Ćilim 2.5

Textile is one of humanity’s earliest media infrastructures. Before images where created and sound could be recorded, threads already organized space into fields of rhythm, tension, and sequence. The act of weaving functioned as an early interface: a protocol through which human gesture materialized structure. Through repetition, the gesture acquires an unexpected affective charge: the return to the same movement, again and again.

Ćilim 2.5 by Amer Tanović returns to this proto-media condition: not where an image searches for a screen, but where structure seeks a body.
Pattern becomes matrix.
Thread becomes protocol.
Each rhombus, angle, and recursive form operates less as ornament and more as a proposition of movement, a soft command embedded within cultural memory.

The motifs – fertility signs, protective geometries, cosmological diagrams – documented in ethnographic studies of Bosnia and its surrounding regions appear not as decorative residues but as persistent cultural algorithms. They emerge from gendered labor, collective embodiment, and long-standing symbolic systems. Even in digital form, these structures retain their rhythmic presence: not material in themselves, yet grounded in repetition, micro-vibrations, and patterned temporality.

Sound activates this medial field.
The traditional weaving song reintroduces the kilim into its original technological ecology, where voice synchronizes gesture and organizes shared temporal experience. In Ćilim 2.5, sound does not accompany the digital structure; it permeates it, extending the logic of breath into visual form and restoring a sensorial continuity between textile practice and its contemporary iteration.

The digital Cilim by Tanovic can be read like a visual code or a text itself. As the moving particles evolve, a countercurrent begins to form; a subtle pressure that does not originate solely from the work, but from the act of “reading” or seeing itself. Something in the cadence of the movement, in the held tension between its particles, reaches the viewer with a quiet insistence, as if the work is sensing the body that encounters it. Before recognition becomes thought, the viewer finds themself drawn into an unexpected nearness, a shared vibratory field in which two presences, the one that shows and the one that sees, momentarily align. What we perceive is not simply the work, but the resonance of another attention touching our own beneath the threshold of language.

In this sense, Ćilim 2.5 should be understood less as a digital translation of a traditional form than as an examination of the structural conditions that allow textile practices to persist across media. The work foregrounds how patterns operate as a system of relations rather than aesthetic motifs, a distinction essential to understanding textile as an epistemic technology.

What becomes visible here aligns with broader trajectories in media history: the shift from manual protocols to computational procedures without the loss of embodied knowledge. This continuity is often central to media art, where analogue gestures and digital processes often reveal shared operational logics. While Ćilim 2.5 engages historical structures of textile-making, its contemporary relevance emerges through the social relations it activates.
The work is not only a digital reinterpretation of pattern; it is a rearticulation of weaving as a collective technology, a system for organizing time, labor, and shared experience. 

As a result of being publicly accessible, the kilim becomes a site of collective engagement, not a static artefact. It invites viewers to reflect on how patterns are produced, by whom, and under what conditions. In doing so, the work shifts attention from aesthetics to the social infrastructures that sustain textile practices today, including gendered labor, intergenerational transmission, and the distributed authorship inherent to weaving communities. Rather than presenting textile as a symbolic artefact, Ćilim 2.5 positions it as an active participant in a broader network of social, technological, and institutional relations.

Ćilim 2.5 opens a productive field of inquiry: how traditional techniques of ordering, sequencing, and repetition anticipate contemporary algorithmic systems. In doing so, it provides a framework for rethinking textile work not as an inherited craft, but as a dynamic medium that articulates cultural, technical, and social structures simultaneously.

Tanović’s kilim functions less as an image and more as a pulse, a manifestation of soft force that unsettles technological imaginaries detached from the body.
Here, the algorithm does not present itself as cold abstraction; it operates as an extension of touch, a continuation of the gestures that once drew thread across air.
Digitality does not negate materiality; it reveals its internal protocols and latent structures.

The significance of the work lies in its capacity to reveal structure, not to hide it. 

Ćilim 2.5 does not depict a carpet.
It rearticulates the very idea of textile as a medium.
It suggests that weaving is a form of thinking, and that code, like thread, is a way of structuring desire and relation.

If the kilim appears alive, it is because it carries the memory of hands, those that wove it in material form, and those that now reconfigure it in light.