Oracle Reading of a Kiphu
Sound performance / Electromagnetic textil installation / Spoken word
Germany 2023 – 2024
“Astronomical khipus were Andean instruments for recording stellar cartographies with strings and knots that symbolized mystical numbers, embodying days, months, and celestial years—like books of prophecy and divination. An ancient code that unveils the divine nature of the cosmos. Due to their complexity, khipus constitute an essential part of a series of elements within Andean cosmotechnics that form intricate webs of data that flows through eco-computer systems, creating an ancestral rope memories that dialogues with the natural world, holding transcendent cosmic meaning and preserving the wisdom of Indigenous South American peoples. TALKING KNOTS is a sound performance featuring the sonification of the electromagnetic installation Khipu / Electrotextile Pre-Hispanic Computer, creating a poetic dialogue that carefully reintegrates these ancient technologies into contemporary computer science.This project revives these historically oppressed ancestral technologies, challenging colonial narratives, and thus brings to the present questions and uncertainties about our past, while opening possibilities for more inclusive, just and sustainable technological imaginaries through Latin American artistic speculation.“.
“Astronomical khipus were Andean instruments for recording stellar cartographies with strings and knots that symbolized mystical numbers, embodying days, months, and celestial years—like books of prophecy and divination…
An ancient code that unveils the divine nature of the cosmos. Due to their complexity, khipus constitute an essential part of a series of elements within Andean cosmotechnics that form intricate webs of data that flows through eco-computer systems, creating an ancestral rope memories that dialogues with the natural world, holding transcendent cosmic meaning and preserving the wisdom of Indigenous South American peoples. TALKING KNOTS is a sound performance featuring the sonification of the electromagnetic installation Khipu / Electrotextile Pre-Hispanic Computer, creating a poetic dialogue that carefully reintegrates these ancient technologies into contemporary computer science.This project revives these historically oppressed ancestral technologies, challenging colonial narratives, and thus brings to the present questions and uncertainties about our past, while opening possibilities for more inclusive, just and sustainable technological imaginaries through Latin American artistic speculation.“.
2023 /
Sound performance for the opening of the exhibition Renaissance 3.0
A Base Camp for New Alliances of Art and Science in the 21st Century at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany
2024 /
Sound performance for festival Fertile Void: Quantum Paradoxes and the Physics of Living Matter
Lectures, Performances, Conversations, Exhibition
HKW | Haus der Kulturen der Welt – Berlin, Germany
Conversation Cosmic Nettings/
Tying Quantum Knots, Constanza Piña Pardo, Subsequent conversation with Alexandra Martens-Serrano
Curatorial Text/
What would have happened if the colonizers had not arrived in the Americas and ancestral technologies were still in existence? What would they be like?
Khipu: Pre-Hispanic Electrotextile Computer is an artistic research project by Constanza Piña Pardo that explores an ancient computing system used in pre-Columbian Andean cultures. In this system, information was knotted with strings and coded in numerical values, a level of abstraction in line with modern-day computation. Currently considered as pre-Hispanic ecological computers, the importance of the khipus lies in their transcendental cosmic significance and the preservation of the wisdom transmitted from Indigenous peoples in Abya Yala. Due to their level of complexity, khipus might allow for an exploration of quantum worlds.
As a large number of khipus remain locked in European museums, Piña Pardo invites audiences to sonify and embody a khipu for the quantum age through a performative offering. Subsequent to the lecture performance, the artist engages in a conversation with Studio Quantum resident Alexandra Martens Serrano to discuss the remnants of—and resistances inherent to—pre-Hispanic computation and what these ancestral forms might evoke in the contemporary scientific age.
