Sewing machines and weaving looms: a media archaeological encounter between fashion and film

Abstract

This article proposes thinking of media archaeology as an operating table upon which historical, material and technological interconnections between fashion and film are made. By exploring how early cinema and digital film can be coupled to textile as technology, more specifically through the mechanisms of the sewing machine and the Jacquard loom, it extends the historical span from the mid-1890s, with the invention of cinema as projection, to the early 1800s, when computational thinking was successfully implemented as weaving technique. Instead of focusing on film and fashion as means of visual representation, the author relies on the concept of inscription for a better understanding of both cinema (as recording of light and movement) and textile (with its various thread techniques of weaving, stitching, knitting, etc.).