T o refer to the Jacquard loom as a precursor of the computer is a common narrative in histories of computing beginning with Ada Lovelace comparing the punched card operated loom with the calculating engine designed by Charles Babbage: "We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves." But this does not mean that Jacquard invented the algebra of patterns. He only constructed the first widely known and used mechanism replacing the drawboy by punched cards to feed pattern information into his mechanism. To control a weave means to decide whether a warp thread is to be picked up or not. Weaving has therefore been a binary art from its very beginning, applying operations of pattern algebra for millennia. Jacquard's cards were the end of this story rather than its beginning, reducing the weaver to an operator who had to step on a single treadle repeatedly. This article argues that algebra is already involved in operating shafts or heddles on ordinary looms, that this algebra was applied tacitly until the first weaving notations were developed, and that these notations make the tacit algebra of patterns recognizable to nonweavers: inventors and engineers.

This article hosts an interdisciplinary exploration of cyclic rhythmic structures, bringing together historical references to ground understanding of algorithmic electronic dance music, and in particular the algorave movement. The role of pattern in uniting dance, music and language is investigated in the ancient practice of weaving, in ancient Greek choral lyric, and contemporary live coding. In this context the TidalCycles environment is introduced, with some visual and audio examples. Cyclic metrical patterns in ancient Greek are then explored in detail, particularly the metrical transformations of Epiplokē. Finally, this jump between contemporary and ancient practice leads us to consider algorave itself as a Luddite movement, its proponents engaged in an unravelling of technology.

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T his article introduces the TEXTILE special issue on Weaving Codes, Coding Weaves, and the project of the same name, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for 18 months from September 2014. We introduce the collaborators of this interdisciplinary project, spanning textiles, music, arts technology, computer science, mathematics, anthropology, media theory, and philosophy. We tell the multifaceted story of how we met and began to collaborate, following prescient activities in textiles, music performance, live art, and computer programming that have met confluence in our project. This forms an introduction to the articles produced by these collaborators, either as part of the Weaving Codes project, or in parallel with it. We conclude by looking to the future, in particular the five year ERC PENELOPE project now beginning in the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

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