On April 21, 2022 I attended Patricia Cadavid's event in which she taught us about her work which largely centers around colonialism in new media, particularly in sound. Cadavid, a Colombian researcher and artist, is currently completing her Masters in Interface Cultures in the University of Arts in Austria and is also an artist in residence in the Art + Science Center at UCLA. In her latest work she takes, a decolonial perspective to work on the vindication of the memory contained in the ancestral interfaces of the Andes in South America which was stripped away by colonization and their connections with art and science.
In her presentation, Cadavid discussed how, during precolonial times in the Andes, barriers between art and science did not exist. Previous Andean societies embraced the symbiotic relationship between the arts and sciences which can be be seen in the image below. The image depicts a native Andean astrologer and poet who studied the sun, moon, and other heavenly bodies to know when to plant the fields. The barriers between these two fields were constructed as a result of colonialism.
One of the ways in previous Andean societies combined the arts and sciences was through the creation of khipus, sometimes spelled quipus. The khipu allowed those who created them to keep records and communicate information with one another through the use of string and knots (Cartwright, 2014). This tangible interface consists of a central wool or cotton cord which other strings are attached to. These strings consists different shaped, colored, and sized knots all of which encrypt different kinds of values and information (Cadavid, 2019). This devices are one of the first known textile computers and were used until the Spanish colonization which banned the use of these devices and destroyed a substantial number of these devices. Today, 1,000 khipus are known and are varying in complexity with some consisting of tens of thousands of knots tied by different people, from different regions of the empire, and for different reasons (Medrano and Urton, 2018).
To pay homage to these devices, Cadavid uses art, science, and technology to construct an electronic khipu made of conductive rubber cords that act as sensors. The interaction is based on the weaving of knots in real time. In doing so, she is able to highlight the repressed memories and history of the precolonial Andes.
Works Cited
Cadavid Hinojosa, Laddy Patricia. “Knotting the memory//Encoding the Khipu_: Reuse of an ancient Andean device as a NIME.” 2019, https://www.nime.org/proceedings/2020/nime2020_paper94.pdf. Accessed 11 May 2022.
Cartwright, Mark, et al. “Quipu.” World History Encyclopedia, 8 May 2014, https://www.worldhistory.org/Quipu/. Accessed 11 May 2022.
Medrano, Manuel, and Gary Urton. “Khipu - The Incas' Knotty History - SAPIENS.” Sapiens.org, 26 July 2018, https://www.sapiens.org/culture/khipu-incas-knotty-history/. Accessed 11 May 2022.
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