“Rachel Halton still doesn’t know who made the decision, in October 2022, to summarily decommission the $160,000 #JacquardLoom that had been a cornerstone of #RMIT’s renowned #weaving and #textile #design courses for 20 years.
Nearly 3 metres high and weighing more than half a tonne, the loom was an intricate machine of polished wood, steel, compressed air and #mechatronics: simultaneously a grand monument to the golden age of the #TextileIndustry and a modern #tool for weaving strands of #yarn into intricate #fabrics. Halton knew she couldn’t let it end up in landfill.”
“The loom was the only one of its kind in the southern hemisphere, and one of only a handful in the world, bought for the university’s #Brunswick campus in the early 2000s, soon after Halton started teaching there. It “elevated what you could do as an artist”, she says.
Students enrolled just to have access to it. International artists visited especially to weave on it. It became integral to Halton’s creative practice.”
“Watt has “a very special affinity” with the loom. It isn’t just the time she spent working on it at RMIT, or that it sat in her home for months after it was rescued. She’s also been using her coding skills – self-taught – to update its electronics. It’s as though technology is lapping back on itself, given that #Jacquard #PunchCards inspired the basis of #ModernComputing.”
This is why Australia can’t compute.
#RachelHalton / #Tech / #programmIng / #BuildingStuff <https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/may/25/a-new-room-for-a-doomed-loom-and-the-battle-to-save-australias-slowly-dying-crafts>
