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Illustration Beyond the Page:
Mechanical Music, Artists’ Books, & Sound Weaving

This is my working title for a paper I am writing for the 15th International Illustration Research Symposium.

​My proposal for my paper explores how mechanical and coded systems shape contemporary illustration practice by examining the intersection of sound, book arts, and historical apparatuses. My research focuses on Tapestry Sound Book (2019), my artist’s book that encodes sound through woven patterns, drawing connections between the heritage of mechanical music devices, illustration, and experimental book forms.

​The loom, one of humanity’s oldest machines, provided the conceptual bridge between weaving patterns and programming. In the early 19th century, Joseph-Marie Jacquard’s loom (1804) revolutionised textile production by introducing punch cards to control which threads were lifted, enabling complex woven patterns to be “encoded” mechanically. Each card represented a binary choice: a hole or no hole, lift or don’t lift essentially turning weaving into a form of machine-readable instruction.
 
This method of external, modular control inspired later computing pioneers. Charles Babbage, in designing the Analytical Engine (1837), borrowed Jacquard’s punch card system for feeding both data and operations into his mechanical computer. Ada Lovelace, writing notes on Babbage’s design, explicitly drew analogies between the loom’s ability to weave flowers and algebraic patterns, seeing programming as the weaving of symbolic structures.
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By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, punch cards had been adopted in data processing, most famously by Herman Hollerith for the 1890 U.S. Census a lineage that eventually led to IBM. Through the mid-20th century, computers still relied on punch cards for both data input and program code, making them a literal continuation of the loom’s logic of pattern control.