'...threads of ones and zeros riding the carpets and simulating silk screens in the perpetual motions of cyberspace. It joins women on and as the interface between man and matter, identity and difference, one and zero, the actual and the virtual. ' Plant, Sadie. Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and The New Technoculture.1997. Fourth Estate, London.
Holes-Linings-Threads project was developed as part of The Future Looms, a commission for a collaborative public Internet project initiated by Pavilion and Iris in partnership with Channel/ Artec, as part of the Photo 98 Public Sightings programme.
The starting point was an essay in which author Sadie Plant traces the connections between women's work in the textile industry with the birth of the computer.
In Cards and Holes, Softwares Linings and Threads the past and the future are woven together: women's history in the textile industry, the advancement of information and technology, and a real location in the town of Batley, an old textile town in the Spen Valley of West Yorkshire which has witnessed the demoralising collapse of the textile industry. Visits to Batley were an initial part of the project to absorb it's past and present, to gathered archive material, interviewed elderly women mill workers and photographed old places of work .
The project explores the relationship between textile production, with it's punch card operation, and the computers around the world, powered by switches.
One of the first practical applications of switch technology as input devices took place in the textile industry. Looms were controlled by an arrangement of perforated cards in a moving loop.
As in binary systems, the presence of each perforation was, in effect, a switch that was open. The absence of any perforation was a switch that was closed. Wooden plungers connected to different coloured threads passed through the punched holes whenever they encountered them. This simple operation mechanically prescribed which threads would be woven into elaborate designs.
Interconnected by switches that open millions of times each second, and underlie the computer's every action, pulses of current weave intricate tapestries of logic.
The fundamental operations- adding, subtracting and comparing numbers- are relatively simple. Complexity and diversity arise from the myriad ways those operations are combined to produce results ....
