CULTURALLY SPECIFIC SHAPE GRAMMAR OF BALINESE SONGKET PATTERNS

Abstract

Abstract:Songket weaving in Bali has been connected with the highest castes throughout the centuries. The noble ladies and daughters of the courts and the women of the Brahmanic houses. Nowadays, with the economic changes of the last five decades, Songket can be purchased by anyone who can afford to buy them. The Songket production process is complicated and time-consuming. Young people in communities may find the required, sometimes-lengthy apprenticeships too demanding. This knowledge may disappear if family members are not interested in learning them. More importantly, some traditional craftsmanship knowledge has been transmitted from generation to generation through an oral tradition, which is not well-documented. The preservation of cultural creation has been accomplished through the creation of digital formats, according to the Guidelines for the Preservation of Digital Heritage, as “texts, databases, still and moving images, audio, graphics, software, and web pages, among a wide and growing range of formats” (National Library of Australia, 2003, p.13). The Songket weaving motifs are stored in Tulad. However, Tulad was created with material that is fragile, and some of the information started to disappear. To sustain and preserve the information in tulad for the future generations of the local communities, a digital form of their cultural creations can be used to entice the younger generations to both understand and perpetuate their own cultures. The process of transforming an oral tradition into a digital form involves careful decoding to avoid misinterpretation by (1) Learning the Songket technique from the artisans on site and (2) translating the technique into a cultural shape structure. This study contributes to the digitization of Balinese Songket Patterns into a digital format.

Keywords: songket, tulad, shape structure, culture, motifs