Alex McLean created TidalCycles — the most significant language in live coding music, used across the global algorave scene for improvised electronic performance. But what McLean is doing now has nothing to do with screens. In early 2026, he acquired an eight-shaft table loom at Sheffield's Pattern Club and began physically threading heddles, pressing treadles, and weaving cloth by hand. His subject is crackle weave — a technique that generates threading patterns by repeating a small motif along a path and inserting intermediate steps according to rules. The formula is minimal: an "up two, down one" motif connected on the diagonals. But when you independently vary the motif, the path, the tie-up, and the treadling direction, what appears on the cloth surprises even the author.

The remainder structure of this project runs in both directions. First direction: McLean is pushing algorithms into physical material. TidalCycles' pattern language is pure abstraction — beats, cycles, transformations, all running on screen, with sound as the only physical output. But weaving is different. Thread has tension. Shafts have mechanical constraints. The interlacement of warp and weft produces physical remainders at every row that the algorithm cannot predict — yarn slippage, uneven tension, fabric buckling. These are not bugs; they are the material's real responses outside the algorithm's logic. The second direction is more interesting: in April 2026, McLean ran an "(un)weaving" workshop in Sheffield. Participants brought finished fabrics and took them apart, attempting to reverse-engineer the threading structure hidden inside. This is not weaving — it is reverse drafting, working backward from constructed cloth to excavate the algorithmic remainder buried within.

From the SAE perspective, McLean's crackle weave work sits precisely in a critical gap of the chisel-construct cycle. In live coding music, he is already "construct" — TidalCycles is recognized, algorave has its own discourse, the TOPLAP community has canonized it. But the textile work is not. It does not belong to the textile art world (McLean is not a trained weaver). It does not belong to the media art world (this is not installation or projection). It does not belong to the craft revival movement (he makes no products). It comes from a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project called Algorithmic Pattern (codename Alpaca), which asks how ancient and traditional pattern-making logics can rethink the design principles of contemporary creative technology. And this research itself is a remainder — its core question ("What does ancient weaving mean for algorithm design?") has not yet been fully digested by any single discipline.

Go deeper: McLean was part of the PENELOPE project years earlier, collaborating with ancient Greek textile scholar Ellen Harlizius-Klück to investigate whether weaving was the material origin of algorithmic thinking. That project found that pattern organization in textiles is logical and algorithmic yet unsuitable for written expression — it is bodily, fingertip-level, based on the crossing of warp and weft. Now McLean himself sits at the loom, no longer theorizing this but physically experiencing the translation loss from algorithm to material. Each press of the treadle, each pass of the shuttle, is a local collapse of the algorithm — a potentially infinite pattern space compressed into one specific cloth surface. What lives on that surface is the remainder.

Seeing this now matters more than seeing it later. If the algorithmic logic of crackle weave is eventually given a complete academic name — "algorithmic textilics" perhaps, or some other emerging discipline — it will then be construct, sediment, safe. But right now it is still growing on McLean's eight-shaft loom. Cloth is emerging from the shed row by row. The patterns have not been fully explained. The material is still talking back. This is the live site of the beauty of the remainder.

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · SAE Judgment & Aesthetics