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]]
  
  
  
  
Nakedness required 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, provides an interesting point of reflection in which the body itself is mediated as a site of both visuality and touch. The greater the mechanized process goes to cover the originary skin, the greater the art of deception, and correspondingly, the violence of inscription.
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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).  
  
The definition of the loom is telling in the duality of textiles and the act of producing it through weaving: the loom is both the 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.) Both tool and implement; for both steering and weaving.
 
  
The weave produced by the Jacquard loom is likened to both a matrix and an epidermis, a skin interface. 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 punchcards are riddled with puncture holes, which must be sutured with thread much like bodily fiber and sinew together with a wound.
 
  
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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== Joseph-Marie Jacquard and His Weaving Automaton ==
  
  
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[[File:Silk-jacquard-memoire.jpg|200px|thumb|left|A Tapestry Portrait of Joseph-Marie Jacquard]]
  
  
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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.
  
== Short History: Joseph-Marie Jacquard and His Weaving Automaton ==
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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.
  
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 weaving as it introduced greater speed and efficiency.  
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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 ==
  
'''Description of parts and how it works as a weaving medium''':
 
  
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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)
  
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 mechanism in his mechanized invention of the hand-loom, thus producing a two-part machine consisting of the loom itself and the jacquard frame, often itself just called the 'jacquard'. The loom stood fastened to the floor, with the jacquard frame suspended from the ceiling, resting on heavy beams. 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 utilize the warp and weft threads as coordinates. The warp threads run parallel to the length of the weave, and the weft threads run parallel to the width of the weave.
 
The jacquard works with the loom by lifting each individual warp and reading the perforated cards. Each perforation corresponds to a single warp thread, and each weft is interlaced either over or under the warp threads depending on the presence or absence of a perforated hole. It is noted that unlike traditional hand weaving, the weft threads cover the entire span of the tapestry, so that the image is 'composed of a matrix of warp and weft' (Stone, 1).In this way, the loom could be 'programmed', and patterns could be modified or switched by rearranging or replacing the card deck (Keats, 88). This improvement dispensed of the necessary drawboy services, wherein the necessary hand-labor prior would utilize many workers just to keep the threads in place and maintain the rate of production. Now, the loom incorporated a lifting mechanism which the weaver himself operated with a treadle.
 
  
The jacquard cards provided a selecting medium for pattern-weaving that was applicable to both hand and power looms, and while it 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 design. There was perhaps "no type of mechanism where more accuracy was required than in the various machines which are employed for the preparation of jacquard cards for the loom”, whether they be human or mechanical in nature (Woodhouse, 1).
 
  
These noticeable effects emerged from the introduction of the jacquard loom: 1) instead of two or three human operators, there was only the need for one to be present with the machine; 2) the effect of the weave itself underwent a material change in its make-up. These had media and site-specific effects that portrayed the pivotal yet caught-in-between stage that the jacquard loom found itself in at the eve of the 18th century and the cusp of the 19th in regards to sensory perception, technical performance expectations, and the mediation of the self reflected through the fruit of this mechanized labor.
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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.  
  
== Skin ==
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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.
  
• Skin (micro, medium)
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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).
  
  
interface:
 
Flanagan, Mary. Reskinning the Everyday. Ed. Flanagan and Booth. re:skin. MA: MIT Press, 2006.
 
• Since the pervasive language reappropriates the jacquard loom to usher in the computer, I will do the opposite and utilize concept of the digital interface to address the jacquard loom and weaving.
 
• Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1967. For McLuhan, all media spring forth from the mind as “any extension of ourselves” (McLuhan, 7).
 
  
• “Interfaces are the means through which we take clues and signals in a given culture. Learning new interface systems changes our behavior” (306).
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[[File:Magnoliaweave.png]]
  
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[[File:CloseColorSelfPortraitTapestryDetail.JPG|300px|thumb|right|Chuck Close Self Portrait on Tapestry]]
  
  
How we perceive the weave:
 
  
·      “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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== Refuted Touch ==
  
·      “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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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.
  
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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.
  
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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.
  
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== Works Cited ==
  
[[File:Magnoliaweave.png]]
 
  
== Touch ==
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Bell, T.F. ''Jacquard Weaving and Designing''. UK: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1895.  
• Touch as mediation (the inter-act-ion) passé.
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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.
  
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. MA: MIT Press, 1992.  
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Flanagan, Mary. ''Reskinning the Everyday''. Ed. Flanagan and Booth. re:skin. MA: MIT Press, 2006.  
  
• Here, you want to show the crux of the point where touch itself goes out of critical thought from the wane of the 18th century into the web of the 19th, which focuses on the visual through the jacquard loom (59).  
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Keats, Jonathan. “Origins: The Mechanical Loom”. ''Scientific America'', No. 301, Issue 3, 2009. Pg. 88.  
• Touch: 19, 59-64, 122-124, and with vision, 57, 60.
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• “I indicate how the sense of touch had been an integral part of classical theories of vision in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The subsequent dissociation of touch from sight occurs within a pervasive ‘separation of the senses’ and industrial remapping of the body in the nineteenth century. 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).
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• The Molyneux problem: “But regardless of how the problem was ultimately answered, whether the claim was nativist or empiricist, the testimony of the senses constituted for the eighteenth century a common surface of order. The problem quite simply was how the passage from one order of sense perception to another took place… how the senses could ‘reconvene’, that is, come together in the perceiver” (58).  
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• “By insisting that knowledge, and specifically knowledge of space and depth, is built up out of an orderly accumulation and cross-referencing of perceptions on a plane independent of the viewer, eighteenth-century thought could know nothing of the ideas of pure visibility to arise in the nineteenth century” (59).  
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• “The certainty of knowledge did not depend solely on the eye but on a more general relation of a unified human sensorium to a delimited space of order on which positions could be known and compared. In a sighted person, the senses are dissimilar, but through what Diderot calls ‘reciprocal assistance’ they provide knowledge about the world” (60).
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• The 18th century supports an ‘overriding of the immediate subjective evidence of the body’ (60).
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• “Even in Diderot, a so-called materialist, the senses are conceived more as adjuncts of a rational mind and less as physiological organs. Each sense operates according to an immutable semantic logic that transcends its mere physical mode of functioning” (60).
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• “The notion of vision as touch is adequate to a field of knowledge whose contents are organized as stable positions within an extensive terrain. But in the nineteenth century such a notion became incompatible with a field organized around exchange and flux, in which a knowledge bound up in touch would have been irreconcilable with the centrality of mobile signs and commodities whose identity is exclusively optical” (62).
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• The new mode of perception/reality is through tangibility, which has nothing to do with the ‘reciprocal assistance’ between sight and touch that Diderot supports (124).
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== Site ==
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Kittler, Friedrich A. ''Gramophone, Film, Typewriter''. CA: Stanford University Press, 1986.
• Site (the macro, container): Performance, text and structure
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Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. CA: Stanford University Press, 1986.  
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McLuhan, Marshall. ''Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man''. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994.
  
• “Pushed to their margins even obsolete media become sensitive enough to register the signs and clues of a situation. Then, as in the case of the sectional plane of two optical media, patterns and moirés emerge: myths, fictions of science, oracles…” (xl).
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"Skin." ''Oxford English Dictionary''. 2nd ed. 1989. Online.  
• Understanding media… remains an impossibility precisely because the dominant information technologies of the day control all understanding and its illusions. But blueprints and diagrams, regardless of whether they control printing presses or mainframe computers, may yield historical traces of the unknown called the body. What remains of people is 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” (xl-xli).  
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<http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>
• [Our media systems] do not produce an output that, under computer control, transforms any algorithm into any interface effect, to the point where people take leave of their senses” (2)
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• Re: technological differentiation of optics, acoustics and writing around 1880: “The fabrication of so-called Man became possible. His essence escapes into apparatuses. Machines take over functions of the central nervous system, and no longer, as in times past, merely those of muscles” (16).
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• Film: seriality, continous or discrete data from the weaving?
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• Typewriter: Martin Heidegger on the Hand and the Typewriter (1942-43):
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Just as “the typeweriter is not really a machine in the strict sense of machine technology, but is an ‘intermediate’ thing, between a tool and a machine, a mechanism. Its production, however, is conditioned by machine technology. This ‘machine’, operated in the closest vicinity of the word, is in use; it imposes its own use. Even if we do not actually operate this machine, it demands that we regard it if only to renounce and avoid it” (200). ← Ties into the fear that the workers had and the desire to renounce the loom because of its potential to render them jobless.
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• “A media-technological basis of classical authorship that typewriting simply liquidates: ‘By contrast, after one briefly presses down on a key, the typewriter creates in the proper position on the paper a complete letter, which is not only untouched by the writer’s hand but also located in a place entirely apart from where the hands work.’”… “‘the spot where the next sign to be written occurs’ is ‘precisely what… cannot be seen’” (203).
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• André Breton: “it is a location by position” (205).
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• These three coincide: “the equipment, the thing, and the agent” (206).
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• “… humans change their position—they turn from the agency of writing to become an inscription surface” (210)
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• “A type of writing that blindly dismembers body parts and perforates human skin necessarily stems from typewriters built before 1897” (210) … “Hansen did not even have types and a ribbon. Instead, the writing paper was perforated by needle pins—inscribing, for example, in a rather Nietzchean manner, the proper name of the inventor” (211). Again, “Hello, World”.
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• “Composing and dictating into a machine are… in word and deed one thing and the same thing” (211).  
+
  
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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>
  
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"Touch." ''Oxford English Dictionary''. 2nd ed. 1989. Online.
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<http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/>
  
[[File:CloseColorSelfPortraitTapestryDetail.JPG|600px|thumb|right|Self Portrait of Chuck Close on tapestry from a mechanized Jacquard loom, Magnolia Editions]]
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Woodhouse, Thomas. ''Jacquards and Harnesses''. MacMillan and Co., 1923.
 
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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.