Homo Textor: Weaving As (Technical) Mode of Existence aims to exemplify how weaving as a (technical) mode of existence provides concepts that help to rethink Homo faber and the way the Moderns (as described by Latour) talk about technology. Contradicting a hylomorphic schema where an actor gives form to matter, the characteristic weaving mode is histomorphism, a generative process where intelligible forms grow out of the loom-weaver-threads system.
As the contributions in this book show, histomorphism is not a technical mode restricted to the craft of weaving, but a concept providing a complex type of order that humans/actors trace across social, formal, cosmological, digital, and philosophical dimensions.
This book extends the possibilities opened up by Bruno Latour’s ‘Inquiry into Modes of Existence’ project, and engages Tim Ingold’s notion that making should be seen as a modality of weaving. It provides case studies, performances, technical tools, speculative analyses, ethnographic studies, and philosophical meditations that reveal something about weaving that otherwise remains invisible when presented according to common disciplinary boundaries.
The contributions form clusters and connect with each other around (Part I) challenges of referencing terminology, technology, and form, (Part II) explorations of patterns as knowledge of order, and (Part III) stories about missing and seizing textile opportunities. The first part addresses established paradigms of production and making, such as the superimposition of form to matter (hylemorphism), the opposition of (extrinsic) structure and (intrinsic) substance, and the search for exact correspondences between terms and objects to which weaving poses a radical challenge. The papers in part II look at what weavers do and know and how this knowledge travels to other types of objects and beings as well as their relation to each other, the world in which they live, and how it is ordered. Part III brings together chapters demonstrating that considering seriously not only the textile object as outcome of a textile production process, but also the production process itself with its social relations and movements can take us to new perspectives not only in art, but also in coding and the development of new technologies.
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Contents
Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Annapurna Mamidipudi, Giovanni Fanfani, Alex McLean
PART I. CHALLENGES OF REFERENCING TECHNOLOGY, TERMINOLOGY AND FORM
2. The technical mode of existence of weaving: Introducing histomorphism
Ellen Harlizius-Klück
3. Merge, weave, house, trap: First steps towards a reverse palaeoanthropology of identity concepts
Julian Rohrhuber
4. Lost in lexicography: Kaîros as concept of order
Giovanni Fanfani
5. Woven witness: Philomela, Procne and visualised narratives through textiles
Anthony Tuck and Cole Reilly with Cinzia Presti and Joseph Capozzi
Lars Hallnäs
PART II: EXPLORATIONS OF PATTERNS AS KNOWLEDGE OF ORDER
Kalliope Sarri
8. Poikilia, geometry and living patterns in the Greek archaic and classical mind
Adeline Grand-Clément
9. Epistemic, social, and material ordering through weaving threads
Annapurna Mamidipudi
10. Comparative reflections on Andean weaving as science
Denise Y. Arnold
PART III: ON MISSING AND SEIZING TEXTILE OPPORTUNITIES
11. String: Rewiring women and electronics
Ebru Kurbak
12. Algorithmic patterns on the live loom
Alex McLean
13. Embodying patterns of textile machinery: A dialogue
Caroline Radcliffe and Alex McLean
14. Braiding and dancing: Embodied rhythm and the matter of pattern
Victoria Mitchell
15. Untangling knowledge work by maypole weaving with a Penelopean robot swarm
David Griffiths