Jodie Mack's The Grand Bizarre is about how cloth is alive, the way I see as alive language. Hey, Cousin Language, you've shown up here, for a little while, just to say hello… :) Notice the tiny bit of simulation theming when she's showing how it gets weaved. (The Jacquard loom looms at the beginning of programming…) The Game of Life is a cellular automaton, traditionally black and white square cells, an interaction of simple rules producing what you see on the surface. And here the complexities are reversed, but it's still true, that there's so much behind the curtains generating what you encounter. …A life cycle, it breathes, it's shown breathing. …Cloth-in-general like language-in-general, cloth as a collective entity — 'collective entity' sounds wrong, like it's a hivemind, while it doesn't communicate between itself more than you can see, and isn't a mind at all; and 'little guys' is too simple and simplified, like there's going to be character tropes, and a narrative of following some specific instance instead of the whole structure — but look at them, in the beginning there, they're little guys! Clothes… travel, could be a kids' movie premise if it were the more simple.

The film's described as an examination of the textile industry, labour and alienation and the global economy, and I'd thought that was pretentious galleryspeak, you know, but it is! It's very obvious. It says that out in order, where a piece of fabric's life cycle starts and where it ends, how it's presented and how it's analysed… I'd wished I hadn't heard that description so I could see it clearly what the picture contains, but I do believe it, even after trying my damnedest to detach from it. …I admit I'd missed almost every part of how she may have been using sound, and pattern of sound, except to be immediately pleasing to the ear. Oh well, that's why people talk about art amongst themselves.

It's a very tactile film… At multiple points I'd wanted to reach through the screen and touch it. And afterwards, rolling around in my bedsheets like a snow angel, almost crying from how everywhere textiles and patterns are, hi, hello, I see now, how it sings, to stare and compare and examine…