Playing with Tradition rug by Richard Hutton
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009
Textile looms and computers share a common history; Babbage used punch cards in his Difference Engine after seeing a Jacquard loom at work. This carpet by Richard Hutten is called “Playing With Tradition” and it plays on the historical relationship of looms and computers by looking exactly like a digital image that has been pixel-stretched. Hutten has designed furniture and other products for Droog and Sawaya and Moroni, among others, and this rug was designed for I+I’s Strawberry Fields project. Some of the other pieces in that project are below, and at least two of them make use of computer imagery or computerized loom capabilities. This came to us down the winding path of blprnt (our resident digital expert and man about the studio, whose mom is also a weaver) via quasimondo via today and tomorrow.
