Weaving is Maths

Weaving is maths. The women who have weaved throughout history paved the way for the computers we know today. Weaving has always worked on the basis of zeros and ones - either the weft (horizontal) thread goes over the warp (vertical) threads or under it. That, at its core, is all that a computer is: a series of zeros and ones. The loom was first to use punch cards - Joseph Marie Jacquard mechanised the loom by designing patterns on squared paper and punching out the plain squares. These punch cards sped up weaving, but also led the way for Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace to create the analytical engine. This machine could receive instructions from punch cards to carry out calculations. It is worth noting that Babbage believed this machine was merely capable of sums: it was Lovelace who saw the possibilities for this machine to represent data. Quite astutely, she described the analytical engine as “weaving algebraic patterns, like the loom weaves flowers.”

Punch cards sent us to the moon - we can thank clothmakers for the Apollo Missions. Code was programmed on punch cards during NASA’s human spaceflight programme, and once finished, the code was converted to rope memory which was more resilient. Wires were woven through small magnetic beads. If the wire went through the bead it was on (or a one) and if it went around the bead it was off (or a zero). The very basis of the Apollo Missions was immersed within weaving and textiles history.

Many of the weavers of core rope memory were women, chosen for their dexterity and understanding of the craft. However, working women were often placed in jobs that were decreed too menial for men. The weaving of the rope memory shifted an outdated view of manual and cognitive labours as purely separate. The manual labour of weaving, often seen as women's labour, entwined with the more 'masculine' cognitive labour of complicated, high-precision computing code. Long before the development of electronic computers, the use of the term ‘computer’ referred not to machines, but to women. It was a title designated to someone who performed calculations and equations by hand. Women have always played an integral part in the development of computing, be it from their historic origins as weavers, or their origins as the first computer.

No matter where you look, women and computing are deeply entwined. And yet, as with everything, they are overlooked. Textiles is delegated to being understood purely as a craft rather than an artform, and certainly it is only in recent years that women have started to be named and acknowledged as valuable scientists in the computing field. Certainly I look to Grace Hopper, an American computer scientist and mathematician who was the first to devise the theory for machine-independent computer programming. She believed that programming should be simplified, converting English terms into machine code that was understood by computers. She formed languages and pioneered computer science, working tirelessly to expand the study of computing. She paved the way for many women interested in computer science. (On a small but necessary and quite wonderful tangent, she found the ‘first actual case of bug’ by finding a moth trapped and fizzled within the Mark II supercomputer. As an avid sketcher of the fake bugs she found throughout her programming, it feels only fitting that the first actual bug fluttered into the computer she was working on.)

I think I must also highlight the weavers and spinners that worked tirelessly to create cloth for clothes, sails and furnishing with unmechanised looms. Cloth has always been in demand and certainly thread could never be spun fast enough. However, it is necessary to also mention the workers who saw the industrial development of the textile industry. Workers had to adapt their understanding of an ancient craft form to keep up with the changing industry.

Women have always been known to weave, and they have always spun thread. Spinning was an almost entirely woman-based profession, and the textiles industry relied on spinners. However, instead of seeing spinning as simply work, historically it has often been sexualised or diminished entirely. Spinning could represent a domestic housewife or a prostitute; images of women spinning thread could represent anything that a man wanted – from sex to subversion. And so we fail to see these women as skilled craftspeople, working in an occupation passed down through generations. At the turn of the Industrial Revolution, the role of a spinner faded. With the mechanisation of the spinning process through Spinning Jennies, women turned back to weaving for income. Certainly it was often preferred to domestic service in the 19th century. In the mills, women made up over half of recorded employees. Women have always worked, and we can trace this all the way back to ancient societies.

Weaving was well documented in ancient Greek society; it was more than an essential craft, instead it was a celebrated art. It was documented in pottery and in poetry, and often used as a metaphor for song. Homer wrote of weaving, not only for its musical quality, but as a tool for female agency in a time where they had little. Homer wrote of Penelope, who waited faithfully for Odysseus to return from Troy as the men of Ithaca grew tireless. Odysseus had been gone for so long, they were braying for her attention. To delay remarrying, Penelope wove a burial shroud for Laertes (her father-in-law), declaring that when it was finished she would pick a suitor to marry. At night, however, she would unravel her work, delaying her suitors' prying attentions.

Penelope sits as the epitome of the faithful wife, but more than that, she was intelligent and commanding of her situation. She controlled her fate through the gentle beating of thread. And so I look to these intersections with great interest as an artist. Textiles is a contentious subject within art: is it fine art or is it craft? For me, it is, and has to be, both. Without skilled crafters we lose heritage crafts, but to remove textiles from art is to lose an entire medium. The

tangibility of textiles creates a place for memory and sensitivity to be held gently. The gentle materiality of textiles would be missed from the fine art world as storytelling through fabric is important and associative for a wide audience. We can thank craft for our human understanding of textiles as comfort, and be grateful to be bridging a chasm with textiles being seen in a contemporary art setting.

I like to use textiles to highlight these contentions, not just within the art world but through the gendered hierarchies it faces as a material. Women have always sewed, spun and wove, and therefore it is seen as lesser, perhaps the clearest metaphor for working women everywhere. Paid less, given worse jobs, and historically ignored or forgotten, these women have never been given a foot up in history. The quilts and weavings that I make allow the ever-tangled histories of textiles and technology to entwine and mesh into gentle, tangible quilts of organza and cotton. My work gives them a place to rest as I reflect on the people who allowed me to pursue my passions without being purely defined by my gender. To Penelope, Ada, Margaret, Grace, and so many others who will forever remain nameless (but not forgotten) thank you for all that you are and have done.

Words and artwork by Georgia Warrington, they/she