Below excerpts from Kristine Louise Barrett’s thesis paper and some related research on my side, mainly related to Japanese folklore and weaving.

When she learned how to weave, the arithmetic suddenly took on a very different shape:“I realized that in weaving, when you want to generate a geometric pattern like a square or a rectangle or a circle, you always have to transform that into arithmetic first […] Because you have to think in thread counts” (Harlizius-Klück in Postrel 80). She goes on to note: Weaving is all about odds and evens, ratios and proportions–just like ancient arithmetic. Unlike painters, weavers don’t draw patterns. They build them up thread by thread and row by row, as if they were creating pictures with pixels on a screen. To do so, they have to understand the kind of numerical relations found in the Elements (80) Weavers are thus continuously making complex calculations. And yet, like many weavers I’ve spoken with over the years, I had spent much of my life believing I was terrible at math. It was the process of learning to weave ever more complex patterns that fundamentally shifted these assumptions. Math became visible, corporeal, embodied. The stumbling block of arithmetic abstraction, of geometry and arithmetic stripped of context and material reality, fell away.

Weaving is computational, then, predating modern computers and technology by millennia. As such, I suggest computation is therefore traditional, developed and passed along through informal networks and communities of practice through weaving. However, the modern–often gendered–associations with hand weaving often relegate it to the past, while computation is perpetually new.10 In their studies concerning everyday activities and their contribution to the production of culture, Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren posit: “Dealing with what is ignored or devalued also means dealing with hierarchization. […] During modernity certain activities are made inconspicuous and unimportant. […] Seemingly trivial activities may be gendered in ways that produce patterns of dominance” (2010: 213).11

Tradition is movement, engagement, “an embodied repetitive action” (Bronner 2012: 28). Engaging with folklore is not replicating a narrative or weaving verbatim (that is simply not possible) as if it is pure, unalterable data moving through bodies. Rather, practicing tradition involves reproducing the recognizable shape of the “original” while also allowing it to be idiosyncratic and singular (much like people themselves). It involves working within previously constructed frameworks, perimeters, and/or structures while leaving one’s personal imprint.

An individual weaving is always different from others that came before it–constructed out of materials from a specific place(s)/time(s), choices made in the moment (often out of need or a particular set of limitations)–and yet a recognizable part of the larger corpus of a culture’s given weaving tradition.

Separated from their domesticated counterparts, looms used in industrial settings became machines, associated with capitalist (male) ingenuity and progress, whereas smaller hand powered looms were domesticated and relegated to the “backyards of modernity” as gendered hobbies, associated with the past and tradition (Ehn and Löfgren 2010: 212).

Additionally, setting up a multi-harness loom for a particular pattern can take days of premeditated calculations and/or preparation. In fact, I have found that setting up the multiharness loom is far more time consuming and laborious than the weaving itself. Those who have worked with computer coding to produce a piece of software will have experienced a very similar phenomena. If there is any miscalculation during the pre-planning phase, or a mistake in the set-up, the pattern will either not work, or anomalies/mistakes will be revealed in the woven fabric itself.

Though these general definitions shift over time, I believe it is safe to say that “technology” carries with it a variety of underlying assumptions worth noting (and challenging). ‘Newness’ (though where the ‘new’ begins is ambiguous at best) is perhaps ‘technology’s’ most enduring trait, with most studies and associations with technology sharing a disregard for the past: “…the challenges posed by contemporary media culture are complex, but the past has been considered to have little to contribute toward their untangling.

Language is a mediating technology, just as images likewise are. The point here is that the ‘new’ in ‘new media’ reflects a disconnect between the past and the present/future.

I argue weaving fulfills most, if not all, of the identifiable criteria articulated in Wikipedia’s definition of digital media.

I postulate that all weavings, in structure at least, if not material as well, are already “quines”.

one who is familiar with the general qualities of animal fibers (protein fibers) and bast fibers (fibers derived from stems of particular kinds of plants such as flax, nettle, and hemp), for example, could ‘read’ the threads and adapt (or translate) them to local variants/like fibers/materials. One only needs to be familiar with the tactile qualities of fibers and how these in turn influence the structure (and vice versa) to translate. Textile archaeologists and historians have noted how patterns, materials, techniques, and loom technologies spread, were augmented, and spread once again through this cross-cultural process.

[!NOTE] Title The craft itself acted as a safety net against the tyrant of corporate copyright.

Yes, weaving is computational, and yes, the Jacquard machine allowed data to be fed into that computation. But the same computational nature is present in all weaving, including traditions of hand weaving developed over millennia (Harlizius-Klück 2017). The computation was already there before Jacquard, and by helping automate the weaving process, his device only takes humans further away from that computation. So while Jacquard’s machine is often described in terms of the beginning of the relationship between weaving and computing, the opposite was true—it was the end (MacLean 2020: 2).

[!NOTE] Title So while Jacquard’s machine is often described in terms of the beginning of the relationship between weaving and computing, the opposite was true—it was the end (MacLean 2020: 2).

The ambient binary logic that is intrinsic to modern thinking emerges if one considers relationships between computer technology and weaving, and their material (dis)associations,. Sadie Plant notes how the fixation on binary structure used in weaving as the primary link connecting it to the development of computer technologies is reflective of Western-colonialcapitalist thought, stating, “the zeros and ones of machine code seem to offer themselves as perfect symbols of the order of Western reality, the ancient logical codes which make the difference between on and off, […] white and black, good and evil, right and wrong” (1997: 34).

The basic structure expressed by the draft notation is binary in nature, the warp and weft equivalent to ones and zeros. The black spaces represent the warp threads, the white spaces the weft (or vice versa). This binary language is thus presented as the basic building blocks of weaving and machine computation—and as a bridge connecting the two. Though, once again, this is certainly a central component, it leaves out other material-structural components intrinsic to weaving.

I suggest that thinking exclusively about binary logic in relation to weaving and math removes computation from its material and embodied realities. Again, most weavers who use draft notation are using it as a general map, a tool, with the understanding (through experience) of the other tactile components that very much affect the overall structure itself. Draft notation is a starting point. In contrast to this, hand weaving reflects a far more complex and nuanced set of considerations–both material and semiotic. For one (in contrast to the Jacquard and Babbage additive machine logic), weaving is capable of both adding and subtracting–being unraveled

[!NOTE] Title Draft notation is a starting point. Front which I’d want to say coding is a starting point.

Therefore, we argue that, in archaic Greece, the logic and technology of weaving on the warp-weighted loom was able to represent a pre-scientific paradigm of knowledge-through-order that the emergence of technical, philosophic, and mathematical literature obscured, and separated from the material and procedural experience then relegated to the realm of myth and metaphor (2020: 2).

As Harlizius-Klück suggests, it is this particular quality–adding and subtracting, or moving forward and backward–that distinguishes handweaving as not only a truly computational practice, but a conceptual device for imagining other kinds of technical modes of knowing, being, and making. For example, Ann Bergren explores in depth the connection between language and the female in ancient Greek thought. Her research considers how, through weaving, women were instrumental in the construction of “truth” through language. The connection between women and language may at first seem antithetical considering women’s lack of connection to linguistics in ancient Greek thought (Bergren 2008: 15). However, women were weavers, and weavings likewise communicated. Bergren positions weaving as a kind of precursor to poetic language and structure. Through the weaving of complex patterns, Bergren suggests particular expressive forms of language developed. For example, the use of similes directly reflects the basic structure and construction of repetitive patterns used in weaving. A text can thus “mirror the weaving process,” which can be examined by looking at “the most basic constructive feature common to weaving and narration: spatio-temporal reversal, the alternation of direction in the movement through space and time” (2).

weaving pattern is where the pattern reverses in order to repeat itself–like a mirror. The similes’ “just as” or “like” is the turnaround point in the repeating pattern, moving between the present and the past, or between micro and macro viewpoints. As such, weaving was not just used as poetic metaphor (though certainly it was), rather it was potentially fundamental to the development of poetic forms. We can compare a passage from the Iliad with a point-twill geometric pattern to further illustrate: (fig. 27). Just as snowflakes keep falling to the ground Which the strong-blowing wind, having shaken the shadowy Clouds, Ever pours thick and fast upon the all-nourishing earth, Just so from the hands of these were the weapons flowing, Both Achaeans And Trojans alike (Iliad XII 156-160) (3, italics my own)

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Weaving highly communicative (and complex) objects transformed thought into material realities, capable of being touched, and in their corporeal form, bearing witness. Rather than simply being a metaphoric vehicle, weaving was structurally and conceptually fundamental to the development of poetic and communicative forms of expression. A woven object was material speech. Cultural reproduction and memory were therefore mediated through these objects.

Referencing its skin-like properties when worn on the body–touching both ‘us’ and the ‘otherthan-us’–cloth has been used throughout various locations in the ancient Near East as a means by which one casts a spell, “…spells can be cast by throwing a cloak over a person, or that one can get out of an oath or break a spell by removing their cloak”

[!NOTE] Title I can look at different folklores where weave, fabric appears as ways of communication, across culture

https://senyudo.com/kouza/kouza_52.html

４世紀前後、応神天皇の時代、中国やインドから呉織（くれはとり）と漢織（あやはとり）の２人の織姫がやってくる話です。呉織は呉服、漢織は穴織、「はとり」というのは機織り（はたおり）のことです。５世紀の雄略天皇の時代には養蚕や織姫の話があるので、５世紀には日本で機織りが盛んに行われるようになったと考えればよいでしょう。池田市には呉織神社、漢織神社の他、多くの染色にまつわる地名が残されています。このことからこの地方が渡来系の秦氏の根拠地であったことがわかります。奈良時代に入ると政府は国民に「租庸調」などの税を課します。この中で「調」というのが、「布」による税です。時代によって調の納税額は変わります。主な材料は麻、苧、葛などの絹以外の繊維製品を指していました。東京都にある調布市などは調布と関係のある地名です。
ちなみに絹の着物などは高貴な人しか着ることができず、庶民は麻などの服を着ていました。横浜市麻生区の麻生は麻が映えていた土地の名残です。

When I think about it, all my work has been related to weaving, from Toyota to Uniqlo

http://www.kaikologs.org/archives/10467 ![[Pasted image 20260331190345.png]]

Keeping silk worms were part of the primary school education, and I was responsible for the batch for my class. (with illustration) The worms were kept in fridge over the winter, and cycled through spring to autumn.

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http://note.com/artrip_days_yoko/n/n82833c77c242 部屋の壁に、民芸館に来る途中の石碑に刻んであった「見テ知リン知リテナ見ン」の解説があった。
「ものの美しさは何よりも直観に依らねばなりません。（中略）知識は補助として役立つことがあっても、ものの真価を見極めることは出来ません。」
現代人がいつの間にか身に着けてしまった「知による美の経験」というものに疑問を投げかけている。

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=UCiJcc1PQQ4

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A modern example ![[織物暗号化.pdf]]

In this way, one may argue that relationships, and likewise weaving, are themselves algorithmic. The word ‘algorithm’ has certain connotations and denotations that often strip it of its inherently animated and relational nature.35 Situated once again within the world of computer technologies, there is a disembodied sense to its reality and use—numbers/instructions interacting with other numbers/instructions that result in responses/actions/new or altered sets of instructions, and so on. What if we re-embodied this term; ‘returned’ it to its living and effectual roots and habits and ways of being? I believe it is a useful exercise in orientation; an intervention to consider the relatedness of algorithms and embodied realities through weaving.

There is an “intimate connection between hand and head,” notes sociologist Richard Sennett in his discussions on craft, going on to state that “…all skills, even the most abstract, begin as bodily practices” and that “technical understanding develops through the powers of imagination” (2008:10). In this way, “knowledge [is] gained in the hand through touch and movement” (10). Likewise, anthropologist Tim Ingold describes his experiences of fieldwork amongst the Sámi in north-eastern Finland in which he was not explicitly told how to do practical tasks. Rather, his Sámi teachers provided frameworks for how to learn to do them. He states, “…the only way one can really know things—that is, from the very inside of one’s being—is through a process of self-discovery

In this sense, one knows through the body. Body and mind are not separate, rather deeply, and materially, intertwined. And yet, many approaches to the study of weaving have historically diminished this component–reducing weaving to its finished objects. As Ingold states: In the study of material culture, the overwhelming focus has been on finished objects and on what happens as they become caught up in the life histories and social interactions of the people who use, consume or treasure them. In the study of visual culture, the focus has been on the relations between objects, images and their interpretations. What is lost, in both fields of study, is the creativity of the productive processes that bring the artefacts themselves into being: on the one hand in the generative currents of the materials of which they are made; on the other in the sensory awareness of practitioners. Thus processes of making appear swallowed up in the objects made; processes of seeing in images seen (2013: 7).

[!NOTE] Title I suggest weaving-by-hand is process

There exists a disconnect between head and hand. This disconnect is evidenced in the idea that one can make something relying purely on conception prior to construction–through disembodied practice. Richard Sennett illustrates this through the reliance on CAD (computer assisted design) systems rather than drawing by hand in architecture.

…simulation can be a poor substitute for tactile experience…Hands-off design also disables a certain kind of relational understanding. […] The tactile, the relational, and the incomplete are physical experiences that occur in the act of drawing. Drawing stands for a larger range of experiences, such as the way of writing that embraces editing and rewriting, or of playing music to explore again and again the puzzling qualities of a particular chord (44).

She notes how materials come to us ready-made, prepared, spun and dyed–stripped of process and context. Though modern industry has ‘saved us’ from the labor (and supposed drudgery) of making materials from scratch, it has also robbed us of an intimate and rich understanding of the broader contexts, and temporal realities, involved in their making: All progress, so it seems, is coupled to regression elsewhere. We have advanced in general, for instance, in regard to verbal articulation–the reading and writing public of today is enormous. But we certainly have grown increasingly insensitive in our perception by touch, the tactile sense. […] We touch things to assure ourselves of reality. We touch the objects of our love. We touch the things we form. Our tactile experiences are elemental. If we reduce their range, as we do when we reduce the necessity to form things ourselves, we grow lopsided (44).

[!NOTE] Title In e-textile, since no one is yet doing this, it leaves an open space for people to experiment from the material Thesis: e-textile as pedagogy or encryption through craft where encryption is taken as a broad definition of putting in meaning

Additionally, sutartinės’ aural components mimic loom weaving via the tension derived from the use of musical seconds—clashing notes—and their release (40). These aural articulations mimic the intersections between warp and weft, between pattern and structure. Likewise, the musical elements are continuously passed between singers.

In 1997, Lithuanian composer Dainius Valionis illustrated the direct connection between rinktinės juostos and sutartinės by developing a graphic method for recording the musical structure of the sutartinės, using graph paper as opposed to Western musical notation, that similarly matched draft notation (11). The resulting patterns are very similar to those found in traditional Lithuanian woven belts, bedspreads, and other types of woven fabrics (fig. 30) (11). These in turn were often worn while performing the sutartinės, thus bringing the connection full circle.40

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“Many polyphonic songs compare bees–menders of honeycombs, sewers, pattern weavers (they sewed the combs and made the patterns without silk)–with sisters who are also weavers trying to match the skill of bees in pattern-making (they made the patterns like the bees made the combs). The girls are taught this kind of work by their grandmothers or mothers while the bees learn from their queen, which is considered the foundation of the bee family. […] In polyphonic chants and other songs bees making combs are often depicted in parallel with sisters spinning or weaving. The geometric work of the bee–the making of perfectly hexagonal cells–is compared with the top quality weaving” (2017: 19).

Relation to nature?

As textile scholar and linguist E.G.W. Barber states, “…various kinds of birds and primates can be observed to plait the elements of their nests, some roughly, some carefully” (1991: 79). Likewise, spiders in their webs and bees in their honeycombs provide yet even more varied examples, “so it seems likely that humans too, with so many models around, would have long known or frequently rediscovered the principle of interlacing, if only for building temporary shelters of wattle or reeds” (79).

fundamentally relational—an assembling process. Likewise, cloths are assembled, or rather, the accumulation of a series of assembling processes. Weaving assembles cloth through the interlacing of two sets of threads (warp and weft) at ninety-degree angles. The threads themselves are produced through the spinning of fibers. These fibers in turn have undergone a series of transformations to make them ‘spinnable’ in the first place. Likewise, the fibers themselves are extracted from plant, animal, and/or mineral bodies, and in the case of synthetics, chemical compounds and plastics derived from fossil fuel extractions. Natural fibers, such as the process of growing flax for linen or raising sheep for wool, additionally requires the assemblage of knowledges (e.g. agriculture, botany, animal husbandry, and so on). Chemistry is necessary for the processing of fibers, dyeing, and finishing cloth. Many plants used for fibers are also used as medicine, food, and dye stuffs. Cultural associations with each transit across the different uses both consciously and unconsciously. The leap from an individual flax seed to a linen shirt is for many just that—a leap. Process is an invisible gulf, despite the ubiquitous presence of cloth in everyday life. It is ambient, we are surrounded by cloth through the clothes we wear and blankets we sleep under. And yet, for many they are objects without a past, without context, provenance, or vibrancy. Rather, they are disembodied, simply produced (somewhere else), consumed (quickly), and disposed of (somewhere else)—following the linear capitalist production cycle. In contrast to this, I suggest cloth is a site of relations, an apt teacher for understanding assemblages.

[!NOTE] Title Industrial weave and cloth we see abundantly in our lives are themselves crypto that hides the making process, material, relation and ecology behind it. Studying the weave is to decode that

. It is a way to visualize sprawling and complex living systems, and a lens through which to understand ecosystems as multi-dimensional gatherings in place. Weaving and polyphony likewise reflect complex assemblages and material relations through complex mathematical and structural elements.

. Knowledge bleed can similarly be applied to the relationship between weaving and computation–considering how the structural elements of weaving were adapted and translated into new materials and contexts, such as computer coding. However, the deeply embedded and ambient modern associations with weaving, traditionality, and computation have complicated this. What if we were to apply the material/structure associations outlined here to computation, math, and computer technology? What if the material qualities were considered as much as the abstracted algorithms and arithmetic? What if we re-embodied math?

We live in cloth (at least most of us, most days). It is a ubiquitous part of daily life; ambient and assumed, yet we are estranged. Industrialized cloth production has replaced generative encounters with ecological devastation, socio-political inequalities, and cultural loss.43 We are consumers rather than producers. Likewise, the disembodied relation to computational practices limits both their possibilities, and the situated realities in which they are used and conceptualized. The de-materialized associations with computer hardware, though often only thought of in passing, masks their very material realities. The rare earth minerals extracted and processed for use in computer batteries and microchips, for example, invisiblize the environmental and ecological devastation they incur–and the communities they destabilize and impoverish.

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