I'm making a note about this because I'm curious about painters who also use weave in some form. Note also Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois - also grids, Agnes Martin and Sean Scully - I need to consider the work of each one and reflect on how their practice might inluence my own work.
A couple of hundred years ago, they were trying to speed up the process of tapestries. They hit upon an idea because Rubens made a painting and it was worth ‘x’ dollars and the tapestry was worth five times as much. There was more status in the tapestry then in the original painting. It took two years to weave a tapestry of an original painting that would take just two months to make. They found a method of making paper tapes which had holes in them that were pulled through the loom. If there were holes, they would send the thread up. If there were no holes they would send the thread down. This ultimately led to the IBM key punch card -- which is also hole or no hole. They were looking at the technology that tapestry makers would use. Binary numbers -- the 1 or 0 just stand for hole or no hole. It goes back to that. It was either on or off. It turns out that the computer, which owes its existence to tapestries, is a perfect medium in which to talk to the tapestry. So I work with the computer to see if we can use certain color threads. There are about 150 different colors and values. There are 65 in the color ones and 250 in the black and white. They are made from the guerrotypes by laying them down on a scanner. The scanner illuminates and records the information. It is like a contact print. We do a lot of work on the computer, then we start weaving test strips. And then weave the whole. This thing over here is a tapestry test. You can see how the threads going in different directions make complicated combinations of colors."
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/scobie/scobie8-5-08_detail.asp?picnum=5
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