White Cart Loom

VCR 7 (2) pp. 147–154 Intellect Limited 2017 Virtual Creativity Volume 7 Number 2 © 2017 Intellect Ltd Visual Essay. English language. doi: 10.1386/vcr.7.2.147_1 Visual essay VicKy isley and Paul smith Bournemouth university White Cart Loom abstract Keywords British artists Vicky Isley and Paul Smith (collectively known as boredomresearch) paisley pattern were commissioned in 2016 by the University of the West of Scotland (UWS) to diversity produce a new digital artwork with the aim of supporting Paisley’s bid to be City of natural systems Culture 2021. The commission was co-funded by UWS and Renfrewshire Council, freshwater pearl Scotland. The resulting artwork titled White Cart Loom weaves a narrative mussel combining Paisley’s rich industrial past with current scientific and ecological work, jacquard loom fighting to save a rare organism from extinction. Ernst Haeckel art interdisciplinary At the beginning of the twentieth century, scientist and artist Ernst Haeckel noted how the previous century had ‘immeasurably outstripped its predecessors,’ stating An entirely new character has been given to the whole of our modern civi- lization, not only by our astounding theoretical progress in sound knowledge of nature, but also by the remarkably fertile practical application of that knowledge in technical science, industry, commerce, and so forth. (1929: 1) Noting, at that time ‘an uneasy sense of dismemberment and falseness’ (Haeckel 1929: 2), his concern was that little or no progress had been made in moral and social life compared with earlier centuries, and forewarned of 147 06_VCR 7.2_Research_147-154.indd 147 12/9/17 9:10 AM Vicky Isley | Paul Smith ‘grave catastrophes in the political and social world’ (Haeckel 1929: 2). Just under a century later, competition over diminishing natural resources and mass migration, fuelled by climate change, presents a situation that appears to add credence to this warning. Unfortunately it seems that our remarkably fertile application of knowledge in industry and commerce is to blame. Both are subject to a dismemberment and falseness, failing to form healthy interactions with the imperative natural systems supporting our existence. Resources are consumed with little regard to sustainability. Also, awareness of climate change has done little to curb rampant consumption of cheap manufactured goods. Celebrated for combining art and science to depict complexity and beauty in microscopic life, Haeckel challenged an enduring religious view, which exaggerated humankind’s importance with divine significance. He provided a new vision of the order of life that supported the acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution in Germany. Now, as natural systems crumble under the strain of industry and commerce, we once again need to find a new vision, providing fresh clarity on the intimate dependence of human culture on natural environments. The White Cart Loom responds to this need, uniting the mechanisms of industry with the value of diversity and the protection of endangered life forms. The artwork centres on one primary concern: how do we value the unique, the rare and the last representative of a kind? The textile industry has forever forged a link between the town of Paisley and the iconic droplet-shaped motif known to many as the paisley pattern. The ancient bio-inspired design originates from Babylonia and represents a long-standing reverence for the natural world. Industrial exploitation of the design bestowed Paisley with architectural riches, disproportionality grand in scale. The History of the Shire of Renfrew evidences how Paisley was formerly the home to its own natural wealth of freshwater pearls: In this river of White Cart, a little above the Town of Paisley, there are found pearls so fine and big, that they may compare with many oriental, and have been taken notice of by some of the most famous jewelers in Europe. (Crawford 1782: 2) Freshwater pearl mussels (Margaritifera margaritifera) are now locally extinct. The freshwater pearl mussel is a remarkable organism; capable of surviving for over 200 years, it is one of the longest living animals in the world. Now criti- cally endangered they are protected by law. Contributing factors leading to the mussel’s local extinction include habitat destruction as a consequence of industrialization and the harvesting of wild pearls. In a few secret locations in Scotland, pearl mussels have survived and Scotland is critical for their future, Figure 1: Freshwater pearl mussels. © Sue Scott, boasting over half the Scottish Natural Heritage www.snh.gov.uk/copyright/. world’s population. 148 Virtual Creativity 06_VCR 7.2_Research_147-154.indd 148 12/9/17 9:10 AM White Cart Loom It is, however, a future that hangs in the balance. Despite wide acceptance of farmed pearls’ superior quality, there are those who wish to possess jewellery made from Scottish pearls and illegal poaching remains a significant concern. Colonies containing individuals, potentially born before HMS Beagle took Charles Darwin on a trip that changed our understanding of natural diversity forever, can be destroyed by poachers who kill large numbers of mussels in the hope of finding a single pearl. Over 150 years after the publication On the Origin of Species (Darwin 1859), we still seem to be bound by limited notions of value. Little regard is given to the organism’s role in water management, with just one adult mussel capable of filtering 50 litres of water a day (Zuiganov et al. 1994), improving water quality essential for salmon or trout. Considering the weight of human desire, in a world populated by over 7.4 billion individuals, the White Cart Loom re-imagines the paisley pattern as if it had grown in the shell of a freshwater pearl mussel. The work pays homage to the biological diversity that is currently being lost on an unprecedented scale. Reconnecting the design with its bio-inspired origins, the artwork exploits compu- tation to create unique pearlescent paisleys. The White Cart Loom will keep generating forms until it has created one for each human alive on earth at the time of its launch on the 1 November 2016 in the Paisley Pearls exhibition, Paisley Museum. Figure 2: White Cart Loom in Paisley Museum, Scotland, 2 November 2016–19 February 2017. © boredomresearch. www.intellectbooks.com 149 06_VCR 7.2_Research_147-154.indd 149 12/9/17 9:10 AM Vicky Isley | Paul Smith Figure 3: Digital prints containing a collection of White Cart Loom unique Paisley Pearls, presented to the University of the West of Scotland in February 2017. Each print contains unique digital forms generated during the Paisley Museum exhibition 2016–17. The compositions have been inspired by Ernst Haeckel’s plates in the publication Art Forms in Nature. © boredomresearch. White Cart Loom uses real-time 3D software to generate animated, pearlescent forms that swim across the screen. The forms are composed by combining geometric elements, following a bio-inspired grammar and nodular construction, with modulated oscillations of scale and rotation. Sited in the Paisley Museum’s rotunda, at the intersection between the art and natural history galleries, the White Cart Loom gave birth to over 76,000 unique digital organisms, one for each citizen of Paisley. Since the exhibition in Paisley Museum the White Cart Loom has been generating new forms in international events that combine art, science and technology, including ISEA 2017 in Manizales, Colombia (11–18 June 2017), where the work connected with the theme ‘Bio-creation and Peace’ and Balance Unbalance 2017 conference in Plymouth, UK, responding to the theme ‘A Sense of Place’, provoking ‘reflection and action to address the imminent social, economic and cultural impact of climate change’. White Cart Loom is a full-size reconstruction of a Jacquard loom. The Jacquard (a mechanism that reads punch cards to control the raising and lowering of threads) is the first programmable machine, providing an essential building block for the modern computer. In the White Cart Loom the Jacquard machine has been replaced by a contemporary computer. Boredomresearch recognizes the significance of the 150 Virtual Creativity 06_VCR 7.2_Research_147-154.indd 150 12/9/17 9:10 AM White Cart Loom Figure 4: Detail of the digital organism being created on White Cart Loom in Paisley Museum, Scotland, 2 November 2016–19 February 2017. © boredomresearch. Jacquard loom, not for its enhanced productivity and profitability but for the new affordances it brought to art as it demonstrates an early recognition of a connection between programmable technologies and creative diversity. Textile producers could run the same programme with different-colour threads, experimenting with and testing colour schemes in ways never before possible. Significantly, this brought notions of the unique, valued in the arts, together with the mechanisms of mass production. This insight was lost in the wake of mainstream industrial activity, favour- ing standardized units of production as the most direct route to profit. This bias towards profit is reflected in the Oxford English Dictionary (2017) definition of wealth, attending first to concerns of money and possession before considering wealth as ‘a plentiful supply of a particular desirable thing’. Archaically, wealth signifies well-being, derived from the word well as in good health. In common with the freshwater pearl mussel, this last meaning has diminished over time. Industrialization gives us wealth in the first sense. In the process it has destroyed habitat and depleted biological diversity, stealing our wealth in the second sense, ultimately leaving future generations with a planet having little wealth in the archaic sense. The White Cart Loom celebrates the remain- ing biological diversity, optimistic that the multiplicity of human enterprise can collaborate in its conservation. A century after Haeckel expressed his anxieties for a world spiralling towards catastrophe, social turmoil remains, among a myriad of new concerns, including mass extinctions resulting from climate change.

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