Month: May 2015

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 example from their extensive store houses) were recorded via knots. Researchers have been able to decode the basic numeric system they used, but 20% of the quipu seem to follow a different set of rules, along with extra information encoded via thread material, twist direction, colour and other knot differences. I’ve written a python program for converting the Khipu Database Project excel charts into graphviz files for visualising:

The knots are described in ascii art, with S and Z relating to the ply and knot ‘handedness’ direction they are tied in:

O : a single knot 
O/O : two single knots tied in S direction (it's rotated 90 degrees :)
(\\\\) : a long knot of value '4' tied in the Z direction
/8 : end (figure of 8) knot tied S direction

The pendant nodes also have labels describing their ply direction and the side the attach on, so “S R” is S ply & recto attached.

The hardest part of this has been a bit of more recent media archeology to figure out the colour values, I’ve had to cross reference the original Ascher-Ascher Quipu Databooks published in 1978 which contain their own colour system which more or less maps to the NBS-ISCC Munsell colour chart originally proposed in 1898. Luckily that site provides hex colour values – hopefully they are vaguely accurate, the current lookup table is here:

colour_lookup = {
    "W": "#777777",
    "SR":  "#BF2233",
    "MB" : "#673923",
    "GG" : "#575E4E",
    "KB" : "#35170C",
    "AB" : "#A86540",
    "HB" : "#5A3D30",
    "RL" : "#AA6651",
    "BG" : "#4A545C",
    "PG" : "#8D917A",
    "B" : "#7D512D",
    "0B" : "#64400F",
    "RM" : "#AB343A",
    "PR" : "#490005",
    "FR" : "#7F180D",
    "DB" : "#4D220E",
    "YB" : "#BB8B54",
    "MG" : "#817066",
    "GA" : "#503D33"
}

Ellen’s exhibition in Munich was always going to be a pivotal event in the weavecoding project – one of the first opportunities to expose our work to a large audience. The Museum of casts of classical sculptures was the perfect context for the mythical aspects of weaving, overlooked by Penelope and friends with her subversive woven/unwoven work, we could explore the connections between livecoding and weaving.

Practically we focused on developing the tangible weavecoding exhibit for events later in the week, as well as discussing the many languages we have developed so far for different looms and weaving techniques. One of our discoveries is that none of the models or languages we have created seem sufficient in themselves – weaving could be far too big to be able to be described or solved from a single perspective. We’ve tried approaches describing weave structures from the actions of the weaver, setup of the loom and structure of the fabric – perhaps the most promising is to explor the story of weaving from the perspective of the thread itself.

One of the distinctive things about weaving in antiquity is how multiple technologies were combined to form a single piece of fabric, weaving in different directions, weft becoming warp, use of tablets vs warp weighted weaving. To explain this via the path of a single conceptual thread crossing through itself may make this possible to describe in a more flexible, declarative and abstracted manner than having to explain each method separately as if in it’s own world.

The pattern matrix has now been made into good shape for explaining the relationship between colour and structure in pattern formation. For the first time we also used all 4 sensors per block on the bottom row which meant we could use a special “colour” block that the system recognises from the normal warp/weft ones and use it’s rotation to choose between 8 preset colour settings. This was quite a breakthrough as it had all been theoretical before.

Adding this more complex use of the magnetic patterns meant that Alex could set up the matrix as a tangible interface for his tidal livecoding software meaning Ellen could join us for a collaborative slub weavecoding performance on the Saturday evening. The prospect of performing together was something we have talked about since the very beginning of the project, so it was great to finally reach this point. The reverb in the museum was vast, meaning that we had to play the space a lot, and provide ‘music for looking at sculptures by’:

Since Tuesday the 28th of April, visitors can see the works of Ellen Harlizius-Klück in the Museum for Plaster Casts of Classical Sculptures in Munich. On display are recent works on ancient textile resonstructions, but also artwork from recent years like Quilts and textile installations.

29. April to 7. June 2015, Textile MATRIX, Works of Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Museum for Plaster Casts of Classical Sculptures Munich, Katharina-von-Bora-Straße 10, 80333 Munich, GERMANY.

Next week the weaving codes project assembles in the Museum für Abgüsse Klassischer Bildwerke in Munich. We’ll be working for a few days surrounded by these characters to get us in a classical mood:

The museum is hosting Ellen’s ‘Textile Matrix’ exhibition, a crossbreeding of logical science, religion, crafts and visual arts. The word ‘matrix’ originates from the latin word for mother or uterus, but today is predominantly used in mathematics, science and technology. Her work, as much of the weavingcodes project, provides new perspectives on connections between modern digital technology and ancient weaving.

Alex, Ellen, Emma and I will be in residency in the museum from the 6th May and I’ll be reporting our activities here as usual. On the 9th there will be talks and slub will be performing a special livecoding gig. On the 10th we will be presenting the work we have been doing during the residency and inviting people to participate in a citizen science event, exploring mathematics, weaving, music and code – including the brand new pattern matrix tangible weavecoding device.