weavecoding – dave's blog of art and programming

Weavecoding performance experiments in Cornwall

Last week the weavecoding group met at Foam Kernow for our Cornish research gathering. As we approach the final stages of the project our discussions turn to publications, and which ideas from the start need revisiting. While they were here, I wanted to give local artists and researchers working with code and textiles a chance to meet Ellen, Emma and Alex. As we are a non-academic research organisation I wanted to avoid the normal powerpoint talks/coffee events and try something more informal and inclusive.

One of the original ideas we had was to combine weaving and coding in a performance setting, to both provide a way to make livecoding more inclusive with weaving, and at the same time to highlight the digital thought processes involved in weaving. Amber made vegetarian sushi for our audience and we set up the Jubilee Warehouse with a collection of experiments from the project:

The newly warped table loom with a live camera/projection from underneath the fabric as it was woven with codes for different weaves on post-it notes for people to try.
The tablet/inkle loom to represent ancient weaving techniques.
The pattern matrix tangible weavecoding machine and Raspberry Pi.
A brand new experiment by Francesca with a dancemat connected to the pattern matrix software for dance code weaving!
The slub livecoding setup.

This provided an opportunity for people to try things out and ask questions/provide discussion starting points. Our audience consisted of craft researchers, anthropological biologists, architects, game designers and technologists – so it all went on quite a lot longer than we anticipated! Alex and I provided some slub livecoded music to weave by, and my favourite part was the live weaving projection – with more projectors we could develop this combination of code and weaving performance more. Thanks to Emma for all the videos and photos!

Weavecoding Munich

Ellen’s exhibition in Munich was always going to be a pivotal event in the weavecoding project – one of the first opportunities to expose our work to a large audience. The Museum of casts of classical sculptures was the perfect context for the mythical aspects of weaving, overlooked by Penelope and friends with her subversive woven/unwoven work, we could explore the connections between livecoding and weaving.

Practically we focused on developing the tangible weavecoding exhibit for events later in the week, as well as discussing the many languages we have developed so far for different looms and weaving techniques. One of our discoveries is that none of the models or languages we have created seem sufficient in themselves – weaving could be far too big to be able to be described or solved from a single perspective. We’ve tried approaches describing weave structures from the actions of the weaver, setup of the loom and structure of the fabric – perhaps the most promising is to explor the story of weaving from the perspective of the thread itself.

One of the distinctive things about weaving in antiquity is how multiple technologies were combined to form a single piece of fabric, weaving in different directions, weft becoming warp, use of tablets vs warp weighted weaving. To explain this via the path of a single conceptual thread crossing through itself may make this possible to describe in a more flexible, declarative and abstracted manner than having to explain each method separately as if in it’s own world.

The pattern matrix has now been made into good shape for explaining the relationship between colour and structure in pattern formation. For the first time we also used all 4 sensors per block on the bottom row which meant we could use a special “colour” block that the system recognises from the normal warp/weft ones and use it’s rotation to choose between 8 preset colour settings. This was quite a breakthrough as it had all been theoretical before.

Adding this more complex use of the magnetic patterns meant that Alex could set up the matrix as a tangible interface for his tidal livecoding software meaning Ellen could join us for a collaborative slub weavecoding performance on the Saturday evening. The prospect of performing together was something we have talked about since the very beginning of the project, so it was great to finally reach this point. The reverb in the museum was vast, meaning that we had to play the space a lot, and provide ‘music for looking at sculptures by’:

Pattern matrix – putting it together

Here is a member of staff at Miners Court trying some tangible weave coding in the midst of our crafts area – at the moment it’s simply displaying the weave structure on the simulated warp weighed loom with a single colour each for warp and weft threads, the next thing is to get ‘colour & weave’ patterns working.

The pattern matrix is the second generation of tangible programming device from the weavecoding project. It’s been built as an open hardware project in collaboration with Falmouth University’s Makernow fablab, who have designed and built the chassis using many 3D printed parts and assembled the electronics using surface mount components (far beyond my stripboard skills).

Here you can see the aluminium framework supporting the AVR based row controller boards with the Raspberry Pi in the corner. The hall effect sensors detect magnetic fields – this picture was taken before any of the wiring was started.

The row controllers are designed to read the sensor data and dispatch it to the Raspberry Pi using i2c serial communication running on their atmega328 processors. This design was arrived at after the experience of building flotsam which centralised all of the logic in the Raspberry Pi, resulting in lots of wiring required to collect the 128 bits of information and pass it to the GPIO port on the Pi. Using i2c has the advantage that you only need two wires to communicate everything, processing can be distributed and it can be far more modular and extendible in future. In fact we plan to try different sensors and configurations – so this is a great platform for experimenting with tangible programming.

This video shows the current operation of the sensors and row controllers, I’ve programmed the board with test code that displays the state of the magnetic field with the status LED, making sure that it can tell the orientation of the programming block:

The row controllers have a set of multiplexers that allow you to choose between 20 sensor inputs all routed to an analogue pin on the AVR. We’re just using digital here, but it means we can try totally different combinations of sensors without changing the rest of the hardware.

After getting the first couple of rows working and testing it with elderly people at our Miners Court residency there were a couple of issues. Firstly the magnets were really strong, and I worried about leaving it unattended with the programming blocks snapping together so violently (as we plan to use it in museum settings as well as at Miners Court). The other problem was that even with strong magnets, the placement of the blocks needed to be very precise. This is probably to do with the shape of the magnets, and the fact that the fields bend around them and reverse quite short distances from their edges.

To fix these bugs it was a fairly simple matter to take the blocks apart, remove 2 of the 3 magnets and add some rings to guide placement over the sensors properly:

Pattern Matrix hardware build

More photos from the Makernow fablab, the pattern matrix weavingcoding device is starting to take shape! All schematics, 3d printing shapes and plans will be released soon as open source hardware on the weavecoding repo.