IGEN-NEM A Ferenczy Noémi-díjas textilművészeknek meghirdetett Jacquard pályázat kiállítása 2002. február 5. – március 10. kiállítási katalógus (Textilmúzeum Alapítvány, Budapest, 2002)

The Jacquard loom (1805), the invention of Frenchman Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752-1834) was a significant step in the history of the development of weaving. His loom gave a huge impulse to the revolution of textile industry, and has since served as a basis for modern automatic power looms. The significance of his invention lies in the fact that, by pressing just one treadle, producing patterns as well as sheds and changing cards can be carried out. The device relieved weavers of complex techniques so they could focus their attention on creating the fabric. The Jacquard loom worked with punched cards, so any pattern could be automatically woven into the material. # The method, the use of punched cards, was later applied to convey information of analytical machines and recording computer data, punched cards also played a part among devices of data input in digital computers. • At the beginning of 2001, the renewed Board of the Foundation of Textile Art and Curator Éva Vajk (textile designer) worked out a concept, contrary to former practice, to involve textile designers and artists into the activity of the museum and exhibit their works. • The first representative show of this program is the YES-NO exhibition of contemporary artists inspired by the Jacquard card. Only those awarded with the Ferenczy Prize were invited, but there is also a national contest with the same theme among their plans. • The Textile Museum also took on "securing finds" in connection with the exhibition. The discarded punch cards with their punched raster were saved from decay, they became part of the collection, and a few of them were made available to the artists. • The essence of the exhibition's concept is to show the unity of science/technology and art. And the "WORKS" were born, whose "carrier" was the conserved punch card. These cards may as well be interpreted as digital images. • Digital images are the first ones "independent of matter" among technically produced images. By digihtalizing pictures, all their objective features can be cancelled. Any detail of the visible world offers the opportunity of exciting variations represented at the same time. A Jacquard card can carry even very complex messages. • Turning the "raw material", the punch cards into images, objects, i.e. works of art: that was the artists, task. The creators focused on the novel interpretation and artistic application of the "punch card medium." A digital image is the first image type that can be seen as a real human invention: a thought experience that, by unifying a complex "vision" in the form of Yes and No, is destined to realize not only the technology but the very "meta-language of image making" as well. • By the end of the 20th century, eclecticism or, if you please, postmodern came into focus again: disassembling concepts into their elements, then putting them together and mixing them according to new paradigms. In the YES—NO exhibition applying Jacquard cards, the artists opened up new horizons of form and content with the concept of the Yes and No antithesis, by their way of thinking, experimentation and series of combinations and variations. The desire of unity, importance and self-adjustment creates new systems. In their works, some of them evoke the humane atmosphere of traditional culture, some of them reflect on the forms and content of popular culture, some of them place the stress on the source of light filtering through the tiny holes, and there are some who strive to a novel interconnection of space and time. • The exhibiting artists deploy the synthesis of accidental and conscious creation, giving way to the possibility of association. But it is the individual that is most strongly expressed in these works. • "On the border of every visible world is an invisible world, through which it steps out of itself. If we try to understand this mutual relationship, we can only define the invisibility as the blind spot of consciousness nesting itself in the visible. The relationship is the unavoidable consequence of this blind spot wich becomes visible in the middle of the visible, denying its compulsory borders. " (Gottfried Boehm: Seeing) • • ••••••••••••••••• HÉDI SZEPES