Kristen Roos

This world includes work that Kristen Roos has created for a video installation in several windows in the Exchange District in Winnipeg curated by Manufacturing Entertainment in 2024. 

The title refers to the windows that were in the top floors of weavers’ cottages in the UK prior to the automation of the loom, which were called weavers’ windows or lights. The video was designed using techniques found in vintage paint and animation software for early personal computers from the 1980’s and 1990’s, and uses Jacquard weaving patterns from the 1800’s. 

The designs speak to the history of the Jacquard loom and its relationship to computers and data, making connections between weaving structures and the blocky pixelated imagery found in early video computer systems like the Atari 2600, early 8bit computers, and the Commodore Amiga. The Jacquard loom is one of the first computers, and Jacquard weaving patterns are examples of some of the earliest images stored as data on a portable storage medium, situated in a history that has gone from stacks of paper punch cards, to floppy disks, to our current flash cards/SD cards. In this sense, these weaving patterns can be looked at as a kind of pre-mainframe computer art, in that they were saved on punch cards that were then fed into Jacquard looms. 

WEAVERS WINDOWS

Editions