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).



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.

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.




Short History: Joseph-Marie Jacquard and His Weaving Automaton

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.


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. 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.

Skin

• Skin (micro, medium)

OED:

I. The natural external covering or integument of an animal removed from the body, and related uses.
   1. a. The natural external covering or integument of an animal removed from the body, esp. one which is dressed or tanned (with or without the fur) and used as a material for clothing or other items. Freq. in contrast with hide 
 b. As a mass noun: this as a substance, esp. as a material for clothing or other items. Freq. with modifying word.

2. A piece of animal skin, esp. from a sheep or goat, dressed and prepared as a surface for writing, or painting; a scroll or roll of this material. Freq. in skin of parchment, skin of vellum. Cf. PARCHMENT n. 1. 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).


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).

· “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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Touch

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


1. a. trans.  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’ (Phillips, 1696). Also with the hand, etc., as subject of the verb.

Constructions. b. To touch (a thing) with the hand or other part, or with some instrument.

c. To touch (the hand or other part, or something held) to ({dag}till) something, = to bring it into contact with something; with pl. obj.  to bring (two things) into mutual contact.
d. Med. To examine by touch or feeling: see TOUCH  n. 1c. Also absol.

e. To bring by touching into some condition.

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

• 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). • Touch: 19, 59-64, 122-124, and with vision, 57, 60. • “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). • 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). • “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). • “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). • The 18th century supports an ‘overriding of the immediate subjective evidence of the body’ (60). • “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). • “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). • 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).

Site

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


Performance:

1. a. The accomplishment or carrying out of something commanded or undertaken; the doing of an action or operation.
   b. The quality of execution of such an action, operation, or process; the competence or effectiveness of a person or thing in performing an action; spec.  the capabilities, productivity, or success of a machine, product, or person when measured against a standard.
   e. Psychol.  The observable or measurable behaviour of a person or animal in a particular, usually experimental, situation. Also as a count noun: an observable or measurable action.

2. A set of (fur) trimmings. Cf. PERFORM v. 8b; PERFORMING n. 2b. Obs. c1525 Skinner's Inventory in Codicil to Will of T. Burgh (Somerset Ho.), Item a performaunce of fox poutes xvjd... Item a performaunce of conye wombys xijd.

   3. The carrying out, discharge, or fulfilment of a command, duty, promise, purpose, responsibility, etc.; execution, discharge. Freq. opposed to promise.


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