Category: Weaving
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Tanglebots workshop preparation
It’s workshop time again at Foam Kernow. We’re running a Sonic Kayak development open hacklab with Kaffe Matthews (more on this soon) and a series of tanglebots workshops which will be the finale to the weavingcodes project. Instead of using my cobbled together homemade interface board, we’re using the pimoroni explorer hat (pro). This comes…
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How to warp a tablet loom (/neolithic digital computing device)
Tablet looms have some interesting properties. Firstly, they are very very old – our neolithic ancestors invented them. Secondly they are quite straightforward to make and weave but form an extremely complex structure that incorporates both weaving and braiding (and one I haven’t managed to simulate correctly yet) – they are also the only form…
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A cryptoweaving experiment
Archaeologists can read a woven artifact created thousands of years ago, and from its structure determine the actions performed in the right order by the weaver who created it. They can then recreate the weaving, following in their ancestor’s ‘footsteps’ exactly. This is possible because a woven artifact encodes time digitally, weft by weft. In…
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Pixel Quipu
The graphviz visualisations we’ve been using for quipu have quite a few limitations, as they tend to make very large images, and there is limited control over how they are drawn. It would be better to be able to have more of an overview of the data, also rendering the knots in the right positions…
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Quipu: further experiments in Dusseldorf
A report on further experimentation with Julian Rohrhuber and his students at the Institute for Music and Media in Dusseldorf during our coding with weaves and knots remote seminar this week. As we have so little idea what the Inca are telling us in their Quipu, it seems appropriate to add a cryptanalysis approach to…
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Procedural weave rendering
We’ve been working on new approaches to 3D rendering ancient weaves, using Alex’s new behavioural language (which describes a weave from the perspective of a single thread) as the description for our modelling. This new approach allows us to build a fabric out of a single geometric shape, where warp and weft are part of…
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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…
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Warping a 4 shaft table loom
The next stop on my exploration of loom technology for the weavingcodes project (after building a frame loom and learning tablet weaving) has been learning how to use a 4 shaft table loom. This has been kind of daunting to me, as it’s a much more modern weaving device than I’ve been working with up…
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“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…
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Coding with knots: Inca Quipu
This week I’m teaching at IMM Düsseldorf with Julian Rohrhuber which has given me a chance to follow up a bit on Inca Quipu coding with knots, a dangling thread from the weavecoding project. Quipu are how the Incas organised their society, as they had no written texts or money – things like exchanges (for…