The weaving of complex designs demands far more than one pair of hands, and textiles production tends to be communal, sociable work allowing plenty of occasion for gossip and chat. Weaving was already multimedia: singing, chanting, telling stories, dancing, and playing games as they work, spinsters, weavers, and needleworkers were literally networkers as well. It seems that "the women of prehistoric Europe gathered at one another's houses to spin, sew, weave, and have fellowship." Spinning yarns, fabricating fictions, fashioning fashions...: the textures of woven cloth functioned as means of communication and information storage long before anything was written down. "How do we know this? From the cloth itself." This is not only because, like writing and other visual arts, weaving is often "used to mark or announce information" and "a mnemonic device to record events and other data." Textiles do communicate in terms of the images which appear on the right side of the cloth, but this is only the most superficial sense in which they process and store data. Because there is no difference between the process of weaving and the woven design, cloths persist as records of the processes which fed into their production: how many women worked on them, the techniques they used, the skills they employed. The visible pattern is integral to the process which produced it; the program and the pattern are continuous. Information can be stored in cloth by means of the meaningful messages and images which are later produced by the pen and the paintbrush, but data can also be woven in far more pragmatic and immediate ways. A piece of work so absorbing as a cloth is saturated with the thoughts of the people who produced it, each of whom can flash straight back to whatever they were thinking as they worked.

The weaving of complex designs demands far more than one pair of hands, and textiles production tends to be communal, sociable work allowing plenty of occasion for gossip and chat. Weaving was already multimedia: singing, chanting, telling stories, dancing, and playing games as they work, spinsters, weavers, and needleworkers were literally networkers as well. It seems that "the women of prehistoric Europe gathered at one another's houses to spin, sew, weave, and have fellowship." Spinning yarns, fabricating fictions, fashioning fashions...: the textures of woven cloth functioned as means of communication and information storage long before anything was written down. "How do we know this? From the cloth itself." This is not only because, like writing and other visual arts, weaving is often "used to mark or announce information" and "a mnemonic device to record events and other data." Textiles do communicate in terms of the images which appear on the right side of the cloth, but this is only the most superficial sense in which they process and store data. Because there is no difference between the process of weaving and the woven design, cloths persist as records of the processes which fed into their production: how many women worked on them, the techniques they used, the skills they employed. The visible pattern is integral to the process which produced it; the program and the pattern are continuous. Information can be stored in cloth by means of the meaningful messages and images which are later produced by the pen and the paintbrush, but data can also be woven in far more pragmatic and immediate ways. A piece of work so absorbing as a cloth is saturated with the thoughts of the people who produced it, each of whom can flash straight back to whatever they were thinking as they worked.

The weaving of complex designs demands far more than one pair of hands, and textiles production tends to be communal, sociable work allowing plenty of occasion for gossip and chat. Weaving was already multimedia: singing, chanting, telling stories, dancing, and playing games as they work, spinsters, weavers, and needleworkers were literally networkers as well. It seems that "the women of prehistoric Europe gathered at one another's houses to spin, sew, weave, and have fellowship." Spinning yarns, fabricating fictions, fashioning fashions...: the textures of woven cloth functioned as means of communication and information storage long before anything was written down. "How do we know this? From the cloth itself." This is not only because, like writing and other visual arts, weaving is often "used to mark or announce information" and "a mnemonic device to record events and other data." Textiles do communicate in terms of the images which appear on the right side of the cloth, but this is only the most superficial sense in which they process and store data. Because there is no difference between the process of weaving and the woven design, cloths persist as records of the processes which fed into their production: how many women worked on them, the techniques they used, the skills they employed. The visible pattern is integral to the process which produced it; the program and the pattern are continuous. Information can be stored in cloth by means of the meaningful messages and images which are later produced by the pen and the paintbrush, but data can also be woven in far more pragmatic and immediate ways. A piece of work so absorbing as a cloth is saturated with the thoughts of the people who produced it, each of whom can flash straight back to whatever they were thinking as they worked.

The weaving of complex designs demands far more than one pair of hands, and textiles production tends to be communal, sociable work allowing plenty of occasion for gossip and chat. Weaving was already multimedia: singing, chanting, telling stories, dancing, and playing games as they work, spinsters, weavers, and needleworkers were literally networkers as well. It seems that "the women of prehistoric Europe gathered at one another's houses to spin, sew, weave, and have fellowship." Spinning yarns, fabricating fictions, fashioning fashions...: the textures of woven cloth functioned as means of communication and information storage long before anything was written down. "How do we know this? From the cloth itself." This is not only because, like writing and other visual arts, weaving is often "used to mark or announce information" and "a mnemonic device to record events and other data." Textiles do communicate in terms of the images which appear on the right side of the cloth, but this is only the most superficial sense in which they process and store data. Because there is no difference between the process of weaving and the woven design, cloths persist as records of the processes which fed into their production: how many women worked on them, the techniques they used, the skills they employed. The visible pattern is integral to the process which produced it; the program and the pattern are continuous. Information can be stored in cloth by means of the meaningful messages and images which are later produced by the pen and the paintbrush, but data can also be woven in far more pragmatic and immediate ways. A piece of work so absorbing as a cloth is saturated with the thoughts of the people who produced it, each of whom can flash straight back to whatever they were thinking as they worked.