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).

Short History: Joseph-Marie Jacquard and His Weaving Automaton

Description of parts and how it works as a weaving medium:

Joseph-Marie Jacquard came up with the idea of putting a pattern into holes on a card to produce a fabric design mechanically (Blum, 77). He housed this mechanism in his mechanized invention of the hand-loom, thus producing a two-part machine conventionally known as the jacquard loom. The jacquard loom consists of two parts: the loom and the jacquard. The loom stands fastened to the floor, with the jacquard frame suspended from the ceiling, resting on heavy beams. The jacquard is responsible for housing the shedding mechanism away from the loom itself and consists of a series of vertical hooks from the bottom of which extend the harness cords together to operate them. The harness, a series of interlaced cords, connects the loom and the jacquard together. The documented dimensions of the jacquard loom in one account comes to "72 square feet of floor space, some 16 feet high and [a weight of] over 4,000 pounds (Blum, 34). 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).

Skin

• Skin (micro, medium)

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).

Touch

• Touch as mediation (the inter-act-ion).

Site

• Site (the macro, container): Performance, text and structure

Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. CA: Stanford University Press, 1986. • “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). • 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). • [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) • 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). • Film: seriality, continous or discrete data from the weaving? • Typewriter: Martin Heidegger on the Hand and the Typewriter (1942-43): 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. • “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). • André Breton: “it is a location by position” (205). • These three coincide: “the equipment, the thing, and the agent” (206). • “… humans change their position—they turn from the agency of writing to become an inscription surface” (210) • “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”. • “Composing and dictating into a machine are… in word and deed one thing and the same thing” (211).

Self Portrait of Chuck Close on tapestry from a mechanized Jacquard loom, Magnolia Editions