loom – dave's blog of art and programming

“The mystery of the drawdown”

Double weave has intrigued me since first figuring out how it works with tablets – it shows how weaving is a 3D process, and is an example of shape making from code. It’s the starting point for more advanced methods for creating strong woven composite materials and structures. I’ve been reading this document by Paul O’Connor to understand the process for a 4 shaft loom. He includes this critique on current methods for visualising weaving:

The traditional method for creating the drawdown shows all the warp and all the weft threads in one layer. What is needed is a way to make two drawdowns, one for the top cloth layer and the other for the bottom cloth layer. Most of the commercially available computer weave programs display the drawdown in this same fashion, as a single layer.

This is a draft plan (the traditional notation technique) for double weave which contains the drawdown he’s talking about:

Drawdowns are designed for thinking about weaving as 2D pattern, and like any notation system they abstract a situation so we can reason about it, with the trade-off that they make it impossible to understand different aspects. This is a big problem we have in programming too – and is the reason we need to have many levels and hundreds of different languages to describe problems. I’ve noticed that if people (or organisations) stick with one too long, the specialisation starts to hinder ability to even recognise certain issues. It’s interesting to see such a clear analogy here.

In order to see what’s really happening with double weave, we need to switch to a different notation and look at the structure more closely:

Hopefully you can see that all of the black threads are sitting on top of all the white threads, and forms it’s own plain or tabby weave fabric. The same is true for the white threads underneath. Below is the same structure rendered in the weavecoding dyadic device – this shows the heddles that need raising to create the sheds in the lift plan, and you can see a repeating zigzag pattern. As an aside, I’ve noticed that there seems to be some kind of underlying categorisation of lift plan patterns which I’ve not found mentioned anywhere yet – something else to look into at some point.

Dyadic device: a 4 shaft loom simulation.

On the train back from the Sheffield codingweaves workshops back in October I wrote a quick browser program to attempt to further understand the relationship between structure and pattern in weaving – which I’ve put online here. This works in the inverse of how we’ve been writing weaving simulation programs so far. Instead of defining the pattern you want directly, you are describing the set up of a 4 shaft loom – so the warp threads that each of 4 shafts pick up in the top row of toggle boxes, then which shafts are picked up for each weft thread as the fabric is woven on the right.

This involved writing a program that is based closely on how a loom functions – for example calculating a shed (the gap between ordered warp thread) by folding over each shaft in turn and or-ing each warp thread to calculate which ones are picked up. This really turns out to be the core of the algorithm – here’s a snippet:

;; 'or's two lists together:
;; (list-or (list 0 1 1 0) (list 0 0 1 1)) => (list 0 1 1 1)
(define (list-or a b)
  (map2
   (lambda (a b)
     (if (or (not (zero? a)) (not (zero? b))) 1 0))
   a b))

;; calculate the shed, given a lift plan position counter
;; shed is 0/1 for each warp thread: up/down
(define (loom-shed l lift-counter)
  (foldl
   (lambda (a b)
     (list-or a b))
   (build-list (length (car (loom-heddles l))) (lambda (a) 0))
   (loom-heddles-raised l lift-counter)))

I’ve become quite obsessed with this program, spending quite a lot of time with it trying to understand how the loom setup corresponds to the patterns. Here are some example weaves that you can try. Colour wise, in all these examples the order is fixed – both the warp and the weft alternate light/dark yarns.

This is tabby or plain weave – the simplest and strongest weave (used for sails and hard wearing fabric). The striped pattern is a result of this alternating colour order.

Basket weave – doubling the plain weave, results in a zigzag pattern.

This is called 2×2 twill, the structure provides a stretchy fabric, often used for clothes. Notice that the pattern in the same as the basket weave even though the structure is different – this is a hint at how structure and pattern are linked in strange ways (it gets much more complex than this of course).

I’ve become very interested in this threading pattern for the shafts as it results in lots of interesting patterns. This is an example of connected boxes.

A slight shift and we can obtain meanders, an important motif of the kairotic project. It turns out this is a highly unstable structure due to the length of the ‘floats’ – the threads spending too long without being incorporated back into the weave. More on that later on.

Here’s a more freeform weave where I switch patterns between different types by changing the lift order. Much like music, it’s possible to switch patterns in a nice way that doesn’t interrupt the flow.

Next up is building a real loom to try these patterns out in thread form.

Unravelling technology in Copenhagen

Last week the weavingcodes/codingweaves project started with a trip to Denmark, our first stop was the Centre for Textiles Research in Copenhagen where we presented the project and gathered as much feedback as possible right at the beginning. The CTR was introduced to us by Eva Andersson Strand, and is an interdisciplinary centre which focuses on the relationships between textiles, environment and society.

This long-view perspective of technology is critical for us, as we are dealing with a combination of thinking in the moment via livecoding and a history of technology dating back to the neolithic. This is a warp weighted loom, the focus of much of Ellen Harlizius-KlÃ¼ck’s research and the technology we are going to be using for the project.

Weights like this are widespread in the archaeological record for many cultures around the world, with the earliest ones around 5000 BC. Similarly – a post-it note including a handy cuneiform translation:

Alex talked about livecoding as a backwards step, removing the interface – thinking about it as an unravelling of technology. His introduction to Algorave led to many connections later when Giovanni Fanfani described the abstract rhythmic patterns of Homeric rhapsodic poetry. These were performed by citizens, in a collaborative and somewhat improvised manner – the structures they form musically and in language are potentially of interest as they seem to echo the logic of weaving pattern.

Ellen described her research into tacit knowledge of ancient Greek society – how weaving provided thinking styles and ordering concepts for the earliest forms of mathematics and science which is the basis for much of the weavingcodes project. One additional theme that has come up fairly consistently is cryptography – Flavia Carraro’s description of ‘The Grid in the decipherment of the Linear B writing system: a “paper-Ââ€loom”?’ was another addition to this area.

Emma Cocker talked about Peneolopeian time – constant weaving and unravelling as a subversive act, and the concept of the kairos, as a timely action – the name given to the point at which the weft is made when the warp ‘shed’ is provided, as well as a part of the warp weighted loom. Her input was to provide a broader view to our explorations (as coders, weavers and archaeologists all tend to get caught up in technical minutiae from time to time). From our discussions it was apparent that one of the strongest connections between livecoding and ‘weaving as thought’ is a subversion of a form of work that is considered by the dominant culture as entirely utilitarian.

New Hardware

A Harris, 4 shaft table loom: