Difference between revisions of "Jacquard Loom"

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(Visuality and Chevreul (Kittler, Crary))
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[[File:CloseColorSelfPortraitTapestryDetail.JPG|600px|thumb|right|Self Portrait of Chuck Close on Tapestry, Magnolia Editions]]
 
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[[File:CloseColorSelfPortraitTapestryDetail.JPG|thumb|right|Self Portrait of Chuck Close on Tapestry, Magnolia Editions]]
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== Old Media (Manovich) ==
 
== Old Media (Manovich) ==

Revision as of 14:10, 22 April 2010

“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).





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.

· 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.

· 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)




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).

- “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).

- weft (parallel to width) and warp (parallel to length)

- 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, ?)

The separation of technical and cultural performativity from hereon...

-Caught in a web of changing perceptions of who operates, who inscribes, and who performs? (Gitelman, Vismann, perhaps? Outside sources) -New modes of address, then.

Visuality and Chevreul (Kittler, Crary)

-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.

· “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).


Self Portrait of Chuck Close on Tapestry, Magnolia Editions

Old Media (Manovich)

--> Obsolete mode of mediation? (Lev Manovich) -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…

· “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).

· 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! 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?

Legacy: Computers and Control (Winner, Mowshowitz)

-Is it a legitimate early computer? Davis and Davis;


-Technological Determinism (Winner, Mowshowitz):

· “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)

· “… 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).

· “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).

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.


-Material Specificity and Function argument: -Davis and Davis: -Rojas and Hashagen: · 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. · “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).