Rethinking Patterns

a conversation with Vera van de Seyp

Vera van de Seyp and her knitting machine.

Creative coder and graphic designer Vera van de Seyp explores new technologies, digital tools and fields in media where boundaries are still blurry and yet to be defined. From working with hacked knitting machines and creating perpetually morphing typefaces or playful websites, to organizing a symposium on creative coding and discussing the politics of instruction manuals. In her work, she emphasizes the importance of knowledge sharing and acknowledging the role of women in coding culture. We interview Vera at //\ hoekhuis HQ in Rotterdam, a city where she may move to soon.

What are you currently working on?

I'm preparing a series of workshops that will take place in Bern and Warsaw. As always, I’m designing a couple of websites, one for a New York styling company which is a lot of fun, and one for a photographer. I also teach at the KABK art academy in The Hague, but the semester just finished, and I now have more time to focus on my own work. I'm knitting a lot. And there are many things up in the air.


Is it fun to teach at the school where you studied yourself?

Not many people want to teach programming to art students. They've asked me if I wanted to teach before, but it felt a bit too early. So far, I really enjoy it. But at times, it can still feel weird when I feel more familiar with the students than the teachers, or vice versa. Much has changed since I was a student, so while there are recognizable situations and people around, there are also new problems and people. A lot has happened in the art academy world over the last years, and in that respect I think it's a very interesting time to teach, and to be around in this academy, because you feel that change is in the air. 


You recently organized the ITERATIONS symposium. Iteration is a mathematical concept where you try to calculate something through a repetitive process. 


Picking a title for the symposium.

I think it’s one of the most beautiful principles I use in my own work. Especially in producing imagery or sound using programming, one often works with repeating processes or loops to generate a certain outcome. With the symposium, I wanted to bring together a group of people who use programming in their visual art or design practice. In order to come up with a name for the event, I selected different terms that play with programming principles, but equally evoke a strong visual image. Names that are neither pretentious, nor too obvious. I used chance to come up with the final name, by writing the options on paper and asking Marie –who has worked with me over the last six months– to pick one randomly. The title ITERATIONS immediately invited us to organize the symposium more than once.

It’s funny that you used coincidence to choose a title.

I always like doing that, otherwise I start overthinking things. It often works well for me to do research first, but then suddenly introduce something impulsive, so that I don't continue to doubt whether I’m making the right decision. So there is a kind of logic in how I make choices, which is actually very programming-like.


For the festival you brought together a community of makers from different niches.


Yes, I wanted to bring together a group of people that is very diverse and whose work I have been following and admiring for a long time, and who also bring a certain ethic in their work. There is a fairly small group of people that is interested in this angle to creative coding, but there are still sub-niches and I feel that the group is growing slowly. While the tools or the code that people use differ, people do share certain approaches or ways of working. For me it was important to invite an inherently diverse group of people on stage, which I think should be normal by now, and that the main discussion wasn’t necessarily focused on diversity, but on their work.


Instructions, manuals, or guides often come up in your projects. Which seems to be connected to your interest in iterations, as you look at how one could question or reprogram existing repeating structures or processes.

I think it stems from my interest in generative and conditional design: making something based on rules. You can think of the work of Sol LeWitt for instance, where the rules that are used to produce the work are more important than its outcome.

I guess this is indeed reflected in my work in different ways too. Working with fixed rules while leaving other things open often evokes serendipity. Having a certain structure, but also allowing myself to be surprised by the outcome. I’m also interested in the social and political aspects of guides and manuals, and here I enjoy both researching and working with instructions.


Brother KH-910 knitting machine instruction manual

You already mentioned that you recently started knitting.

At the beginning of the pandemic, everyone suddenly had a hobby. People started baking sourdough bread, or started drinking a lot or not at all. Many people had a change in lifestyle, often involving handicraft. The use of crafts was reflected in haute couture fashion in that period too.

So my thing became knitting, at first by hand. Beyond just knitting hats, I was curious how I could knit complex patterns with multiple colors. I prepared all my patterns in Google spreadsheets, and by following the rows and columns, and coloring the boxes, I knew exactly how to proceed. So it was already very well thought out and super programmatic, even if I was still knitting by hand.

When I learned about knitting machines, I first bought an analog machine with punched cards. It was quite limited, as you only have 24 pixels or stitches to control. I later got an electronic knitting machine from the early 80’s, where you can scan and knit larger images, but its memory was still limited. Interestingly, there is a whole online community around hacking these knitting machines using an Arduino and a shield that you can order and solder yourself, and adding a few transistors and a fuse.

Over time I became more interested in the physical manuals that came with these machines in the 80’s. The manuals were designed for women, and their tone and the ways in which they were written was bothering me. Instruction texts such as ‘turn on the lever’, never explained what you were actually doing with the machine. It only included the actions you had to carry out. I was interested in the textual and visual language of these manuals, and how they always emphasized the emancipatory potential of the machine, for instance because it was said to be ‘portable’. Well, I've brought the machine with me many times, and it is anything but portable. It weighs ten kilos and it comes in a very large suitcase. The manuals were also written in a very directive way, including lines such as ‘you are now going to make a garment for your child’.

This also followed my earlier interest and research on the early days of programming in the 50’s and 60’s, in which mostly women were active. At that time, computers were still big rooms, and interestingly programming was a stereotypical female job, because it developed from transcribing and involved typing. Everything that had to do with hardware was done by men, so if a button had to be soldered, it was a male occupation.

Together with designer Charlotte Rohde I explored these languages of instruction and created a series of works. I first started knitting a large wall hanging with references to the fact that women were initially doing the soft work, working with software. However, in becoming more and more complex over time, developing software turned into a typical man’s job as it still is today. 

Another work dealt with the particular role of women in hardware. In the beginning, computer memory was made of iron threads that were manually woven by women. You had a grid of wires, and if you would put some voltage on it, you could turn something on or off where the wires crossed. This is how memory still works today, even if it has of course become much smaller and its production has been automated.

A third part revolved around a book from the 60’s that promoted programming as a job for women, written by a man. It stated that if you wanted to be emancipated as a woman, this was the perfect job. At that time programming was one of the few jobs in which women of color were also allowed to work, and where you could earn much more than through other socially accepted jobs. The book stated that programming was like cooking from a cookbook, and if you enjoyed executing instructions, it was definitely something for you. Reading this now bothers me, but back then it was well-intended.

By the way, yesterday I learned that computer bugs were actual physical animals. The first computers were of course so big that now and then an insect would crawl in, and die on a transistor. Of course the machine would stop working, and this was then referred to as a ‘bug’. My own theory is that programmers made mistakes too, but then claimed it to be the fault of a bug.


I recently read more about Vera Molnar, who made me think of you. Her early work involved graphic design, but in the sixties she started working with computers resulting in generative art. Are there artists or designers, or people from other disciplines that you feel connected with somehow?

To start with people who are active today, I really admire the work of artist Tauba Auerbach. She often engages with mathematical and rather complex subjects, but translating these in beautiful visual and detailed ways, while you still feel the thorough research behind the work. In regards to education, I’m thinking of artist Laura Lee McCarthy, who founded p5.js (an open-source art and education platform that prioritizes access and diversity in learning to code, with over 1.5 million users, red.). Their art practice is very relevant and critical, but in a friendly way. I’m also thinking of Laurel Schwulst and John Provencher, who founded The Fruitful School, and who make DIY, Wikipedia-like websites.

When I think of people from the past, it’s perhaps more difficult to choose, also because we mostly know of the work of men, while of course there were women too. I think Vera Molnar is actually a good example. My grandfather once gave me a book about the work of Peter Struycken, which really inspired me. I also really like the work of Wim T. Schippers, the Fluxus movement and the Nul-beweging. A lot of very cool things happened in The Netherlands in the field of generative art, and in breaking rules or not having rules at all.


What would your ideal workplace look like?

I am very happy with my current studio at the Veem building in Amsterdam, as part of Studio Zesbaans that I share with four guys. The others are more hardcore into webdevelopment, and I'm perhaps the crazy little art sister. We sometimes work together, but even if we don’t, it’s nice to share the room and help each other. At some point I would like to have my own place, just to be able to invite collaborators more easily and not interrupt others too much. So a space where I can make a mess and invite people, but where it is also tidy with lots of plants and good coffee. Oh this sounds very cliché. I also really enjoy working on trains, this is where I’m most productive.


One way to learn about someone’s creative process is by copying or imitating their work. In what ways have you studied the work of others?

I won’t consciously copy someone's work, but I certainly did look at other people’s code when I was a student because you can learn a lot from it. In art and design, the ego is still important for how art is received and contextualized. If you have an idea, it's your idea. There's a lot of emphasis on authorship. What I really like about code and the world around it, is that it is not interested in this type of authorship at all. Of course it’s unethical to copy a piece of code from the internet and sell it as an app, even if it does happen sometimes. But what is beautiful, is that you can truly build on each other's work, and I find this collaborative approach much more constructive.

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Vera’s contribution Iterations coming soon