Infinite Weft (Exploring the Old Aesthetic)
Jer Thorp writes:
How can a textile function as a digital object? This is a central question of Infinite Weft, a project that I’ve been working on for a the last few months. The project is a collaboration with my mother, Diane Thorp, who has been weaving for almost 40 years – it’s a chance for me to combine my usually screen-based digital practice with her extraordinary hand-woven work. It’s also an exploration of mathematics, computational history, and the concept of pattern.
Most of us probably know that the loom played a part in the early days of computing – the Jacquard loom was the first machine to use punch cards, and its workings were very influential in the early design of programmable machines (In my 1980s basement this history was actually physically embodied; sitting about 10 feet away from my mother’s two floor looms, on an Ikea bookself, sat a box of IBM punch cards that we mostly used to make paper airplanes out of). But how many of us know how a loom actually works? Though I have watched my mother weave many times, it didn’t take long at the start of this project to realize that I had no real idea how the binary weaving patterns called ‘drawdowns‘ ended up making a pattern in a textile.
[graphic omitted]
To teach myself how this process actually happened, I built a functional software loom, where I could see the pattern manifest itself in the warp and weft (if you have Chrome you can see it in action here – better documentation is coming soon). This gave me a kind of sandbox which let me see how typical weaving patterns were constructed, and what kind of problems I could expect when I started to write my own. And run into problems, I did. My first attempts at generating patterns were sloppy and boring (at best) and the generative methods I was applying weren’t very successful. Enter Ralph E. Griswold.
By this point, “concept of pattern,” “punch cards,” “software loom,” and “Ralph E. Griswold,” I was completely hooked.
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