Before the fast-fashion business model made it possible for clothing companies to churn out 700 shirts a day , textiles in the 19th century were created using a much slower and more mathematical process: the Jacquard loom. This machine, which used carefully designed punch cards to determine the sequence of weaving operations, created patterns out of thread based on a binary system. (Since woven textiles are created with interlocking threads, you can only ever see a warp or a weft thread on the surface, which is essentially a zero or a one.) The intricate Jacquard loom and its innovative punch card input method would go on to inspire the first general-purpose computer, and English mathematician Ada Lovelace is widely credited with publishing the first algorithm to be carried out by this Analytical Engine. As a result, the relationship between woven textiles and computer science was born, and women sat squarely at the intersection of this technical Venn diagram.

In an effort to tease out these overlapping industries, multimedia artist Ahree Lee has developed an interdisciplinary exhibit called Pattern : Code as part of her residency at the Los Angeles-based Women’s Center for Creative Work. The show is focused squarely on labor, especially undocumented or unrecognized work performed by people undervalued in society. Tracing the history of women in crafts to their more modern participation in computing was an exercise perfectly at home at the WCCW—a center for all kinds of feminist activity, research, and art making.

“Weaving has always been in the wheelhouse of women, and it took an incredible amount of time to weave and produce clothing and all the textiles needed for the household, like bedding and draperies,” Lee says. “Agricultural labor was more dangerous because of the large equipment so that tended to fall on the men, and that’s how this division of labor was formed. Women could do the textile labor at home where they could be watching over the children . . . it was easily interrupted.”

Lee explores domestic labor by creating weavings that illustrate self-generated labor data and research on statistics of women in STEM. One piece, a square tapestry with a triangular image called Disrupting the Industry, is a woven infographic depicting the number of women who got bachelor’s degrees in computer science between 1966 and 2010.

“It starts out pretty low and it steadily increases [until] it reaches a peak in 1984, then it sharply drops off and in 2010 it goes back to where it was in 1966,” Lee says. “It’s called Disrupting the Industry—a phrase used over and over again in pitches from Silicon Valley startups so it’s seen as this good thing—but disruption in any other way is bad. There’s this bias toward disruptive behavior in tech bro culture . . . but historically this other quality was valued in computer programmers.”

These qualities, which women were widely thought to naturally possess, were diligence, patience, and the ability to be detail-oriented—perfect for the tedious and technical work of both weaving and coding.

Another example of Lee’s thread-based data visualizations is her weaving called Ada, which is woven with a secret message.