom. Joseph Marie Jacquard’s 1804 automated loom used binary punch cards (grid-based arrangements of holes and blanks) to direct warp and weft threads into complex woven patterns. This historical alignment reveals a profound truth at the core of media art: the digital grid of x/y resolution and the tactile matrix of textiles share the exact same structural DNA.
Riffing on the classic philosophical notion of the "ghost in the machine," Ghost in the Thread explores how the ephemeral digital signal, the volatile, glowing, and often glitching ghost of code and light, is captured, embodied, and bound into physical or phygital materiality.
The exhibition maps an intergenerational trajectory that begins with Nam June Paik’s 1994 work, DO NOT WATCH TV. Serving as the conceptual catalyst for the exhibition, Paik’s imperative was both a playful critique of broadcast culture and a radical invitation to look beyond the illusion of the screen. By manipulating cathode-ray signals, Paik turned the television from a passive consumer box into an active site of artistic disruption, laying the foundation for video art and glitch aesthetics by laying bare the electronic ghost animating the device.
Extending this pioneer legacy into the early twenty-first century, artist duo LoVid (Tali Hinkis & Kyle Lapidus) bridges early video synthesis with contemporary tactile art. Working across analog video synthesis, circuit-bending, counter-technology, and textiles, LoVid extracts the flickering energy of electrical currents and translates them into vibrant woven canvases, prints, and tactile installations, making the invisible architecture of electronics feel tangible.
LoVid, On Video Taxidermy (3)
Chepertom, (detail) Tide.
Building upon this lineage, a new generation of international artists approaches screen culture as a material language that flows effortlessly into physical space. Chepertom directly investigates the translation of digital art into domestic objects by converting pixel drawings, glitch artifacts, and generative algorithmic compositions into custom Jacquard tapestries and tufted rugs, proving that a digital pixel and a woven knot are functionally identical.
Operating along a similar boundary, Travess Smalley explores the collapse between vector graphics, software layers, and physical printmaking. Smalley treats digital canvas manipulation and physical collage as a continuous medium, producing works that challenge where the screen ends and the physical object begins.
Discover Pixel Rugs to learn more about the work of Travess Smalley. A Paris Edition version will be available during the show.
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Travess Smalley, Pixel Rug (08_27_21_Pixel_Rug_02)
Travess Smalley, Pixel Rug Drawing
Rune Brink, Stream of consciousness
Completing this conversation, Rune Brink examines digital nostalgia, software logic, and low-resolution aesthetics, bringing pixelated animations, spatial design, and screen architecture into dialogue with physical space to illuminate the poetic anomalies living inside our everyday technological interfaces.
From Paik’s cathode-ray interventions to LoVid’s glitching videos and signal-to-fabric transformations, and culminating in the pixel-tufted rugs, prints, screens, and phygital interactive spatial installations of Chepertom, Smalley, and Brink, Ghost in the Thread demonstrates that resolution is far more than a measurement of screen density. It is a material spectrum and a continuous thread connecting the deep history of craft to the evolving future of technology.
In this context, the glitch functions as a semantic space: a fertile, liminal territory born from technological disruption where new language, meaning, and poetic possibilities emerge. Rather than representing a dead end or a systemic failure, the glitch opens a portal to understand the raw materiality of code and the digital image. As these volatile errors and pixelated structures are translated into threads, tapestries, and physical forms, the exhibition reveals that the ghost in the machine is a tangible presence inhabiting the very fabric of our visual world.
OPENING AND EVENTS
OPENING - 11th of September from 6pm to 9pm
ARTISTS TALK - 11th of September from 5pm to 6pm
PRACTICAL INFOS
open from Tuesday to Friday - 10 am to 6 pm
Saturday from 2pm to 6pm
closed on Monday and Sunday