THREAD COUNTS

I like getting into a freshly made bed and to feel the cool, crisp, smooth sheets under my body.  I wonder why touch has a strong effect on how we feel?  I also wonder why the term ‘to be touched’ should imply madness?

Experience is most often mediated through the senses and our largest organ is our skin and it is the place where we meet the world, and the world meets us; to touch is to be touched. 

It’s the haptic quality of textiles that holds the magic by evoking memory, feelings and comfort.  Quilts, toys, clothes, blankets – things made of cloth – can be both beautiful and poignant. I can still remember the feeling of my own special piece of fabric which, when I rubbed it between my thumb and index finger, brought me a focus for my mind, and a comfort for my body.

We interact with the world physically – a fact brought home quite forcefully during lockdown, when instructed to keep two metres apart we suddenly realised how we missed the touch of other people.

Weavers’ practice is rooted in the exploration and sharing of tactile properties inherent in textiles through a selection of materials, structures and subsequent processes.  It has been suggested that the growth of digital technology is also fuelling this desire to touch.  Our daily lives have been hugely impacted by electronic devices which use touch in an unconscious way, with our eyes and attention fixed to a screen rather than aware of the activity of our hands, even whilst using touch screens. Human beings, like things, have become interfaces in a technological world, and along with that technology has come a notion of the compressing of time and space. 

Haptic technology refers to any technology that can create an experience of touch by applying forces, vibrations or motions to the user.  These technologies can be used to create virtual objects in a computer simulation, to enhance remote control of machines and devices.  The word haptic, from the Greek ‘haptikos’ means ‘tactile’ and pertains to the sense of touch.  Simple haptic devices are common in the form of game controllers, joysticks and steering wheels.  Tactile touchpads became commonplace in all our cellular devices.

Gamers can experience the benefit of haptic applications when playing Sony Playstation 5. They report the sensation of actually ‘feeling’ what it is like to draw the string of a bow – haptic feedback through the voice coil actuators. 

Haptic feedback is essential to perform complex tastes in The Shadow Hand, an advanced robotic hand, which has 129 touch sensors embedded in every joint and finger pad that relay information to the operator – which allows tasks to be performed from a distance.  There are so many applications this sense has been used for as well as games and mobile devices, from teleoperators, simulators, robotics, medicine and dentistry, neurohabilitation, Art, Aviator, Space, Automotion and, intriguingly, teledildonics which refers to remotely connect sex toys that allow users to engage in virtual sex or to allow a remote server to control their sex toy!

ANNI ALBERS

ANNI ALBERS at TATE MODERN – 11^th October – 27 January 2019

Last week I visited the Anni Albers Exhibition at Tate Modern. I didn’t know much more about her than that she was introduced to hand-weaving at the Bauhaus, where the tutors felt it a more suitable activity for a female than painting.  Weaving has often been reduced in significance this way as it was thought to be an activity for women; it was considered a menial job suitable for a mother or wife to fit around her childrearing and domestic chores.

Throughout her career Albers explored the possibilities of weaving as a modernist medium, but one also deeply rooted in highly sophisticated and ancient textile traditions from around the world.  Students in the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus produced independent artistic works as well as designs for industrial manufacture.  Albers and her colleagues created wall hangings which she considered a modern development to textile art.  They described them as, “amazing objects, striking in their newness of conception in regard to use of colour and compositional elements”.

The weaving workshop developed its own distinctive language, making use of the grid structure of weaving, and emphasising haptic or tactile qualities. Albers published two influential books; one on designing and one on weaving.  Her seminal book ‘On Weaving’ (1965) serves as a kind of visual atlas by exploring the history of the last 4,000 years of weaving around the world, as well as examining technical aspects of the craft and the development of the Loom. Anni Albers made many of her pictorial weavings on the eight-harness Structo Artcraft handloom pictured below.

The loom is a machine for weaving cloth and was the world’s first piece of automated machinery. The earliest looms actually date from the 5th millennium BCE and consisted of bars or beams fixed in place to form a frame that held a number of parallel threads in two sets which alternated with each other. By raising one set of these threads, which together formed the warp, it was possible to run a weft thread between them. The block of wood used to carry the filling strand through the warp was called the shuttle.

The fundamental operation of the loom remained unchanged, but improvements were introduced through ancient and medieval times in both Asia and Europe. One of the most important of these was the introduction of the heddle, a movable rod that served to raise the upper sheet of warp. In later looms the heddle became a cord, wire, or steel band, several of which could be used simultaneously.

The draw loom, probably invented in Asia for silk weaving, made possible the weaving of more intricate patterns by providing a means for raising warp threads in groups as required by the pattern. The function was at first performed by a boy (the drawboy), but in the 18th century in France the function was successfully mechanized and improved further by the ingenious use of punched cards. Introduced by Jacques de Vaucanson and Joseph-Marie Jacquard, the punched cards programmed the mechanical drawboy, saving labour and eliminating errors. Punched cards were used to direct the weaving of beautiful patterns, punched cards either had holes or no-holes (un-perforated card) – it was binary: yes or no, on or off.

In the mid 19^th century Charles Babbage designed an automatic mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomic functions. It was called the Difference Engine and was intended to compute many useful tables of numbers – through his interest in mass production methods he realised that he could ‘borrow’ the punched card method of programming from the Weaving Industry as it operated on the same binary system of ones and zeros.

Albers studied the material qualities of yarns, as well as different ways of working with them.  Combining yarns and techniques, she was able to create complex, multi-faceted pieces, rich in texture.  Using a floating weft technique and brocade weaving (adding surface threads to a basic weave), she was able to integrate additional threads as free lines.  She could draw with these threads into the structure of her pictorial weaving.

In the 1940s she began to explore knots by sketching and painting entangled, linear structures; and produced scroll-like works with Celtic-style knots.  Albers’ works reflect her statement “The thoughts can, I believe, be traced back to the event of a thread.”

 

String or thread has been being used to weave fabric for forty thousand years. As the great ice age sheets began retreating from Northern continents humans started inventing.  These newly creative hunter-gatherers produced novel tools – awls, pins and chisel-like burins, and they sculpted representations of animals and people. They painted pictures and made hand prints on their cave walls by spitting pigment over a hand placed on the wall. And it was these people who also invented string and sewing by twisted handfuls of little weak fibres together to make long, strong thread, or string.

The production of ‘homespun’ yarn and cloth was one of the first cottage industries, and pin money was women’s earliest source of independent cash when they sold surplus yarn and cloth, working as small-scale entrepreneurs long before the emergence of factories or the mechanisms which now define the textile industry.

Anni Albers was aware of the rich feminine history linked to every warp and weft of woven fabric and she was open to creating new works that explored the connection between text and textiles; textiles and architecture; textile as memorial and pictorial weavings, “what I’m trying to get across is that material is a means of communication.  That listening to it, not dominating it, makes us truly active, that is: to be active, be passive.”

It should also be mentioned that she developed a range of jewellery made with ubiquitous materials like hair pins, corks and eyelet screws, and she also took to printmaking when weaving became too physically demanding.

Though Albers was in favour of modern design and production, she held a strong belief that technology increasingly dulls our awareness of the tactile, or haptic, as it replaces the need to make things with our hands.  In her essay ‘Tactile Sensibility’ she states that

“All progress, so it seems, is coupled to regression elsewhere.  We have advanced in general, for instance, in regard to verbal articulation, but we certainly have grown increasingly insensitive to our perception by touch, the tactile sense.  For too long we have made too little use of the medium of tactility.’

How interesting it was to see Albers’ work and her commitment to establishing weaving as a modernist medium, but I feel the curators missed a trick, given her obvious inquisitive nature, I felt as if we were left with a bit of cliff-hanger.  For me, it would have been an instructive exercise (and fun) to explore how Anni Albers would have coped with, or indeed what would have been her opinion of the use mankind had made of weaving and the adoption of its punched card system?  Would she have been excited by this new turn in the history of weaving and its significance in the development and dominance of computers in everyday life?  Would she have re-prioritised the visual over the tactile; would she have been inspired by the possibilities of smart textiles; or would she have been appalled at work being made on a screen one removed from the human hand, with no touching and no haptic quality to inform the progress of her ideas?

 

SMART FABRICS

Throughout History and Now

What did ancient people try to accomplish when they deliberately made clothes that contained meaning? For one thing, it must have been to mark or announce information.  Twenty thousand years B.C. a small, plump Venus donned a string skirt to announce her readiness for childbearing and in the mountains of South Central Asia, a Kafir woman wore a distinctive headdress for a few days each month to indicate that she was now a woman.

 Cloth could also be used as a mnemonic device to record events and other data.  Social rank too, has probably always been encoded through symbols in material, design, colour and embellishment of the clothing.  In Ancient Rome the emperor and no other enjoyed the privilege of wearing entirely purple robes.  Hanging up a distinctive textile could be a way of making ordinary space special, even sacred.  In Southern Sumatra a special ritual cloth was placed as a backdrop in important rites of passage ceremonies.  And the vision of Henry VIII and his ‘Field of the Cloth of Gold’ remains a vivid image in the minds of many British schoolchildren cheering at the British King who was grander and more stylish than his French counterpart.

 

Thirdly, fabric design has been used to invoke magic – to protect, to secure fertility and riches, to divine the future, perhaps even to curse. Within that magical world, fertility, prosperity and protection were three of the most common objectives.  Images of snakes, frogs and fish (egg layers all) incorporated into woven cloth were thought to bring wealth and fertility to a household in many parts of Europe.

The Slavic Goddess Berehinia – Protectress of women and their fertility displaying birds in her hands

 But Europe had no monopoly on mystical, protective images on cloth and clothing.  In Egypt, Tutankhamon’s tomb was found to contain a wealth of royal cloth, in particular a richly decorated tunic, with a neckhole forming an ‘ankh’ (or sign of long life) with his name embroidered at the centre of the cross and surrounded by the traditional ‘cartouche’ (a protective oval made by a magic rope), and at the bottom of the tunic panels embroidered with an array of real and mythical beasts (thought to be of Syrian workmanship) are all designed to ease his journey into the afterlife.

 More structural approaches to working magic have been devised with folktales telling of magic girdles where the magic seems to be inherent in the weaving, not merely in special decoration.  One possibility was to weave in the spell as number magic; in the Netherlands experts have unearthed cloth where the weaver has chosen red wool warp threads for her work, twenty four spun one direction, and twenty four spun the other way.  Opposite spins catch the light differently and, when placed next to each other, give a striped effect.  She divided the bunch spun one way into three sets of eight, and the other bunch into four sets of six, and alternated them. It can’t be a coincidence that in Holland, Germany and Denmark those numbers were considered particularly sacred.  The scheme is best known from the runic alphabet, which at first consisted of twenty four letters in three sets of eight, and later of thirty two letters in four sets of eight.  It is assumed that number magic began with the introduction of Mithraism into those countries via the Romans; Mithraic religion from the Near East is just packed full of number magic. 

 The Batak tribes of Sumatra generated woven magic another way; in one area the women wove special magical cloths on circular warps, which were never cut because the continuity of the warp cloth across the gap where the wool had not been woven in, was said to ensure the continuity of life from the mother to the child.  The birth of the child was represented by the beginning of the weft at one side of the uncut fringe; drawing the cloth through the hands of the weaver represented the child growing up, and when the other side of the uncut fringe was reached, it represented the beginning of a new generation whose life would repeat that of the mother, and so on ad infinitum.   Biblical students will remember that Jesus’ garment was removed from his body uncut “in accordance with the scriptures”, a possible reference to this custom?

But these magic numbers, symbols, and methods of weaving depended largely on the wearers and viewers buying into the myth of the magic woven into the cloth which they were conditioned to believe.  It was not until the twenty first century that actual magic became available to inventive weavers worldwide.  Conductive fibre or elements; computer circuitry and electronics; laser optics and speakers would mark the next stage for this fabricated messaging. Value Added Fabric can communicate, transform, conduct energy, grow, medicate, play music or identify friend or foe.  It is used for astronaught suits as it can inflate or deflate, be heated or cooled down, be lit up in dark outer space, and can incorporate infra-red digital displays and alarms.

Smart fabrics are set to transform the fashion industry and allow us to download new styles for our clothes rather than buying new garments.  “Micro-robotics, 3D printing and rapid changes in technology are poised to revolutionise fashion,”  says the designer of Lady Gaga’s bubble-blowing dress ‘Anemone’, and ‘Volantis’ her flying dress powered by twelve electric motor-driven rotors.

 Electronic conducting textiles have the ability to make music.  One example is the electric gloves that allow people to interact with their computer remotely via hand gestures, beautiful gloves that help the wearer gesturally interact with their computer and technology allows for a performance without having to interact with or physically touch, keyboards or control panels.

 The new generation of weavers will double as medics, technicians, artists, designers, spacemen, nutritionists, image consultants and, of course, scientists.  What will be next?  How much more inventive we can get?  Maybe they will be able to realise what only those imaginative writers of the TV series Star Trek, way back in the sixties, had thought possible; maybe the next big thing is Transportation Suits where we can wear a piece of clothing that will jumble our atoms and ‘beam us up’ to new and unexplored parts of the universe, or even to different time zones?  But what happens when those suits gets hacked or infected with malicious Ransomware?  Back down to earth or lost in time and space?