Difference between revisions of "Jacquard Loom"

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“Adam and Eve were undoubtedly our first customers for textiles. The moment they discarded their fig leaf, there was created an immediate market for textile garments” (Blum 4).  
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[[File:Punchedcardloom.jpg|300px|thumb|right|Jacquard Loom]]
  
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[[File:Jacquard-cards-cu.jpg|300px|thumb|right|Punched Cards]]
  
  
  
  
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Jacquard's mechanical additions to the handloom gave rise to new, concrete media and sensory-specific effects that reflected changing stages in perception at the eve of the 18th century and the introduction into the 19th. The mechanized mediation of the self is also reflected through the fruit of this mechanized loom, where instead of two or three human operators, it reduced human agency down to one operator per machine, reducing the time and human presence necessary to complete the same quantity and quality of weaving. The diminishing of human agency and the increase of mechanized forms of labor paralleled the dismantling of the 18th century conception of the 'human sensorium', only to find that the mechanical jacquard loom devoured this mode of sensory mediation to reveal a new one: weaving as a mediatic skin interface. The mechanized weave altered the skeleton and structure of the woven product, setting it apart from its hand woven precursors by introducing the weave as a threaded matrix as opposed to a solid piece of block colors. The woven skin-as-interface captured both the rise of the physiological division of sensory faculties in the 19th century, and the violent erasure of human agency in the craft and production of mechanized weaving, channeling the idea that McLuhan first introduced that media are ever extensions of ourselves (McLuhan, 7).
  
  
  
Creepy motifs:
 
  
·      Synthetic epidermis, the weave of colors like skin pigmentation. Texture is much like scar tissue. The cards are riddled with puncture holes, which must be sutured with thread much like bodily fiber and sinew together with a wound.
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== Joseph-Marie Jacquard and His Weaving Automaton ==
  
·      Mythological framing: Penelope at the loom, unraveling at night what she weaves during the day… Odysseus by ship, another context of 'loom'
 
  
·      Warped and weft: visual illusion of ‘seamless’ imagery, literally. How can something with so much texture and with its matrix of threads look so cohesive and smooth? Something so aesthetically pleasing, yet up-close, so grotesque.
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[[File:Silk-jacquard-memoire.jpg|200px|thumb|left|A Tapestry Portrait of Joseph-Marie Jacquard]]
  
·      Thick weave, thick description:
 
OED thesis based on etymology: loom both picture of domesticity, Penelope, frame or set of frames on which threads are woven into cloth; and nautical, Odysseus ((orig. naut.) move slowly up and down, tied to the word oar performative; appear indistinctly visual.) tool; bucket, tub XIII ; weaving machine XV (for earlier weblome ‘weaving implement’ XIV ). ME. lhttp://www.oxfordreference.com/data/unicode/Mb/omac.gifme , aphetic of OE. gelhttp://www.oxfordreference.com/data/unicode/Mb/omac.gifma utensil, implement.
 
  
(From The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology in English Language Reference)
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In 1801, Joseph-Marie Jacquard exhibited a machine that mechanized the labor of weaving colored patterns in textiles. Promptly in 1806, France claimed it as property of the state and it soon afterward became the primary method of commercial weaving.
  
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Joseph-Marie Jacquard came up with the idea of putting a pattern into holes on a card to produce a fabric design mechanically. He housed this punch card system in his mechanized loom, and produced a two-part machine consisting of the loom and the Jacquard frame, often just called the 'Jacquard'. The loom stood fastened to the floor, with the Jacquard frame suspended from the ceiling, resting on heavy beams. The loom incorporated the punch cards lined in order with each punch card pertaining to a row on the tapestry design, and a lifting mechanism, which the weaver himself operated with a treadle, eradicating the need for a draw boy or an assistant to orchestrate the shedding action. The Jacquard was responsible for housing the shedding mechanism away from the loom itself, and consisted of a series of vertical hooks from the bottom of which drew the harness cords together to operate them, connecting the loom and Jacquard together in mechanistic synchronicity.
  
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The weaving action in both hand and mechanized looms utilized the warp and weft threads as coordinates. The warp threads ran parallel to the length of the weave, and the weft threads ran parallel to the width of the weave. The Jacquard performed the shedding mechanism by lifting each individual warp thread independently of the others, and reading the perforated cards. Each perforation corresponded to a single warp thread, and each weft was interlaced either over or under the warp threads depending on the presence or absence of a perforated hole. It was noted that unlike traditional hand weaving, the weft threads covered the entire span of the tapestry, so that the image was “composed of a matrix of warp and weft” (Stone, 1). The loom could be 'programmed', and patterns could be modified or switched by rearranging or replacing the card deck, creating a feedback loop between weaver, cards and loom (Keats, 88). The Jacquard cards provided a selecting medium for pattern-weaving that was applicable to both hand and power looms, and while the loom mechanism did eliminate the need for extra hands to be present and man the machine, it required a whole new level of pre-production and design planning to create the cards that would correspond to the desired pattern. At the time, there were perhaps fewer "[types] of mechanism where more accuracy was required than in the various machines which are employed for the preparation of Jacquard cards for the loom” (Woodhouse, 1), whether they be human or mechanical in nature.
  
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== Weave as Skin Interface ==
  
  
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“Adam and Eve were undoubtedly our first customers for textiles. The moment they discarded their fig leaf, there was created an immediate market for textile garments” (Blum, 4)
  
== Short History: Joseph-Marie Jacquard and His Weaving Automaton ==
 
  
Description of parts and how it works as a weaving medium:
 
  
- The jacquard loom consists of two parts: the loom and the jacquard. “The loom is bolted to the floor; the jacquard is suspended from the ceiling, resting on heavy beams. The two are connected by a series of interlaced cords, known as the ‘harness’. It is a massive, many geared and levered machine, occupying 72 square feet of floor space, some 16 feet high and weighing well over 4,000 pounds. Yet, it is uncanny in its precision. In its coordinated movements, it appears to have the selective powers of the human brain and the dexterity of living fingers” (Blum, 34).
 
  
- Jacquard: under ‘Textile Definitions’, the following comes up: “Name of French inventor of the idea of putting a pattern into holes on a card to produce a fabric design mechanically. In the Callaway Textile Dictionary: ‘A shedding mechanism by means of which a large number of ends may be controlled independently and complicated patterns produced. It is located several feet above the loom and essentially consists of a series of vertical hooks from the bottom of which extend the harness cords together with means for operating them. The raising of the desired hooks to form the shed is governed by an endless chain of suitably punched cards.’ Stated simpler: The Jacquard controls each warp thread separately, which it raises or lowers to make the patterns” (Blum, 77).  
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Nakedness requires an acknowledgment of discarded shields or skins, to cover the original skin. Textiles, in both in their artificial mimesis of skin as well as the necessary negation of skin in the act of covering it, provide an interesting point of reflection in which the body itself is mediated as a site of both visuality and touch. The further the mechanized process goes to cover the originary skin, the greater the art of deception, and correspondingly, the violence of inscription. As seen in the Oxford English Dictionary definition of 'skin', it is both "the natural external covering or integument of an animal removed from the body" and "the substance, esp. as a material for clothing"; this skin can also be "dressed and prepared as a surface for writing" (OED, "skin"). The weave coming out of the Jacquard loom tells a story about the medium much in the same way that "blueprints and diagrams, regardless of whether they control printing presses or mainframe computers, may yield historical traces of the unknown called the body" (Kittler, xl). The weave as a skin product here extends strongly beyond commerce or function, but carry what “remains of people… what media can store and communicate. What counts are not the messages or the content with which they equip so-called souls for the duration of a technological era, but rather… their circuits, the very schematism of perceptibility” (Kittler, xl-xli). In search of the traces of a missing body, then, one may find in the inscriptions of the mechanized matrix of warp and weft the lingering remains of a skin interface.  
  
- “In 1801, Joseph-Marie Jacquard developed an apparatus that revolutionized weaving. In Jacquard’s process, a cartoon of the design to be woven is divided into a grid, which is used to encode a series of perforated cards. A device (now known as a Jacquard) suspended over the loom lifts each individual warp thread by reading these cards. Each perforation corresponds to a single warp thread, such that each weft thread is interlaced either over or under the warp threads depending on the presence or absence of a hole. Unlike traditional hand weaving, the weft threads span the entire width of the tapestry, and the image is composed of a matrix of warp and weft” (Stone, 1).  
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The associative trend for explaining the importance of the Jacquard loom in media history has been to relate it to early computer history, as seen in various accounts of various inventors remediated the Jacquard loom punch card in order to conceive of computational devices such as Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine and the Hollerith Punch Card. To flip the focus here, the loom may be viewed as a manifestation of a computer-based concept, the interface. Interfaces have multiple dimensions, and they "are the means through which we take clues and signals in a given culture. Learning new interface systems changes our behavior” (Flanagan, 306). The Jacquard loom set up an interface of mechanical and symbolically potent significance in the mediation of weaving: through the mechanization of hand-weaving, it changed the way the weave itself was fabricated, even if the way we perceive it as a whole appears unruptured. The weave produced by the Jacquard loom is likened to both a matrix and an epidermis, a skin interface “to describe an underlying topology of the self” (Flanagan, 312). This synthetic epidermis produces a weave of colors like skin pigmentation in its complexity. The texture is much like scar tissue, and indeed, the Jacquard punch cards are riddled with puncture holes, which must be sutured with thread much like bodily fiber and sinew to close the wound—the violence of the human agent, wiped out.  
  
- weft (parallel to width) and warp (parallel to length)
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The human operator mechanism is reduced to one, and in its stead the loom spits out a mechanized weave, a skin to recall those eliminated. Through this assimilative act, the art of weaving itself changes in its sensory manifestation as well. The act of weaving on handlooms typically translated the original design through a process that resembled paint-by-numbers, in which "the cartoon is divided into regions, each of which is assigned a solid color based on a standard palette" (Stone, 2). Jacquard weaving differs in that the "repeating series of multicolored warp and weft threads can be used to create colors that are optically blended" (2). The eye apprehended the threads' combination of colors as a single color, which is a method that has been likened to pointillism. Pointillism itself originated from the discoveries madeby Eugène Chevreul a French chemist working at the time for Les Gobelins tapestry works in Paris. Chevreul, who was responsible also for developing the color wheel of primary and intermediary hues, noticed from his work at Les Gobelins that the perceived color of a particular thread was influenced by its surrounding threads, a phenomenon he called 'simultaneous contrast'" (2). The effect of constructing the tapestry with the weft threads spanning the entire width of the piece, the image composed is a pointillist matrix of warp and weft interlaced so that the colors that comprise the image no longer are contained but are interspersed to give the illusion of a solid block of color. The gradients of the piece created a pigmented, interwoven image instead of the categorical division of colors, and channeled a complicated texture of reality not unlike the surface texture and pigmentation of human skin itself. The texture of the weave itself undergoes a change; the visual illusion of ‘seamless’ imagery made in a reality of a concentrated matrix of pointillist coordinates. That something so aesthetically pleasing as a whole may look so grotesque up-close reveals the telling nature of the mechanized weave as uncanny product that causes one to distrust the senses, the danger always being that our mediatic systems may produce an “interface effect, to the point where people take leave of their senses” (Kittler, 2).
  
- From the point of view of weave structure, the manufacture of figured decorative textile fabrics necessitates the employment of more or less elaborate parts by means of which the customary jacquard cards, or their equivalent, may be punched or cut in order to complete the connection between the point-paper design and the actual shedding mechanism of the loom. This method of providing the selecting medium for the pattern is applicable to both hand and power looms, and there is perhaps no type of mechanism where more accuracy is required than in the various machines which are employed for the preparation of jacquard cards for the loom” (Woodhouse, 1).
 
- Jacquard’s key idea was to store brocade patterns on perforated cards that could be fed through the loom, with one card per line of weaving. The loom would read the arrangement of holes punched on a card with a lattice of spring- activated pins connected to hooks that would each individually lift a warp thread wherever a pin entered a hole. In this way, the loom could be programmed, and patterns could be modified or switched by rearranging or replacing the card deck. As it turned out, holes punched in paper provided a ready-made solution for developing any kind of programmable machine (Keats, 88).
 
- The punched-card-driven loom introduced by Joseph-Marie Jacquard in the early years of the nineteenth century was the culmination of a number of efforts to mechanize the tedious work of manipulating the separate threads in a draw loom. The data constituting the desired pattern were introduced to the loom via a set of cards with punched holes (Davis and Davis, 76).
 
- At the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the need for the French silk industry to compete in the world market, Napoleon, who had heard of Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752-1834) because of his other inventions, summoned him to Paris in 1800. Jacquard, who already had ideas for improving the draw loom, found Vaucanson's loom at the Conservatoire. With reconstruction, clever modification, and careful engineering, the device, which came to be known as the Jacquard head, premiered in 1804 (Marcoux 1982: 1). The improved system of laced sequences of cards punched with holes, each hole representing a group of warp threads to be raised, speeded the process immensely (Figure 1). Only the weaver was required. The device was accepted and eventually spread worldwide. Jacquard was awarded a gold medal and the Cross of the Legion of Honor in 1819 (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2004: "Jacquard, Joseph-Marie") (Davis and Davis).
 
-It is the head, harness and frame that structures and controls the weaving mechanism and process.
 
  
  
== Performativity (Gitelman, Vismann, ?)==
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[[File:Magnoliaweave.png]]
The separation of technical and cultural performativity from hereon...
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-Caught in a web of changing perceptions of who operates, who inscribes, and who performs? (Gitelman, Vismann, perhaps? Outside sources)
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-New modes of address, then.
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== Visuality and Chevreul (Kittler, Crary) ==
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[[File:CloseColorSelfPortraitTapestryDetail.JPG|300px|thumb|right|Chuck Close Self Portrait on Tapestry]]
-This is a sub-argument about harnessing new technologies and new methods of seeing to create new perceptions of an ‘entirety’ or a complete ‘piece’ or object.
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·      “In Jacquard’s process, a cartoon of the design to be woven is divided into a grid, which is used to encode a series of perforated cards. A device (now known as a Jacquard) suspended over the loom lifts each individual warp thread by reading these cards. Each perforation corresponds to a single warp thread, such that each weft thread is interlaced either over or under the warp threads depending on the presence or absence of a hole. Unlike traditional hand weaving, the weft threads span the entire width of the tapestry, and the image is composed of a matrix of warp and weft” (1).
 
  
·      “Typically, tapestries are translated from the original design via a process resembling paint-by-numbers: the cartoon is divided into regions, each of which is assigned a solid color based on a standard palette. In Jacquard weaving, the repeating series of multicolored warp and weft threads can be used to create colors that are optically blended—i.e., the human eye apprehends the threads’ combination of values as a single color. This method can be likened to pointillism, a style of painting in which tiny dots or points placed in close proximity are optically blended as described above. In fact, pointillism originated from discoveries made in the tapestry medium: the style’s emergence in the 19th century can be traced to the influence of Eugène Chevreul, a French chemist responsible for developing the color wheel of primary and intermediary hues. Chevreul worked as the director of the dye works at Les Gobelins tapestry works in Paris, where he noticed that the perceived color of a particular thread was influenced by its surrounding threads, a phenomenon he called ‘simultaneous contrast’” (2).
 
  
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== Refuted Touch ==
  
  
[[File:CloseColorSelfPortraitTapestryDetail.png|400px|thumb|right]]
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The mechanized weave manifested itself first, then its observer, after. With its appearance, the jacquard loom fulfilled the priming action to prepare history for a new kind of sensory mediation where “these sense perceptions had to be fabricated first” (Kittler, 3). The Jacquard loom was a site of simultaneous separation of tasks in both technological and sensorial aspects. On one hand, the weaver moved from the immediate interaction of creating the tapestry only to relegate the tasks to the machine itself. On the other, the loom presented a site-specific body of a medium in history that housed the separation of the senses, where touch divorced vision as a holistic informant of the 18th century 'unified human sensorium' (Crary, 60). The chorus of hands diminished to one pair; human touch reduced, yet the weaving continued. The touch of hands used to mediate an understanding, or as the Oxford English Dictionary terms it, “To put the hand or finger, or some other part of the body, upon, or into contact with (something) so as to feel it; ‘to exercise the sense of feeling upon’”, “to bring (two things) into mutual contact to examine by touch or feeling” and “to bring by touching into some condition” (OED, “touch”). The knowledge of making one’s way around the world through tactile skill was overcome by mechanized performance, shifting sensory mediations from touch to sight.  
  
== Old Media (Manovich) ==
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Touch, and whatever 'conditions' and knowledge its 'mutual contact' brought along with it (OED, "touch"), was shunted out of critical thought from the decline of the 18th century into the rise of the 19th, which focused on the visual with the rising occupation with physiology. Jonathan Crary argues that the sense of touch, integral in the classical theories of vision in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gives way to a "subsequent dissociation of touch from sight", a "pervasive ‘separation of the senses’ and industrial remapping of the body in the nineteenth century" (Crary, 19). The product of the loom, as if to foreshadow the division of such perceptual thought, produced a tapestry made not of concrete components for an image-as-whole, but a latticed, sinuous weave that rejected the 18th century perception of vision and the senses as blocks categorically placed to create a holistic and cohesive whole in favor of a matrix or grid that threaded discrete and independent coordinates into a woven product. Bell’s account of Jacquard weaving and design works simultaneously with this shift in sensory attention by observing all the ways in which shade, lighting, and Chevreul’s concept of simultaneous contrast may bring about the greatest effect for “showing up the pattern on the damask”, where “it is the business of the designer to regulate what form it is to partake of” (Bell, 4-5). The product here is meant primarily now for a vision severed from the human sensorium that works parallel reflexivity with the woven matrix. Crary notes that the "loss of touch as a conceptual component of vision meant the unloosening of the eye from the network of referentiality incarnated in tactility and its subjective relation to perceived space” (19). The human touch loses sense of itself and surrenders it to the Jacquard loom: "[It] is uncanny in its precision. In its coordinated movements, it appears to have the selective powers of the human brain and the dexterity of living fingers” (Blum, 34). The human operative power over the Jacquard loom seems to merely be the supervision of sight to confirm the design and the operation work in tandem; the human weaver here is merely an eye.
--> Obsolete mode of mediation? (Lev Manovich)
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-By what standards is this an old media by contrast of definitions of what is new media, and then what of this old media totes obsolete modes of mediation that no longer transfer into the new? Penelope=ravel by unraveling…
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·      “Around 1800, J.M. Jacquard invented a loom that was automatically controlled by punched paper cards. The loom was used to weave intricate figurative images, including Jacquard’s portrait (Hello, World). This specialized graphics computer, so to speak, inspired Babbage in his work on the Analytical Engine, a general computer for numerical calculations. As Ada Augusta, Babbage’s supporter and the first computer programmer, put it, ‘The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.’ Thus a programmed machine was already synthesizing images even before it was put to processing numbers. The connection between the Jacquard loom and the Analytical Engine is not something historians of computers make much of, since for them computer image synthesis represents just one application of the modern digital computer among thousands of others, but for a historian of new media, it is full of significance” (22).
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The introduction of the jacquard loom thus symbolizes the violent erasure of two agents—the human operator, and a sensory mode of mediation in history. The "orderly accumulation and cross-referencing of perceptions on a plane independent of the viewer" (Crary, 59) contained the senses in a manifest, discrete network of 'reciprocal assistance' (60), an eighteenth-century thought that "could know nothing of the ideas of pure visibility to arise in the nineteenth century” (59). Instead of allowing such a sensually logical system to 'transcend its mere physical mode of functioning' (60), the Jacquard loom pointed to the human inadequacy to perceive and supervise all aspects of the loom's mechanisms at once. The woven product in turn, this matrix of warp and weft threads, pointed to the surpassing of the 18th century concept of an ‘overriding of the immediate subjective evidence of the body’ (60) in favor of the unexpected: the material resemblance to a skin interface to channel in the 19th century’s specific visuality-as-physiology. Once the perceived whole was eliminated, the complete sensorium dismantled from the human, what was left in his stead was the metonymic operator. Where did the missing pieces of human sensory agency go? The 19th century moves towards the “fabrication of so-called Man", whose "essence escapes into apparatuses” (Kittler, 16). The jacquard loom assumed some of the human tasks and produced in its place the missing skin that spoke for the eliminated sense of touch, a replacement for the fractured human sensorium.
  
·      The computer has ‘returned to its origins’: “No longer just an Analytical Engine, suitable only for crunching numbers, it has become Jacquard’s loom—a media synthesizer and manipulator” (26). This argument, while elegant, is the exact opposite of the approach you will take in this dossier!
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== Works Cited ==
Arguably an old media with a dead form of mediation: numerical representation: “While some old media such as photography and sculpture are truly continuous, most involve the combination of continuous and discrete in their coding (28); are they modular? I don’t think so (30); is it a form of analog, low-level automation? Yes (32); variability: “it involved a human creator who manually assembled textual, visual, and/or audio elements into a particular composition or sequence. This sequence was stored in some material, its order determined once and for all” (36). “If in old media elements are ‘hardwired’ into a unique structure and no longer maintain their separate identity, in hypermedia elements and structure are separate from each other” (41)  Manovich argues that, as a media of its time which corresponded with the foreshadowing ‘logic of industrial mass society’ and bourgeoisie (41), the Jacquard loom played its part in “making us all the same” (42). In that sense, as a mode of mediation it is well and truly dead. Performative sameness (No!). Lastly, what to make of the transcoding principle for new media (and therefore what is not new media=old media?): “computerization turns media into computer data” (45). Could there be a ‘cultural layer’ and a ‘Jacquardian layer’ in which “these dimensions belong to the computer’s own cosmogony rather than to human culture?” (46). What did the Jacquard loom, as an old media, bring into extinction with it in terms of old modes of mediation?
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== Legacy: Computers and Control (Winner, Mowshowitz) ==
 
  
-Is it a legitimate early computer? Davis and Davis;
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Bell, T.F. ''Jacquard Weaving and Designing''. UK: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1895.
  
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Blum, Herman. ''The Loom Has a Brain: The Story of the Jacquard Weaver’s Art''. PA: Craftex Mills, Inc., 1958.
  
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Crary, Jonathan. ''Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century''. MA: MIT Press, 1992.
  
-Technological Determinism (Winner, Mowshowitz):
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Flanagan, Mary. ''Reskinning the Everyday''. Ed. Flanagan and Booth. re:skin. MA: MIT Press, 2006.
  
· “The automatic draw-loom was perfected by Joseph Marie Jacquard at the close of the eighteenth century. This loom used a perforated prism (in conjunction with cards) instead of a perforated cylinder, and incorporated a lifting mechanism which the weaver himself operated with a treadle” (Mowshowitz, 34)
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Keats, Jonathan. “Origins: The Mechanical Loom”. ''Scientific America'', No. 301, Issue 3, 2009. Pg. 88.
  
· “… the importance of these advances in the textile industry for computing technology lies in the elaboration of an automatic sequence-control mechanism which is differentiated from the process it controls. The system of cards used to encode a pattern in the Jacquard loom constituted an effectively unbounded medium for storing information, and lent itself quite naturally to the control of a sequence of computations, once the parallel was understood. That the parallel was understood may be a reflection of certain intrinsic features of modern society” (Mowshowitz, 34).
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Kittler, Friedrich A. ''Gramophone, Film, Typewriter''. CA: Stanford University Press, 1986.  
  
· “Manufacturing in particular came to depend less and less upon complex human skills. In order to achieve speed and reliability in production, the role of the craftsman was diminished by a systematic resolution of manufacturing processes into primitive operations. Scientific understanding advanced in proportion as the terms of ordinary human experience were isolated, refined and transformed into measurable quantities. The spirit of reductionism is an effective principle in the modern world. It is thus no accident that the automatic sequence-control mechanism of the Jacquard loom inspired the vision of Babbage” (34). “Hierarchical structure facilitates specialization at all levels, and permits the functions of management to be differentiated from the operations of production. The advantages of this arrangement can be appreciated by analogy with the Jacquard loom in which control is exercised as a distinctive component of the weaving process” (Mowshowitz, 45-46).
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McLuhan, Marshall. ''Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man''. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994.
  
I argue that the Jacquard loom has undoubtedly contributed towards advancements in the development of computers, but that it itself is not an analog computer; it lends itself to the function and control of a sequence of computations, but not an actual medium of program control.
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"Skin." ''Oxford English Dictionary''. 2nd ed. 1989. Online.
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<http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>
  
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Stone, Nick. “Jacquard Weaving and the Magnolia Tapestry Project”. ''Magnolia Editions'', 2007. Web. April 18, 2010.
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<http://www.magnoliaeditions.com/Content/PressRelease/Magnolia_Tapestry_Proj.pdf>
  
-Material Specificity and Function argument:
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"Touch." ''Oxford English Dictionary''. 2nd ed. 1989. Online.
-Davis and Davis:
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<http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>
-Rojas and Hashagen:
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·      The Jacquard loom is another example in which a machine automaton, while it does compute a ‘finite set of primitive functions’, it does not execute a program and is therefore not what one would consider computation at a program control level more than just a sequence control level.
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Woodhouse, Thomas. ''Jacquards and Harnesses''. MacMillan and Co., 1923.  
·      “The process of weaving does not depend on the cards that control the selection of warp threads. The loom has only one state and always executes the same single function: raise a set of warp threads before bringing in the filling thread. Therefore the loom weaves a pattern corresponding to the holes in the cards. The cards can be considered an analogy to the weaving pattern and not a program” (60). “The cylinders of most musical automata, like the set of cards in the Jacquard loom, are interchangeable parts; another melody can be played or another pattern woven quite easily. So the control sequence can be either an inherent part of the machine or put on an external medium. However, and this is my point here, pegged cylinders and Jacquard cards can be used for program control in other machines, but their use does not necessarily imply that the machines are program controlled” (61-62).  
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Latest revision as of 10:49, 24 November 2010

Jacquard Loom
Punched Cards



Jacquard's mechanical additions to the handloom gave rise to new, concrete media and sensory-specific effects that reflected changing stages in perception at the eve of the 18th century and the introduction into the 19th. The mechanized mediation of the self is also reflected through the fruit of this mechanized loom, where instead of two or three human operators, it reduced human agency down to one operator per machine, reducing the time and human presence necessary to complete the same quantity and quality of weaving. The diminishing of human agency and the increase of mechanized forms of labor paralleled the dismantling of the 18th century conception of the 'human sensorium', only to find that the mechanical jacquard loom devoured this mode of sensory mediation to reveal a new one: weaving as a mediatic skin interface. The mechanized weave altered the skeleton and structure of the woven product, setting it apart from its hand woven precursors by introducing the weave as a threaded matrix as opposed to a solid piece of block colors. The woven skin-as-interface captured both the rise of the physiological division of sensory faculties in the 19th century, and the violent erasure of human agency in the craft and production of mechanized weaving, channeling the idea that McLuhan first introduced that media are ever extensions of ourselves (McLuhan, 7).



Joseph-Marie Jacquard and His Weaving Automaton

A Tapestry Portrait of Joseph-Marie Jacquard


In 1801, Joseph-Marie Jacquard exhibited a machine that mechanized the labor of weaving colored patterns in textiles. Promptly in 1806, France claimed it as property of the state and it soon afterward became the primary method of commercial weaving.

Joseph-Marie Jacquard came up with the idea of putting a pattern into holes on a card to produce a fabric design mechanically. He housed this punch card system in his mechanized loom, and produced a two-part machine consisting of the loom and the Jacquard frame, often just called the 'Jacquard'. The loom stood fastened to the floor, with the Jacquard frame suspended from the ceiling, resting on heavy beams. The loom incorporated the punch cards lined in order with each punch card pertaining to a row on the tapestry design, and a lifting mechanism, which the weaver himself operated with a treadle, eradicating the need for a draw boy or an assistant to orchestrate the shedding action. The Jacquard was responsible for housing the shedding mechanism away from the loom itself, and consisted of a series of vertical hooks from the bottom of which drew the harness cords together to operate them, connecting the loom and Jacquard together in mechanistic synchronicity.

The weaving action in both hand and mechanized looms utilized the warp and weft threads as coordinates. The warp threads ran parallel to the length of the weave, and the weft threads ran parallel to the width of the weave. The Jacquard performed the shedding mechanism by lifting each individual warp thread independently of the others, and reading the perforated cards. Each perforation corresponded to a single warp thread, and each weft was interlaced either over or under the warp threads depending on the presence or absence of a perforated hole. It was noted that unlike traditional hand weaving, the weft threads covered the entire span of the tapestry, so that the image was “composed of a matrix of warp and weft” (Stone, 1). The loom could be 'programmed', and patterns could be modified or switched by rearranging or replacing the card deck, creating a feedback loop between weaver, cards and loom (Keats, 88). The Jacquard cards provided a selecting medium for pattern-weaving that was applicable to both hand and power looms, and while the loom mechanism did eliminate the need for extra hands to be present and man the machine, it required a whole new level of pre-production and design planning to create the cards that would correspond to the desired pattern. At the time, there were perhaps fewer "[types] of mechanism where more accuracy was required than in the various machines which are employed for the preparation of Jacquard cards for the loom” (Woodhouse, 1), whether they be human or mechanical in nature.

Weave as Skin Interface

“Adam and Eve were undoubtedly our first customers for textiles. The moment they discarded their fig leaf, there was created an immediate market for textile garments” (Blum, 4)



Nakedness requires an acknowledgment of discarded shields or skins, to cover the original skin. Textiles, in both in their artificial mimesis of skin as well as the necessary negation of skin in the act of covering it, provide an interesting point of reflection in which the body itself is mediated as a site of both visuality and touch. The further the mechanized process goes to cover the originary skin, the greater the art of deception, and correspondingly, the violence of inscription. As seen in the Oxford English Dictionary definition of 'skin', it is both "the natural external covering or integument of an animal removed from the body" and "the substance, esp. as a material for clothing"; this skin can also be "dressed and prepared as a surface for writing" (OED, "skin"). The weave coming out of the Jacquard loom tells a story about the medium much in the same way that "blueprints and diagrams, regardless of whether they control printing presses or mainframe computers, may yield historical traces of the unknown called the body" (Kittler, xl). The weave as a skin product here extends strongly beyond commerce or function, but carry what “remains of people… what media can store and communicate. What counts are not the messages or the content with which they equip so-called souls for the duration of a technological era, but rather… their circuits, the very schematism of perceptibility” (Kittler, xl-xli). In search of the traces of a missing body, then, one may find in the inscriptions of the mechanized matrix of warp and weft the lingering remains of a skin interface.

The associative trend for explaining the importance of the Jacquard loom in media history has been to relate it to early computer history, as seen in various accounts of various inventors remediated the Jacquard loom punch card in order to conceive of computational devices such as Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine and the Hollerith Punch Card. To flip the focus here, the loom may be viewed as a manifestation of a computer-based concept, the interface. Interfaces have multiple dimensions, and they "are the means through which we take clues and signals in a given culture. Learning new interface systems changes our behavior” (Flanagan, 306). The Jacquard loom set up an interface of mechanical and symbolically potent significance in the mediation of weaving: through the mechanization of hand-weaving, it changed the way the weave itself was fabricated, even if the way we perceive it as a whole appears unruptured. The weave produced by the Jacquard loom is likened to both a matrix and an epidermis, a skin interface “to describe an underlying topology of the self” (Flanagan, 312). This synthetic epidermis produces a weave of colors like skin pigmentation in its complexity. The texture is much like scar tissue, and indeed, the Jacquard punch cards are riddled with puncture holes, which must be sutured with thread much like bodily fiber and sinew to close the wound—the violence of the human agent, wiped out.

The human operator mechanism is reduced to one, and in its stead the loom spits out a mechanized weave, a skin to recall those eliminated. Through this assimilative act, the art of weaving itself changes in its sensory manifestation as well. The act of weaving on handlooms typically translated the original design through a process that resembled paint-by-numbers, in which "the cartoon is divided into regions, each of which is assigned a solid color based on a standard palette" (Stone, 2). Jacquard weaving differs in that the "repeating series of multicolored warp and weft threads can be used to create colors that are optically blended" (2). The eye apprehended the threads' combination of colors as a single color, which is a method that has been likened to pointillism. Pointillism itself originated from the discoveries madeby Eugène Chevreul a French chemist working at the time for Les Gobelins tapestry works in Paris. Chevreul, who was responsible also for developing the color wheel of primary and intermediary hues, noticed from his work at Les Gobelins that the perceived color of a particular thread was influenced by its surrounding threads, a phenomenon he called 'simultaneous contrast'" (2). The effect of constructing the tapestry with the weft threads spanning the entire width of the piece, the image composed is a pointillist matrix of warp and weft interlaced so that the colors that comprise the image no longer are contained but are interspersed to give the illusion of a solid block of color. The gradients of the piece created a pigmented, interwoven image instead of the categorical division of colors, and channeled a complicated texture of reality not unlike the surface texture and pigmentation of human skin itself. The texture of the weave itself undergoes a change; the visual illusion of ‘seamless’ imagery made in a reality of a concentrated matrix of pointillist coordinates. That something so aesthetically pleasing as a whole may look so grotesque up-close reveals the telling nature of the mechanized weave as uncanny product that causes one to distrust the senses, the danger always being that our mediatic systems may produce an “interface effect, to the point where people take leave of their senses” (Kittler, 2).


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Chuck Close Self Portrait on Tapestry


Refuted Touch

The mechanized weave manifested itself first, then its observer, after. With its appearance, the jacquard loom fulfilled the priming action to prepare history for a new kind of sensory mediation where “these sense perceptions had to be fabricated first” (Kittler, 3). The Jacquard loom was a site of simultaneous separation of tasks in both technological and sensorial aspects. On one hand, the weaver moved from the immediate interaction of creating the tapestry only to relegate the tasks to the machine itself. On the other, the loom presented a site-specific body of a medium in history that housed the separation of the senses, where touch divorced vision as a holistic informant of the 18th century 'unified human sensorium' (Crary, 60). The chorus of hands diminished to one pair; human touch reduced, yet the weaving continued. The touch of hands used to mediate an understanding, or as the Oxford English Dictionary terms it, “To put the hand or finger, or some other part of the body, upon, or into contact with (something) so as to feel it; ‘to exercise the sense of feeling upon’”, “to bring (two things) into mutual contact to examine by touch or feeling” and “to bring by touching into some condition” (OED, “touch”). The knowledge of making one’s way around the world through tactile skill was overcome by mechanized performance, shifting sensory mediations from touch to sight.

Touch, and whatever 'conditions' and knowledge its 'mutual contact' brought along with it (OED, "touch"), was shunted out of critical thought from the decline of the 18th century into the rise of the 19th, which focused on the visual with the rising occupation with physiology. Jonathan Crary argues that the sense of touch, integral in the classical theories of vision in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gives way to a "subsequent dissociation of touch from sight", a "pervasive ‘separation of the senses’ and industrial remapping of the body in the nineteenth century" (Crary, 19). The product of the loom, as if to foreshadow the division of such perceptual thought, produced a tapestry made not of concrete components for an image-as-whole, but a latticed, sinuous weave that rejected the 18th century perception of vision and the senses as blocks categorically placed to create a holistic and cohesive whole in favor of a matrix or grid that threaded discrete and independent coordinates into a woven product. Bell’s account of Jacquard weaving and design works simultaneously with this shift in sensory attention by observing all the ways in which shade, lighting, and Chevreul’s concept of simultaneous contrast may bring about the greatest effect for “showing up the pattern on the damask”, where “it is the business of the designer to regulate what form it is to partake of” (Bell, 4-5). The product here is meant primarily now for a vision severed from the human sensorium that works parallel reflexivity with the woven matrix. Crary notes that the "loss of touch as a conceptual component of vision meant the unloosening of the eye from the network of referentiality incarnated in tactility and its subjective relation to perceived space” (19). The human touch loses sense of itself and surrenders it to the Jacquard loom: "[It] is uncanny in its precision. In its coordinated movements, it appears to have the selective powers of the human brain and the dexterity of living fingers” (Blum, 34). The human operative power over the Jacquard loom seems to merely be the supervision of sight to confirm the design and the operation work in tandem; the human weaver here is merely an eye.

The introduction of the jacquard loom thus symbolizes the violent erasure of two agents—the human operator, and a sensory mode of mediation in history. The "orderly accumulation and cross-referencing of perceptions on a plane independent of the viewer" (Crary, 59) contained the senses in a manifest, discrete network of 'reciprocal assistance' (60), an eighteenth-century thought that "could know nothing of the ideas of pure visibility to arise in the nineteenth century” (59). Instead of allowing such a sensually logical system to 'transcend its mere physical mode of functioning' (60), the Jacquard loom pointed to the human inadequacy to perceive and supervise all aspects of the loom's mechanisms at once. The woven product in turn, this matrix of warp and weft threads, pointed to the surpassing of the 18th century concept of an ‘overriding of the immediate subjective evidence of the body’ (60) in favor of the unexpected: the material resemblance to a skin interface to channel in the 19th century’s specific visuality-as-physiology. Once the perceived whole was eliminated, the complete sensorium dismantled from the human, what was left in his stead was the metonymic operator. Where did the missing pieces of human sensory agency go? The 19th century moves towards the “fabrication of so-called Man", whose "essence escapes into apparatuses” (Kittler, 16). The jacquard loom assumed some of the human tasks and produced in its place the missing skin that spoke for the eliminated sense of touch, a replacement for the fractured human sensorium.

Works Cited

Bell, T.F. Jacquard Weaving and Designing. UK: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1895.

Blum, Herman. The Loom Has a Brain: The Story of the Jacquard Weaver’s Art. PA: Craftex Mills, Inc., 1958.

Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. MA: MIT Press, 1992.

Flanagan, Mary. Reskinning the Everyday. Ed. Flanagan and Booth. re:skin. MA: MIT Press, 2006.

Keats, Jonathan. “Origins: The Mechanical Loom”. Scientific America, No. 301, Issue 3, 2009. Pg. 88.

Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. CA: Stanford University Press, 1986.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994.

"Skin." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Online. <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>

Stone, Nick. “Jacquard Weaving and the Magnolia Tapestry Project”. Magnolia Editions, 2007. Web. April 18, 2010. <http://www.magnoliaeditions.com/Content/PressRelease/Magnolia_Tapestry_Proj.pdf>

"Touch." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Online. <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>

Woodhouse, Thomas. Jacquards and Harnesses. MacMillan and Co., 1923.