Programming Prayer: The Woven Book of Hours (1886–87)
Touchstone in the history of computing, monument of city pride, pastiche of Gothic and Renaissance revivalisms with a dash of Art Nouveau — the Livre de Prières: Tissé d’après les enluminures des manuscrits du XIVe au XVIe siècle, produced in Lyon in the 1880s, is an object of many valences, a nodal point connecting several seemingly disparate legacies. As the title indicates, the book’s leaves are neither handwritten nor printed, but woven (tissé), then mounted onto heavy paper backings and bound. A product of combined manual, mechanical, and computational labor, the leaves were produced on Lyon’s famed Jacquard looms, their text and imagery encoded in hundreds of thousands of punch cards that directed the weaving of black and silvery gray silk threads.
The book was conceived to be a technical marvel, but its contents looked back to Gothic books of hours made between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, precious tomes that contained calendars of Christian holidays and prayers to be recited at prescribed hours of the day. Mostly produced before the era of print, these books were sumptuous objects, typically hand inscribed on vellum with fine illustrations that were sometimes enhanced with gold leaf. With its own shimmering silk threads and extravagant concentration of labor, the woven prayer book is an object deliberately appended to the lineage of the luxury book while also offering a vision for its future, as a product of modern industry.
