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I message my mother to ask about what happened to my aunt’s loom and whether she could share some personal anecdotes about it:
Concernant le métier à tisser, c’est celui de ton père qu’il a fabriqué lui-même et qu’il avait commencé à faire avant que je le rencontre. Ensuite il l’a donné à ma sœur mais j’ai du mal à me souvenir de ce qu'elle a pu en faire parce qu’il ne fonctionnait pas très bien. Il faudrait poser ces questions à ton oncle. Ensuite le métier à tisser a été entreposé chez mon père. Le reste de l’histoire, tu la connais. (2)
More of a dead-end than an anecdote, yet I can’t help but smile at my mother’s remark on the device not working well; my dad was known for building things that were ultimately flawed. 

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A partition of threads isolates them from the rest of the room. In the corridor space formed by wall | and a vertical loom | they sit side by side. The two women are weaving a rug, working the pattern :
down to up ^

                                                      left to right >
The left weaver sings the pattern she knots
7,2,7
                                                      The right weaver sings back as she knots further
                                                      7,2,7
One calls,
6,4,6
                                                      the other responds,
                                                      6,4,6
5,2,2,2,5
                                                      5,2,2,2,5
4,2,4,2,4
                                                      4,2,4,2,4
3,2,6,2,3
                                                      3,2,6,2,3
2,2,8,2,2
                                                      2,2,8,2,2
2,2,8,2,2
                                                      2,2,8,2,2
3,2,6,2,3
                                                     3,2,6,2,3
4,2,4,2,4
                                                      4,2,4,2,4
5,2,2,2,5
                                                      5,2,2,2,5
6,4,6
                                                      6,4,6
7,2,7
                                                      7,2,7
they weave two symmetrical
                                                      diamond shapes. 

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I always wished I could sing.
Or perhaps I mean to sing better.
Despite my efforts,
my vocal chords failed to comply
in striking the right note, tunes stuck
like unchewed crisps in my raspy throat.
But defying the silence I confined myself to,
I often hummed – off-key
for no one but my apartment walls;
the enveloping surfaces reflected back
my own buzzing vibration.

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In 1969 Alvin Lucier sat in a room, and recorded himself saying the words
– I am sitting in a room.
He then played the tape recording back into that room, whose unique resonance slowly distorted his words; he repeated, repeated, repeated the operation. Until his words turn to mere sounds, noise, and finally, just a vibration.

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Rhythm can be simply defined as any regular recurring motion. A repetition.
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I open a book, a blue-print in grey tones,
and read about Iannis Xenakis,
composer, mathematician
and architect,
that my father adored.
Lines gathered as the threads of a warp, shifted to form
parabolic hyperboles.
Bridges
infrastructures engineering
turned to musical compositions.
Poured concrete conceived with mathematical modulation.
Partitions mutated into partitions,
rhythm rhythm rhythm of the built matter
and all the concealed, impalpable algorithmic composition surrounding my body
I immerse myself into the muted
Cacophony.
– Buildings can sing too, don’t you hear?

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He whistles at work. Italian invited worker.
My grandfather.
Framed by a dusty wife-beater
his distorted hairy shoulders
transfer 25kg of stony powder
into a tumbling mixer.
The thick bloke disappears in a cloud of smoke,
and contrasts the drama with a bawdy joke.

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One brick at a time, and a trowel full of wet cement, he builds a wall. He lays the bricks with a simple pattern, alternating width and depth, one-two, two-one, and repeats. With a pasty voice, thickened by liquor and accumulated dust, he sings his joyful tune:
Un maçon / Chantait une chanson / Là-haut sur le toit d'une maison,
Et la voix de l'homme s'envola / Pour se poser par là
Comme un oiseau sur la / Voix d'un autre maçon
Qui reprit la chanson / Sur le toit voisin de la maison
Et ainsi commença l'unisson / De deux maçons et d'une chanson ! son ! sons ! (3)

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He draws her attention to a large object in the room; a peculiar assembly of metal elements, cogwheels piled in layers to form vertical towers held together by brass tubes, digits engraved at regular intervals on the edge of rotating disk : the first prototype of the Difference Engine. Lustrous model of skyscrapers from a future Ada and Charles will not live in, the steam-era machinery is primarily conceived to crunch numbers. She disappears behind a desk covered with papers; immersed in translating an article detailing the ability of the new Analytical Engine, Ada indulges in filling the blank space of the paper’s margins. She thrives in the footnotes, seven in total and longer than the original text, filled with her “poetical science”; in which, she devises the first algorithmic programming. 

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“We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves Algebraical patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.” (4)
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Thick paper cards
bound together by a continuous stitch
perfo00rated through,
randomised order of hollo00w circles
and intact matter
circulate with mechanical rhythm
in a roo00m
hovering above the loom.

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I was appalled for many years by the time it takes to prepare a loom before being able to actually weave. The longest operation consists of preparing the warp, linear threads of equal length and spread at a desired width and density, that will welcome the horizontal weaving thread, the weft.
Warp-weft. Very easy to confuse each other, but thankfully my weaving teacher had shared this mnemonic:
– Say it out loud: waaaaarp, is loooong, as the leeeeength of weaving / mouth open in a A exaggeration, gesturing as stretching an invisible dough with both ends
 / weft, is short, as a swift move of the shuttle / mouth puckered right finger tracing a short straight invisible arrow shooting in the air. 

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My phone buzzes back my uncle’s answer:
J’ai juste connu celui qu’elle avait récupéré et que ton père avait fabriqué, mais une fois chez nous il n’a jamais fonctionné… Peut-être essaie de voir si xxx en sait plus. (5)

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Two women sit across from each other. A perforated surface stands between them.
Both hold a copper wire in their hand, which they pass to each other through the donut-shaped openings. They follow a strict protocol; zero indicates the wire should go outside the hole, one indicates the wire goes through the hole. Digit by digit, line by line, they weave with electrically conductive wire; the resulting matter known as
core memory
software
encapsulates the code
that will lead the Apollo mission to the Moon.
– We called them LOL; as
Little Old Ladies.
Perhaps it would not be so acceptable to say this nowadays. (6)

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Last time I saw xxx was at my grandmother’s funeral; we had exchanged amused yet sceptical smiles as Bella Ciao filled the farewell room of the crematorium, a surprising request from my grandmother in the script of her turning-to-ashes ceremony. Afterall, the woman had never expressed much fondness for political resistance throughout her lifetime, so this was a neat last move from the Italian rural immigrant, illiterate cleaning lady, divorced woman with a revengeful bite, whose voice rolled the rrrr’s and turned any u into oo’s, sometimes quite rude and stubborn-to-the-bone-character that she was… 

xxx has the cracked and congenial voice of people who still fight for social justice and community ideals.
– Ah bon, elle avait un métier à tisser? Jamais vu!
Par contre, je me souviens que dans le village où on a grandi, la voisine en avait un, et on était souvent fourrées chez elle. Ça m’a toujours fasciné ces machines! (7)

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A loom can be reduced to two beams and a system to keep them apart at equal length. To build a frame, you will need a few pieces of wood, chop them in pairs to equal length, and chisel their ends to fit into each other with care and precision.
The wooden structure that frames a treadle loom is called the temple. 

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He rumbles through the attic, and pulls a dusty wooden structure. Armed with a hammer, he beats out the connections holding the beams together. Tchok, tchok, tchok. In a few minutes, the loom is no more than a pile of wood, chips and entangled yarns. He carries the bundle down to his garden and throws the discarded stack without further attention besides his rusty cement mixer. With one match, he lights his cigarette first, blows a puff and proceeds with igniting crumbled pieces of newspaper. As the wood catches fire, he squats down to finish his smoke and stares at the flames.
The loom never really worked, and some things simply take too much space. 

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“The computer was always a simulation of weaving; threads of ones and zeros riding the carpet and simulating silk screens in the perpetual motions of cyberespace.” (8)
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He briefly looks at his phone, scrolls upwards to dismiss notifications popping on the screen; resumes to his task, liquid concrete gushing over interwoven grids of steel – Skyradio pumping, machinery roaring, generators buzzing, diggers digging, crates rotating, fellow workers’ hollering, they pour the foundations of a windowless shell that will spread over xxxxxxm2, for xxxxx linear km of shelves, to encase xxxxx m3 of disks / servers / xxxxxTB / data / memory to be kept at regulated temperature and humidity / blasting air conditioning.
A fresh new building,
softly humming:
– Zero, one, zeroooo, oooone, zerooo…

– Buildings are singing too, don’t you hear?

Poetic essay by Marie Ilse Bourlanges
Silkscreened on knitting punch cards, fragmented in 6parts
Edition of 50 prints
2024
Contribution to accompany the mixtape Field Recordings Vol. 2 one-two, zero-one, Toil to the Beat
by Liza Prins and Marie Ilse Bourlanges

Many thanks to the printing workshop of the Royal Academy of Arts of The Hague