Computers are alchemical in the way that they use tiny assemblages of conductive squiggles and crystal wafers to generate images, solve complex mathematical problems, and connect people miles apart in real time. How does this transformation from material to information to image occur? Weaving Data, a group exhibition in the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University, offers a different way to understand the development of computing technology—by going back to its origins in the textile industry.
In the mid-nineteenth century, mathematicians Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace borrowed from Jacquard loom technology—which used punch cards to determine the pattern woven into textiles—to invent what we consider the first computer.
Where the loom used a binary system of hole/no hole to determine a pattern woven into fibers, the punch cards in Babbage’s “analytical engine” controlled a mechanical calculator. Switch holes on punch cards to ones and zeros, and you have the building blocks of modern computing technology.
The works in Weaving Data pay homage to this history, and other lesser-known narratives of the confluence between textile and tech.
