Jacquard Jacquard Jacquard

I wish to squeee more loudly in response to beamjockey's recursive Jacquard comment, because it's so cool.

Teaser: look at this image of this weaving.

1) That picture the weaver is holding? It's a Jacquard of Jacquard.

2)

This picture itself amazes me; Jacquard technology was far more advanced than I had any idea of. The tonal gradation -- how much can be thread colors, and how much is dithering? And with the fineness of detail, it's a huge amount of information to encode onto those cards. I haven't found the piece's thread count and so forth, but just this JPEG is 1.5 million pixels, worth at least half a byte each, and those cards can't be more than a few bytes. (The hole spacing seems to vary; artistic licence?) Who punched those millions of holes?

I wonder if anyone nowadays knows enough to tell whether the cards in this piece might be so cunning as to encode part of it.