Thanks a million for posting! As a Kanchipuram native(can trace lineage all the way up to 5 generations at least), this was totally unexpected and a pleasant surprise. I have visited one of these Co-op looms and it's mindblowing how to this day the Kanchi Pattu(silk-Tamizh) is made with a handloom. aptly named handicraft. of course, the piece de resistance is the Varadharaja Perumal Kovil which has some of the best and well maintained sculptures on the planet.

This being one such exhibit https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianHistory/comments/1j75nc0/the_...

Brings back my joyous/carefree youth where I would spend summer vacations ambling around the massive temple complex.

That was a pretty fun article. Nice use of parallax scrolling and everything.

An amusing personal connection is that my wife wore a sari for our wedding (I'm from Chennai) and I wore a sherwani that she, a graphic designer, designed with Dall-E's assistance. A friend of ours knows an embroiderer in Bangalore who then put the design to the coat. Loved it, to be honest: https://x.com/arjie/status/1855328068883353665

Saris (not quite from Kanchipuram - American fabric) and Thinking Machines!

This started decently enough and then the author went all over the place. I'm not sure why detailed explanations of neural nets and smart contracts were needed here. It really feels like trying to ram in a tech solution for what is effectively a market/social problem.

Using computers to aid in designing is not specific to Kanchipuram saris. While I realize people always approach it from the POV of saving a dying art, I'm unsure if K.saris can really fall under that umbrella. Clearly the demand is there and the issues here arise due to inefficient and possibly corrupt market practices rather than the art itself dying. A lot of space was used to explain the lopsided economics on the supply side but there's not enough attention paid to the demand side and the marketplace dynamics.

My immediate thought is that if automation is really needed for the preservation of traditional patterns, then the right tool for the job is not unreliable, only probably approximately correct, generative AI approaches like GANs and Diffusion models, but Good, Old-Fashioned, symbolic AI approaches widely used today for procedural asset generation in the games industry like L-Systems or texture synthesis algorithms and Wave Function Collapse.

Wave Function Collapse in particular is itself based on convolutions, like CNNs, to preserve translational invariance, but it also preserves equivariance by means of a constraint satisfaction procedure. It's cool stuff and dirt cheap compared to training a CNN from scratch*.

_______________

* On anything but ImageNet/CIFAR 10.

This is a greatly researched article, and the site is just awesome!

Kanchipuram Saree has a rich history, and I learned so much more by reading this article.

I am intrigued by the Kanchipuram saree and have dreamed about owning one. The digital ledger is a unique idea – if authenticity is established, it would be easy to invest in this as art piece.

The sad part? This is just one piece of heritage among countless which have already been lost or haven't got a voice to save them. Just like Kancheepuram, nearly every district has a rich heritage in cuisine and fabric which is hundreds of years old. A lot of it was just lost to history because it became commercially nonviable to preserve and so much of it is disappearing in front of our eyes while we do nothing :(

lol what even is this article. Embedding a chip into sari so that someone from New York can get whole "biography" of sari, and hence this blockchain adaptation will mitigate economic distress in India by owning the Hermes style of "handcraft" consumerism?

> Yet, the market for "Indian Luxury" is booming globally. We see European houses acting as colonial curators of Indian heritage: Prada rebranding the Kolhapuri chappal for ₹84,500 ($930); Gucci selling the common kurta as an 'exotic kaftan' for the price of a small car; and Dior releasing a ₹18,180,000 ($200,000) coat dripping in Lucknowi Mukaish work without a whisper of credit to the artisans. The global appetite for the aesthetic is ravenous. But in Kanchipuram, the very hands that feed this hunger are vanishing.

The Western colonial imperial system never truly went away, it simply morphed into an opaque inscrutable machinery to make it palatable to its own highly refined taste. An empire of human rights.

Wish they showed more of the Jacquard loom. Indian (and maybe other) students learned it as a predecessor of modern computers, using punch cards to automate patterns.

This was a wild and fascinating read. I thought from the title with Thinking Machines that I would be reading about a hardware startup but instead I got labor markets in India, convolutional neural networks, jacquard looms and Crispr all in one article. The additional beautiful illustrations peppered in between were a great break from the chaos of reading too. This makes me wish for a better way to understand the dyes in my clothing.

really impressive work!!! the depth of research and the way the website presents it are both well executed.

i grew up in erode, a major handloom hub in tamilnadu.. so this hits close to home. research like this helps preserve and better understand regional textile ecosystems that often don’t get enough structured documentation.

thanks for sharing.

Looking past the writing style, which I intensely dislike, I am very disappointed in how the article identifies a real problem (Hari is not paid enough) and gives inane solutions (saree NFTs).

Why is Hari not paid enough?

1. "The visual language of the loom is deteriorating into digital gibberish"

2. "the chemical dyes are poisoning the very water the weavers drink"

3. "the market is flooded with fakes that have destroyed consumer trust"

You understand why 1 and 3 are problems to be solved when you consider the solutions proposed: AI and Blockchains. If Hari happens to ask an AI and Blockchain company to help him out, the outcome is clear: after they take a cut, his remaining salary reduces from 5000 to 500, and the consultants walk away to next solve manual scavenging using LLMs and room temperature superconductors.

Naturally, the Cyber Lime வெறியன்s in Paris care whether the yalis are the right way up. The goal is to sell the sarees in "Upper East Side in New York or London’s Jermyn Street or haute Paris" while touting them as culturally authentic. Wikipedia dumps of 5 different kinds of vision models reinforces the idea that AI is, of course, the solution. The only question is which kind.

Using CRISPR-Cas9 for better microbial dyes is interesting. Unfortunately the one link provided is about R&D for food dyes in the US, so I am not convinced (without checking it up myself later) that this is feasible in Kanchipuram yet.

"[LVMH's] Aura Blockchain acts as a digital notary for their diamonds, recording the specific mine of origin and cut history." You can already verify that your blood diamond has been mined by an exploited, underpaid worker. The only thing you need to save Kanchipuram sarees is authentic Proof-of-Exploitation so no one can doubt that your precious clothes are hand-woven by Hari who can't afford his groceries.

Indian luxury clothes made "with a solid bar of silver and gold", the process enhanced with AI and Blockchains, to be sold to a Met Gala market as the solution to underpaid weavers in Kanchipuram is... idk. The cherry on top is them admitting to using AI art in an article about underpaid artisans.

"Even while developing this piece, the irony of using AI was not lost on us." I wish I could pull this off with a straight face.

It toon me two tries to actually read this because the first time the scrolling to get to the article irritated me so much I closed the page.

My sister and mother insisted on having Kanchipuram silk sarees.

Every upper middle class woman had to have them, back in the day.

what does this have to do with Thinking Machines? Just clickbait?

> It could find patterns, but it could not understand meaning.

Try to explain that to an AI believer. No chance in hell. The religion brooks no doubt.

Amazing article, and love the storytelling format. Checked the altermag.com, I wonder why I didn't stumble upon it before. Easily one of the best websites I visited in recent times.

damn that’s one greatly designed website.

I hate it when people mispronounce/misspell Yazhi. It's pronounced using the the most unique feature of the language - "zh" instead of "L" just like Tamil itself (it's actually Thamizh). The original wikipedia page:

https://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%AF%E0%AE%BE%E0%AE%B3%E0...

It's India's State and Local Governments are promoting this - most artisans that manufacturing these goods are doing so as part of a cooperative as Khadi and MSME Cooperatives is a major pillar for Indian politics and economic development, along with One District One Product [0] in order to build a heritage consumer goods industry similar to what Japan did.

It's also something that is deeply personal for Narendra Modi and Amit Shah [1] as they started their political careers climbing up the cooperative ladder - they were able to turn Gujarat from being a Congress only state to a BJP only state by co-opting cooperatives in the dairy industry [2]. And in Kancheepuram's case it's an extremely important industry in TN.

Furthemore, if Prada or Chanel buys Indian heritage artisan goods and gives it the luxury veneer, it helps MSMEs and khadi cooperatives demand better terms when wholesaling light manufactured products.

Finally, at a personal level, much of my family is associated with Khadi and Cooperative industries - they are one of the only ways to build medium or even high value industries while giving participants some degree of agency. The profits of khadi goods being sold at high margins ends up in the hands of cooperative members and cooperatives tend to re-invest in capacity building or subsidizing new entrants. This is why you see cooperative banks dot all of India.

[0] - https://www.investindia.gov.in/one-district-one-product

[1] - https://theprint.in/opinion/politically-correct/rahul-gandhi...

[2] - https://scroll.in/article/858585/amul-is-now-a-congress-mukt...

I find it silly and patronising to call this colonialism.

Colonialism is when globalism? Much of Indians have no problem (I assume) with this.

To add to your critique... The piece proposes fast fashion as a solution to the woes of essentially a bespoke, made-to-order craft. How can this not lead down the path from the alleged Prada-ification to a (inevitable) Zara-ification of the woven product... motifs clashing with motifs; culture and context loudly absent.

Quoting:

"For a heritage boutique, this offers a data-driven way to align traditional korvai patterns with modern market appetites knowing, for instance, that a specific shade of "Cyber Lime" will be trending in Paris next season and weaving it into a classic gopuram border."

Um. No please.

The buyer of a Kanjeevaram (or Paithani, or Navvari, or Balucheri, or any number of other traditions) is looking for something outside of time. The very inheritance exists because it is beauty, art, craft, taste of person-hood and---ultimately indescribable but deeply felt---quality that transcends the generations. To be worn until worn out, and then converted to another timeless piece with which the next few generations would adorn themselves.