ARCHIVE: THE SKOR CODEX
Submission Title: Photo of "Roept u maar!" by artist Peter Stel
Submitted by: Société Anonyme Participant's field of work/interest: Avant-garde artist collective Participant's Image Description: "The SKOR Codex is a printed book which will be sent to different locations on earth in the year 2012. It contains binary encoded image and sound files selected to portray the diversity of life and culture at the Foundation for Art and Public Domain (SKOR), and is intended for any intelligent terrestrial life form, or for future humans, who may find it. The files are protected from bitrot, software decay and hardware failure via a transformation from magnetic transitions on a disk to ink on paper, safe for centuries. Instructions in a symbolic language explain the origin of the book and indicate how the content is to be decoded. La Société Anonyme noted that "the package will be encountered and the book decoded only if there will be advanced civilizations on earth in the far future. But the launching of this 'bottle' into the cosmic 'ocean' says something very hopeful about art on this planet." Thus the record is best seen as a time capsule and a statement rather than an attempt to preserve SKOR for future art historians." http://societeanonyme.la/ Translation and weaving by Sophia Borowska. Date: 8 Nov, 2016 |
Translation to WeavingThe pages of the SKOR Codex are packed with data in the form of black and white pixels representing the 0s and 1s of binary code. Each digital file was translated into this visual form of binary by a special program designed by the Société Anonyme. Coming across these images, I was struck by how much they resembled the pattern files read by the Jacquard loom. At the final stage of design in Pointcarré, when all the different structures have been inputted, a file is generated which is just black and white pixels, telling the loom which threads to lift (black pixel) and which to leave down (white), line by line for the whole weaving. Through weaving, these series of lifts cohere to reform the image designed at the beginning, but with the SKOR Codex, it is the seemingly random patterns of binary code being represented rather than the original image file. These images were therefore practically ready to weave without inputting structures, since the loom could feasibly read the black and white pixels as commands.
-Sophia |
Technique and Process Notes
The translation was complicated by the fact that we are now working on a black-and-white warp, meaning that I could not use the whole warp as my “white” in the pattern. On a white warp, I would have used black weft and simply followed the lift commands from the submission. To get around the black and white warp, I had to use both black and white in the weft as well. Then I alternated both colours line by line in the image, and assigned which colour should be on top based on the submission binary. In theory, the weaving could be read pixel by pixel by checking which colour (be it warp or weft) is on the surface of the cloth.
-Sophia Original Dimensions: 480 x 1924 Number of Picks: 1964 Woven Dimensions: 31” x 7.5” Weaving Density: 60 ppi Threads used: Warp is black and white 2/16 mercerized cotton. Wefts are black and white sewing thread. |
Outcome Notes
However, the way that my unorthodox way of assigning structures (based on the pink and blue stripes overlaid on the image… see “pattern” file) meant that colour areas combined in strange ways, producing areas of “faux double-weave” and leaving floats on the back of the cloth. Because each colour area was only assigning lift commands to one of the wefts, I could not work out how to tie down the background floats. This may be worked out in further tests. Overall, the piece has retained the visual feel of the submission, although the blurry circle in the centre of the image does not seem to have materialized. The different textures produced by the warp-faced areas and weft-faced areas are interesting, as is the repartition of these areas based on the placement of each pixel in the image in relation to the order of the wefts.
-Sophia |