Anna Lucia — Loom — generative weaving as on-chain craft

2021

Artists: Anna Lucia · Year: 2021 · Medium: Long-form generative art — algorithmic textile/weaving compositions · Substrate: p5.js / JavaScript; Ethereum via Art Blocks; algorithm models a four-shaft hand loom with punched-card pattern · Place: Cairo, Egypt (Dutch-born) · Institution: Art Blocks (Factory, Project 213) Anna Lucia is a Dutch artist and engineer who came to generative art the long way around: she trained as a civil engineer (MSc Water Management), discovered Processing in 2019, and taught herself to code creatively after work. She made her practice public on Instagram in 2020, minted her first NFT in 2021, and was selected for the Tezos cohort at Art Basel Miami in December of that same year — a compressed trajectory from autodidact to internationally exhibited artist. Loom, released on Art Blocks Factory in December 2021, is the work that defined her position in the field. The algorithm models a four-shaft hand loom: a punched-card pattern is generated at mint time, and that pattern then drives the interlacing of horizontal and vertical threads across the canvas. Each of the 200 outputs is a different cloth — a different pattern, a different palette, a different density of weave — but every one is structured by the constraints of an actual textile mechanism rather than by free pictorial composition. The result is generative art that is legibly cloth: the eye reads warp and weft before it reads color or geometry. The work sits in a specifically craft-aware corner of the Art Blocks catalogue. Where Tyler Hobbs's Fidenza takes flow-field abstraction as its lineage and Dmitri Cherniak's Ringers is geometric/topological, Loom is interested in the mechanical history of pattern-making as a discipline. The 2023 Generations collaboration with the Quilters of Gee's Bend, in which Anna Lucia's digital quilts were re-quilted by the original Alabama quilters of the Gee's Bend tradition, made that interest explicit: the digital and the textile lineages were treated as a single conversation rather than as appropriation. Anna Lucia has subsequently shown at Bright Moments, in Le Random's curated programs, and her work has entered the Arab Bank Art Collection. She lives and works in Cairo. Lore Anna Lucia learned to weave on a real loom while she was developing the Loom algorithm — she has said in interviews that she could not write the code for the punched-card pattern generation without first understanding the physical mechanism in her hands. The Generations project with the Quilters of Gee's Bend grew from a similar instinct: rather than scrape quilt imagery into a model, she wrote algorithms that produced single digital quilts which the Gee's Bend quilters then re-made in cloth, on commission, at full scale. Sources • Art Blocks — Loom (Project 213). • It's Nice That — Anna Lucia profile (2025). • Right Click Save — Anna Lucia and the Quilters of Gee's Bend interview. • Arsnl Art — Generations (Gee's Bend collaboration). • i·illucid — Slowing down with Anna Lucia (interview).