Regularity

Now that we have translated 10 PRINT into tiles, let us move to another material realm, textiles, particularly the early tool for producing regular patterns in textiles, the Jacuard Loom. Prior to that loom, circa 2nd Century BCE, China gave birth to a loom “that made it possible to create a pattern in fabirc...called a drawloom because [it] allowed the warp threads to be drawn up individually to create the design to be woven” (10). However, that loom was irregular, “the arrangement of the individual warp threads was different for every single row of weaving” (10). By contrast, the loom designed by Joseph-Marie Jacquard, was regular and programmable (12). Such a machine relied on an exacting degree of regularity. Of course, much has been made of the Jacquard Loom as the prototypical computer, for example James Essinger's book ''Jacquard's Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age''. The core similarity in these early accounts were the punchcards, which were automatically applied to the control system, which served as patterns for the loom to follow. Interestingly, Essinger notes accounts of an earlier punchcard loom by a weaver named Falcon. However, those punch cards were "clumsily made and unreliable" (36). At the same time, the loom itself had to be made regular in order for the punch cards to fit the pattern. Once the loom was standardized the designs could be planned out on graph paper. Unlike the one-line of instructions of 10 PRINT commercial grade textiles required up to 4000 cards strung together. The cards were applied to a bar, an "elongated cube," full of "hundreds of identical holes...to accommodate the tips of needles," which will be raised according to the selections on the punchcard. As the bar turns with each pick of the shuttle, it moves down the material as if moving down a computer screen. Regularity made possible the Jacquard Loom's ability to draw its intricate patterns.