corecodes weaving workshop

corecodes is a presentation of texts, patterns, and woven drawings on gender, optimization, and microaesthetics from LeFevre Fellow Samiha Meem, on view in the Main Space at Knowlton Hall from April 8 to April 11.

corecodes uses image-as-instruction to visualize a series of girlrooms shaped by distinct aesthetic economies across play, work, home, and pleasure: Sportpop Acceleration, Siren Economy, Tradwife Desolation, and Babygirl Degrowth. These “cores,” circulating through online image discovery platforms, encode implicit directives for continuous optimization of body, space, and image—prescribing not only how to live or live better but how to perform living better. The project works against the legibility of these cores and codes, using a deep learning-based vision-language model to extract semantic descriptions from images, expand their interpretative frames, and recode them through a “name drafting” system that translates textual information into adaptive patterns for making woven drawings. It’s more deconstruction than simulation.

It will be accompanied by a brief talk from LeFevre Fellow Samiha Meem and a weaving workshop led by UG4 student Sydney Stuermer by the Big Steps on April 9 from 12–2 PM. 

The workshop invites participants to interface with and inscribe the recoded microaesthetic patterns into customized carrier bags—yours to keep! These carriers function as both material archives and mutable sites of translation, where intuition, misalignment, and adaptation open space to test what holds, what shifts, and what resists containment. More than a technical exercise, it’s a low-pressure space to make, to talk, to rethink how body, image, and space move through, resist, or undo the representational forces that drive optimization.

Refreshments will be provided. Registration is required for active workshop participation due to limited kits.

Host or Publisher Samiha Meem