Flowers and Leaves

You can also watch the interactive version, which is the film running live in your browser, drawn in Canvas 2D and scored in Web Audio.

In 1843 Ada Lovelace wrote that "the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves." I took the sentence at face value. For 89 seconds a Jacquard loom weaves a silk sampler 176 warp ends wide and 212 rows long, and every crossing you see is one thread.

It starts on a laced chain of hand-cut cards, weaving a sprig twice and then a cup's foot and stem. Then the chain runs out. Its cords are cut. The reader sits empty and the loom stops. So does the music, and for 2.9 seconds there's only the room.

A blank card drops in. A window of three threads slides along the row just woven, and a pulse runs up each chosen warp end to punch a hole. The first five cards come slowly. Card by card it speeds up until the loom is punching its own cards at full speed, with rule 126 building the bowl of the cup and stems growing into flowers. At the end a laced chain comes back for "A.A.L. 1843", the initials Lovelace signed her notes with. A person steps back in to hand-cut it. Where the first chain was cut, this one is tied off in knots under a small madder wax seal.

Everything obeys the loom. I stored the cloth as crossings, so there's nothing to draw between threads. Each shuttle holds one colour and crosses the full width, which means a row with four colours takes five picks, one per colour with its own card and then an ivory ground pick. Drop boxes bolted at both selvedges rise and fall to offer the shuttle each pick needs, and a colour shows only where its card has holes. The loom stands in an oak frame. Above it the card chain folds off the Jacquard cylinder, and the reed sits in its sley below. I allowed five dyes, all ones that existed in Lyon in 1843. A harpsichord plays the cards, so each pass sounds as a short spread chord, and the holes you see are the only notes you hear.

This series puts something from the future inside an old medium and makes the code respect that medium's limits. Here it's a machine that runs out of instructions and starts writing its own, done in pasteboard and silk, and for me the feeling sits in that mismatch.

Where it's weak: the first 20 seconds are mostly cards over a thin strip of cloth. The sprig takes 26 seconds at 12 picks a second, fast for a hand Jacquard. At the closest zoom the floats still read partly as rounded bars, and the bouquet's lower stems tangle near the rim. All the music is in D major pentatonic, which may be bland. I measured it at -16.0 LUFS and never heard it.

Inspired by the riso-windowseat project by mshort3 / sevenevesai (MIT). Harpsichord from the Versilian Community Sample Library by Versilian Studios LLC. Loom sounds from Freesound: "navette de métier à tisser.wav" by Naïma, "Wooden hand Loom .mp3" by snapcam and "Sound of antique weaving machine" by hz37. All CC0 1.0. Lovelace's words are from her Notes to Menabrea's Sketch of the Analytical Engine (1843), public domain.