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Programming Prayer: The Woven Book of Hours (1886–87)
An illuminated prayer book woven on mechanical looms programmed by punch card.
Touchstone in the history of computing, monument of city pride, pastiche of Gothic and Renaissance revivalisms with a dash of Art Nouveau — the Livre de Prières: Tissé d’après les enluminures des manuscrits du XIVe au XVIe siècle, produced in Lyon in the 1880s, is an object of many valences, a nodal point connecting several seemingly disparate legacies. A product of combined manual, mechanical, and computational labor, the leaves were produced on Lyon’s famed Jacquard looms, their text and imagery encoded in hundreds of thousands of punch cards that directed the weaving of black and silvery gray silk threads. Although the Lyon book is based on historical models, Randall rightly points out that its imagery does not directly copy medieval prototypes, but rather is mediated through nineteenth-century aesthetics, and that some leaves in particular “strike a distinctly Art Nouveau note”.
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