JOSETTE is an artistic research project co-led by Romain Hoarau and Barbara Mermoud since 2024.
It was born out of a shared curiosity for the common origin of our respective work tools: computers and textile machines.

Josette was initially the adaptation of an esoteric programming language that allowed us to knit lines of code. Then Josette became a question: how can these knitted programs be read? Then Josette also became the machine that reads these programs. And since we need to communicate with this machine, Josette also became the software that makes this possible. Josette will probably evolve into other things that remain to be discovered.

Josette moves freely between the fields of textiles, mechanics, digital technology, and electronics.
As we progress along this path, we discover new questions.

Through its inefficiency, its absurdity, and its use of artisanal skills, Josette is a vehicle for criticizing work, industry, and production in the post-capitalist era. Josette allows us to create from and act on our anger towards the contemporary organization of labour. An organization that is devoid of pleasure, ethics, and utopias, and wich prioritizes productivity and profit at the expense of workers’ lives, time, and joy.

Josette also allows us to open windows onto other possibilities in our relationship with technology and machines.

Josette is both the end and a mean. The creative process itself is a critique in action, a demonstration of the possibility of creating and using machines with joy and curiosity, outside of a profit-driven framework.

Josette carries on a thousand-year-old textile tradition: fabric as a vector of information.
Objects encoded using Josette look like scarves, but serve as text-based data carriers. They be used as a method of archiving and transmitting clandestine information, thus escaping the repression of increasingly fascist states.