13. FINAL¶

PRESENTATION¶

For my project, I would like to build my own open-source machine inspired by the Jacquard loom.

I grew up with a mom who was a weaver, and while studying textiles in school, I really fell in love with the TC2 digital Jacquard loom. This is a huge loom with over 2,600 threads that you are able to program patterns on through the computer. I made much of my work on this loom, but what really interested me was the machine itself. Through working closely with this machine, I learned to examine its edges, feel the shifts in tension, and listen to its noises. The TC2 functioned as an extension of me and was the first machine I felt I had a close enough relationship with to understand its inner workings. Now that I am no longer in school, it is incredibly difficult to get access to a digital Jacquard loom. Normal floor looms are great, but do not offer the same capabilities of weaving images. I would like to attempt to build some sort of mechanism that would allow "programming abilities" to continue weaving repeat images.

I was lucky enough to be able to see an open-source TC2 project at Dutch Design Week that they are working on at TU Eindhoven. This is really exciting; however, I feel like most digital Jacquard projects, even if open-source, remain fairly inaccessible to the public because of the complex electronics needed to individually control many threads. I would like my loom to have at least 100 warp threads, which would be very difficult and slow with at-home electronics. For my project, I'd like to look farther back into history to the loom's origins. The original Jacquard looms used a kind of physical programming through the use of punch cards. The punch card holds a pre-made pattern, and the order of holes dictates which threads can be lifted and when.

The Jacquard loom also represents a major shift in machine/human relations. This was one of the first looms to industrialize textile production, changing the industry completely. Textile workers rebelled against this new technology in an attempt to maintain agency in the mills. Making this machine open-source is a way of me engaging with this history and imagining a speculative scenario in which mechanized looms could exist outside of industrial environments.

This loom also fascinates me because it went on to inspire early computer designs. I have always been very drawn to this parallel as someone who makes work focusing on the intersection of textile craft and technology. Something as tangible as weaving is usually considered by many to be far removed from our digital worlds, but I think that this is a wonderful reminder that computers had very clunky, physical beginnings. I am interested in exploring this part of computer history as well as the labor, often done by women in running punch card data on these machines.

I am lucky to be in the lab with Asli who has already made an amazing open-source, four-shaft loom! Her project is worth taking a look at and is a big inspiration to me. Also, Kae made a great loom for Open Source Hardware Week which included electronics. Her loom is really playful, and I love the interaction she creates between weaver and loom.

I have also been looking at some open-source punch card-controlled machines made by Chris Fenton. He is interested in computation history and explores modernizing and redesigning old machines to be 3D printed. Another thing that has been helpful in understanding possible designs for loom mechanisms is the dobby loom.

An artist that really inspires me is Zsanett Szirmay, who uses textile punch card designs to create music box scores. Another big inspiration is Henrik Menne, who designs sculptural machines which function as performers in a gallery space. In this project, I would love to have a functional machine, but I am also equally interested in the aesthetic/emotional qualities of this as an object. I am interested in exploring the boundaries between machine and sculpture.

I am so interested in weaving images because I am fascinated by the relationship between pixel and woven structure. My past work has been a lot about mass-produced images and digitalization. I would source popular images from the arts and craft movement and abstract them into pixelated, low-quality images. I then would weave this into a Jacquard cloth. This is very much inspired by Hito Steyerl's "In Defense of the Poor Image," which talks about the aesthetic phenomena of the degradation of the digital image. Growing up immersed in digital landscapes, meme culture, and surrounded by an influx of online images, I am interested in translating this kind of "well-traveled," "well-loved" low-quality image into a physical object through textile.

Paper about the Luddite revolution, jacquard loom history Luddite Revolution

Patent and deisign of early jacquard looms Jaquard Loom patent

These are all videos that have been helping me figure out the how I want to design the mechanism of the loom