THE BODY-LOOM ASSEMBLAGE
An assemblage conceptualises space and agency as emerging from interactions between humans and non-humans resulting in precarious wholes. The body-loom assemblage expands on, connects and recognises the different elements, materials, systems and environments co-constitutive of the acts and artefacts of weaving. Loom-and-body as assemblage includes my body, which can be interpreted as a system or an environment coming into contact with the system or environment of the loom. As a component of the body-loom assemblage sometimes I am connected, sometimes disconnected. I join with the loom at interfaces where legs are needed to pedal or hands are needed to thread up, move the shuttle, adjust the heights of the shafts, or draw in the reed. Embodied actions, components, tools, time, temperature, patterns, fibres, spun yarns, cloth handle and colour are connected through the body-loom assemblage which helps me notice how different systems and environments connect and interact. I learn to weave as a component of the body-loom assemblage.
I developed a weaving practice as a way to explore the analogue-digital interface, the point in MRI where the NMR signal is transformed computationally into a biomedical image. The numerical and mechanical relationship between the loom and the computer is grounded in their shared need for precision and control over warp and weft threads, and numerical functions respectively. The punch cards used in the Jacquard loom control the warp threads mechanically and inspired Charles Babbage’s proto-computer called the Analytical Engine. This is a conceptual leap that is easy to take for granted. The computer emerges from the history of weaving and their shared lineage is important to the material culture of both computation and cloth. Materially and conceptually the loom straddles the analogue and digital - it exists at the analogy-digital interface historically. I seek to reveal the computational operations between the analogue NMR signal and the digital MRI image by combining the mathematical properties of weaving and MRI. This study thus re-corporealises data abstracted from the body using mathematics through an embodied craft.
My loom is a 16-shaft George Wood Dobby floor loom made of wood with a cast-iron modular mechanism on top. The iron-cast binary dobby mechanism controls the treadling by either lifting or not lifting warp threads. The pattern is encoded using lags and pegs which are fed onto the drum and fed through the dobby module using the pedal: wherever there is a peg in a lag it pushes against a metal rod connecting to the shafts which stop it from being lifted which enables the weft to be woven over or under the warp. The principal parts of my loom include a frame and warp beam to create consistent tension in the warp, an apron bar for rolling up the cloth as it is woven, heddles for controlling warp threads and the iron-cast dobby module which controls the pattern. The dobby mechanism was designed to create repeat patterns and as such lends itself to non-representational, visual algebraic patterning. A treadle is a mechanism operated by a pedal that converts reciprocating motion into rotating cyclical motion. Treadling is the sequence in which the shafts holding the warp thread are activated and raised by the pedal and the treadling sequence is determined by the peg pattern which is inputted into the wooden lags using small dowels (also called pegs). As the pedal is activated it turns the drum of the dobby, which brings in the lags that lift or do not lift the shafts. I originally intended to use the loom to calculate FTs or in some way reveal how they worked but discovered that the loom's computational potential is more akin to memory storage. The interaction between treadling and threading-up sequences is where the cloth is formed. This is a site or interface of intra-action where I can focus my task of exploring the analogue-digital interface via the mathematical processes in MRI.
My research addresses the so-called black box of technology, a concept that emphasises the omnipotent power of technology whose inner workings are concealed and designed out of the user's sight. In this study, I use practice-based methods to explore how hidden processes in MRI work via the mathematical lineage between the loom and the computer. With increasing developments in technology, the internal operations of systems have become increasingly opaque. The shared lineage of the computer and loom helps me to comprehend how weaving and computational technologies became ‘opaque’. The use of the dobby loom is significant because you can see its inner mechanism work, yet the use of it still requires embodied knowledge that I needed to learn and that can only really be understood through the body. The shared history of the loom and the computer offers an opportunity to create connections between the analogue-digital interface as the loom straddles this interface functionally and historically.
The body-loom assemblage also counts as a body-machine interface. I draw to visualise how I interface with the loom spatially and temporally. The acquisition of weaving knowledge is not explicit but accumulated through feeling, sensing, and touching. It emerges through practice and drawing helps me locate how my body becomes interfaced as the body-loom assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari “theorise the machine in terms of desire” where acting/reacting to aspects of an assemblage such the body-loom concerns the movement of a force, or flow.
My body-loom assemblage drawing maps the forces, movements and flows channelled through the assemblage. Using lines, arrows, spirals, curves and dotted lines they map how legs, hands, arms and eye interface with warp, pedal, heddles, and other components. Theories of extended cognition and distributed memory argue for a more linked, connected and material theorisation of knowledge (Farina & Levin, 2021). Extended cognition theory states that when we think, knowledge resides within our bodies and tools, objects, social formation and places. Tools and places support, enhance, or in some cases substitute for cognitive processes that would not otherwise exist (Petracca, 2020, p. 280). My drawings capture the shifting arrays I sense when I interface with the loom and I record knowledge by moving from loom to drawing.
The loom and I are metabolically linked through hands, shuttles, legs, pedals, vision, hearing and other parts of both my body and the loom. By being embodied, the act of weaving reveals specific, embodied discoveries about the body-loom assemblage in practice, addressing the multiple aspects of sensation, perception, cognition and expression that are part of the practice. When I ‘sense’ as a body-loom assemblage I feel for sites of tension, flow, friction, lubrication and resistance. I am aware of rust, dust and sweat that affect pace and flow which I represent with melted, lumpy textures in my hands, looping curves and broken lines. Much like in the process of creaturing matter, I develop a creaturely view of my loom and of the mathematics at work at the analogue-digital interface. Having installed and assembled the loom myself, I had an understanding of its components but not working parts functioning with the body, in practice and as a body-loom assemblage. It was only through the flow and movement of practice and the emergence of my woven fabric that the body-loom assemblage eventually made sense to me.