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.


Joseph-Marie Jacquard in Tapestry: Hello, World!

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.


Text is as tissue as tissue is to the body, skin, and as tissue is to linen which is to tapestry and weave.

The trend for explaining the importance of the Jacquard loom in media history is 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. The focus can be reversed so that the loom can be viewed as a manifestation of a contemporary concept, the interface. Conceived at the crossroads of one century into another, the Jacquard loom can be seen as a mechanical 'skin interface', one that operates to reveal new facets springing forth from the mind as 'any extension of ourselves' (McLuhan, 7). Interfaces have multiple dimensions, and by definition "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 signficance 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.

How we perceive the weave: Typically, the tapestries from hand-looms were tranlsated from 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 therads can be used to create colors that are optically blended" (2). The eye apprehends 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.


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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.


The weaver used to oversee all operational mechanisms directly in the procedure of weaving on the hand loom, but with the advent of the Jacquard loom, a great number of the tasks including the most difficult, the interlacing of warp and weft threads to combine into complex design patterns, were relegated to the machine. The effect resulted in a product materially and visually indistinguishable from hand-woven tapestries, but the form and structure of it differed in terms of the actual make-up of hand-woven products. This introduction of a tapestry matrix signaled a pivotal change in sensory perception between the 18th and 19th century. 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 with the rising occupation with physiology. What happens with the Jacquard loom is a simultaneous separation of tasks, in which the weaver moves from the immediate interaction of creating the tapestry only to relegate the tasks to the machine itself, as well as a separation of the senses which divorces touch as a holistic informant of the 18th century 'unified human sensorium' from vision (60). 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, produces a tapestry made not of concrete components for an image-as-whole, but a latticed yet sinuous weave that rejects the 18th century perception of vision and the senses as block, holistic and cohesive whole in favor of a disjointed, tenuously threaded sensory web or grid (word this better!) (Crary, 60). 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 "orderly accumulation and cross-referencing of perceptions on a plane independent of the viewer" (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 points to the human inadequacy to perceive and supervise all aspects of the loom's mechanisms at once, and the woven product itself, the matrix of warp and weft threads, points 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 physiological resemblance to a skin interface to channel in the 19th century.

-What the experience of operating and weaving on the jacquard loom kills is the 18th century mode of mediated sensory perception as a whole. You take out the perceived whole, the complete sensorium out of the human, and you're left with the metonymic operator. Where do the missing pieces of human sensory agency go? The 19th century moves towards 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). The jacquard loom assumes some of the human tasks and produces in its place the missing skin that echoes the eliminated sense of touch.

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.

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


"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” (Kittler, 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” (Kittler, 2)


Just as “the typewriter 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” (Kittler, 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). “Composing and dictating into a machine are… in word and deed one thing and the same thing” (211).


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

“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” (Mowshowitz, 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).

“If performance is our mist, our mad atmosphere, it’s also capable of becoming stratified, of leaving a historical sediment of effects that we can read in both words and actions” (McKenzie, 3).



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



REMEMBER NOT TO HIJACK YOURSELF





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.

McKenzie, Jon. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. NY: Routledge, 2001.

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

Mowshowitz, Abbe. The Conquest of the Will: Information Processing in Human Affairs. MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1976.

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>

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