(2023—24)

INDUSTRUCTO journal

a mmesic survey of the in between
pursuing a method to transcribe the immaterial into a physical chart
that could be a matrix for its own virtualization.

puncture: information in two potential states. either by absence or location of the holes.

(on an automated loom, location cross the width corresponds to threads in the warp,
with a hole indicating that the thread should be lifted, thus allowing the shuttle to pass beneath).
punch cards were different from most other ways of storing digital information in two important respects: they could be overlaid with human-readable text or graphics. because holes are punched into a flat substrate — whether paper, card stock, plastic or metal—both human and machine-readable information could be stored in a single artifact.

DO NOT FOLD, SPINDLE OF MUTILATE
damage to punched cards may make them unreadable. in the 1950s, when they became widespread, manufacturers printed a warning on cards to prevent office workers from stapling, folding…

(also the title of a 1970s movie in which four middle-class ladies create a fictitious woman and submit her profile to a computer dating service to amuse themselves with the potential suitors’ letters)

a motto for the Free Speech Movement, which upon recognising the United States had become an organisational society,
used punch cards as a metaphor to its commoditization, a symbol of the "system" and alienation.

and so is the timeclock.

in striving for efficiency, timekeeping also got standardised.
whereas before time was local, and its perception dictated by shadows, burning candles, or the bells of a church.
natural rhythms and seasons sufficed.
with the railway weaving cities and countries
synchronized and standard time was essential.

how is past time present
in a factory’s remnant

GYŐR , HUNGARY

from places of (re)production to spaces turned into an unreproducible
and speculative commodity themselves, in which the remnants are of a semiotic nature.

what is the lexicon of our communication with the past?

is it through symbols that we must not mutilate whilst freely operating on the remaining surface? symbols have a dual existence: part reality and part mental image.
these voids are like the holes on the punch card that weaves the city around relatable signs.
the tabulated information of the masterplans, is a schematic vocabulary of urbanisation.

1944, FORTEPAN 109157 / ROYAL HUNGARIAN AIR FORCE
< 1944, FORTEPAN 25077 / ROYAL HUNGARIAN AIR FORCE

in a similar way, we have created a common diagramatic language with machines, to perform actions and create patterns.
in the textile industry, we rely on a punch card to mediate that transcription and produce facts.

if manipulated, the punch cards can render a faulty depiction

— of a society that has seen the punch card as the intermediary to the corporate system, hence a symbol of oversimplification, dehumanization and depersonalization. the individual is a number, encoded in a binary set —

NHL archive

< 1968, MTI-FOTO-856411 / 1963,MTI-FOTO-844827

now that the information is indeed ellusive,
what do the physical vestiges
still tell us of the workers
whose hands operated progress?

collage over graph paper (101×41,5cm)
map of Óbuda and Újlak, by Gyula Kozma to the publisher Mosinger R. Műintézete in 1906, monochrome 35mm photographies (18×14cm), photocopies
Aquincum, 2023

in the preliminary phase, the investigation was focused on ruins as semiotic vestiges of the integral symbols buildings represent(ed). industrial sites were pivotal to urbanism, not only by their scale, but also due to the dependencies that gravitated around them, weaving the city. this was a fragile fabric, that eroded through time. the intention of the survey on Aquincum (Óbuda, Budapest) was to underline the antagonism between protection, recovery & reconstitution of archaeological sites as a tool to recall the past, and appropriation, selection & demolition of industrial remnants according to a non-canonical preservation of recognizable elements,

as much as ancient ruins, industrial sites are milestones in the history of humanity, marking our dual capability of destruction and creation that engenders both nuisances and progress. our power over matter allows us to extract, transform, erect and exhaust.
because such structures belong to a recent past, only pioneer species have come to inhabit these sites.
time hasn’t still: when it sediments, it will l be over uncharacterized traces that our actions of pillage and neglect leave. we are being agents in this exploitation, under an act of voluntary anthropic ruination.

through historical documents such as cartography, illustration and photography, former industrial sites were identified in the district III and a flexible route outlined to allow the dérive. the photographic records were then developed, processed, cropped, photocopied and it’s fragments manipulated and assembled in a widespread sheet. whilst the pattern chart is an allusion to the weaving drafts, and so to a systematised preceding planning, it also resembles the method of archaeological surveys that record what is found. if exploring the mutilated, obsolete, derelict, demolished factories, and calling to action how it endures (in the memory, records, archives or ruins) this duality of possible readings is fundamental.

totems in a contextual

vacuum.

credits: Babai Dénes

conveying the sense of the indestructible character of the commodities prone to reproduction, opposing the generative or creative nature of industria and art,
taking place inside ^indu- of a built ^-structo industrial space, with an empashys on light, which is what generates both this disseminated architectural typology and the photographic record.

understand how can a mutable artwork be achieved by the manipulation of punched cards once rendered sensible to light
and subsequently fed into the loom, so that the machine becomes a performer in the embodiment of the context,

weaving a tapestry with the threads of time.

Over a series of fabric—actions, an experimental research approaches the relevance of the wool industry in Covilhã (Portugal). Rooted in the records and cues of a past in ruins, unwoven from archives according to inputs provided by Jacquard punch cards, a suggestive narrative dithers between presence/absence and motion/emotion.

The reduction of the former workers’ existence into a tabulated language renders it intelligible by the loom, so as to produce a graphic translation of the interaction between man and machine
during the period of industrialization. The ekphrasis as a trans—script, is a tinted auratic expression of the manufacture that preceded mechanical reproduction, whose soundscape still echoes in the latent factory where the tapestry was — or could have been — produced.

300×160CM
woven wool fabric, acetate punch cards, iron filings, flat washers, oxidizing agents, charcoal, glue, sound (18’40’’)

⬋

IV