Weaving Waves. A platform on text, textile and technology

Abstract

Weaving Waves is a speculative platform to study shared genealogies between text, textiles and technology. Due to the nature of the research, this proposal is necessarily conceived as partial. The departing point is situated in the wave-shape that threads take in textile making, and how textiles have the capacity in many cultures of composing a non-phonetic system of inscription, and a de-centred place of enunciation. The non-linear entanglement of the warp and weft serves both as a metaphor for the composition of history, and also as a generative device about how narratives can be introduced. Authors such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui or Walter D. Mignolo have proved that textiles are a way of non-phonetic writing, and as such, they contain historical narrations and epistemologies divergent from the Western ones. Authors such as Gary Urton have shown how quipus (a textile device for writing from the Incas) are encoded with a binary code system. Also the Jacquard loom and its systems of punched cards to produce fabrics inspired early computational devices developed by Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. The thinking of Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung introduces elements for disothering within this enterprise. The tentative aim is to present a possible multidisciplinary research, which could be a project part of Siegfried Zielinski’s speculative Institute of Southern Modernities.