More than 200 years ago, a French silk weaver revolutionized European textile manufacturing.

Joseph-Marie Jacquard’s loom with its punched card system wove intricate patterns into the silks of the day, enabling unskilled weavers to create the richly textured brocades that previously demanded the skills of master weavers and many months to complete.

Today, one Balinese weaver, Ida Bagus Adnyana of Putri Ayu in Blahbatuh, is adapting Jacquard’s system to produce traditional Indonesian songket and textiles, many of which, Adnyana says, could otherwise be lost because of the rapidly changing pace of modern Indonesia.

“To make the songket by hand is very difficult,” Adnyana says. “It takes many months to complete one length of fabric. Those still skilled in making songket are getting old and the younger generation today wants everything instantly; they are quickly bored so learning from the elderly to make songket by hand is hard.”

Adnyana’s goal is to protect the future of Indonesian songket by writing traditional motifs and patterns into the punch cards, which direct the raising and lowering of motif-forming thimbles during the weaving process.

He points out that to make a length of songket using the punch cards takes a couple of days, versus months without the cards.

When Adnyana first began experimenting with punch cards to solve the problem of protecting traditional motifs while also making songket more accessible to Balinese for ceremonies, he was unaware of Jacquard and his centuries-old invention.

“The idea for this first came when I saw clothing labels being made with sewing machines that read cards to form the pattern,” he says.

“In Bali we understand songket — how to lift or lower each thread to form the motif. When I saw the sewing machine that read which string to pull to form the design, I recognized that same principle at work.”

It at first appears a great leap of imagination from the prosaic world of clothing labels to the poetry of
songket.

“I felt immediately that this punched card technique could cross over to songket weaving,” says Adnyana.

His was an innovation very like that taken in 1837 by England’s lace-makers in the adoption of Jacquard’s cards to form the patterns in their lace. In Adnyana’s case, this innovation won him an award from the national department of research and technology, presented by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono earlier this year.

From his first realization that punch cards could be the answer for the rapid weaving of songket to discovering the technology and applying it took Adnyana a year of trial and error. He traveled to Indonesia’s textile center, Bandung, and learned from weavers there how to write the designs into the punch cards and to locate the looms that are a marriage of tradition and technology. The songket is still hand-woven without electricity, but with the aid of the punch card system.

Writing the designs into the cards is painstaking work. Adnyana records each change in pattern, stitch by stitch, as a round hole in the cards that are linked into chains that feed through the loom as the weavers recreate the songket motifs.

“With the cards we can trace old songket motifs that have been lost. A designer, Thomas Sigar, discovered a Sulawesi songket in the Netherlands that was believed to have been lost forever. He asked us to make it again and we were able to write the pattern into the cards,” explains Adnyana.
In applying his technology, he is finding a way to restore Indonesia’s textile history, even though its original makers have long since taken the secrets of its patterns to the grave.

“These songket are owned by Indonesia but have been lost over the centuries and are very difficult to make. They can be made on machines with computers, but that demands many meters are woven to be viable. With this punch card system, we can make one-off pieces by hand,” says Adnyana.

He adds that while some fashion designers are beginning to work with songket, “it is not yet popular for fashion, but is primarily used in ceremonies”.

“I feel the motifs may need to be updated for high fashion, but for me the key is that with this system I can make songket that is less expensive and quicker to make than songket woven traditionally,” he says.

“There are several factors, one is that traditional songket needs to be ordered months in advance and will cost at least Rp 5 million for one length.

“Using the cards we can make the songket quickly and it costs around one-fifth of that price, which makes these textiles accessible to many more people to be used in their cultural practices. That is the most important element for me.”

He stresses that none of the classical beauty of songket is lost in the process between machine and hand. However, “songket made traditionally by hand is always more beautiful. It has something indefinable within. But this [punch card] system allows faster weaving and is still by woven by hand.”

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