Not just knots: on the role of materiality in Andean khipus

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Not just knots: on the role of materiality in Andean khipus

Full programme 2024-25

Textile - Digital: Blurred Boundaries Between Materiality and Virtuality. Textiles are material objects, which are produced according to well-planned processes. Such a procedural nature favours multiple analogies between textiles and digitality – and raises, at the same time, resistance to these very associations. Weaving has become, in current discourse, a convenient ancestor of computing. By connecting computer history to a material craft, textiles offer a useful set of mytho-poetic metaphors: media would be interwoven in data flows passing through optical fibres. But the warmth, the care inherent in fabrics, and the healing nature of weaving, knitting or crocheting, contrast sharply with the uniformity of our digital world. The idea of this network is to put the textile and the digital in tension, to grasp the actual connections, and the resistances, that exist between these two wor(l)ds. How are digital tools used to conserve/expose textiles? What are the relations between arithmetic and weaving? What would be the textility of our digital media? What are the parallels between the textile and digital industries?

By bringing together textile and art historians, archaeologists, researchers in media theory and digital humanities, as well as curators and artists, this network aims to answer these questions from a variety of perspectives: theoretical, historical, technical, embodied, and political.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

(Hybrid) Room SG2, Alison Richard Building,, 7 West Road, Cambridge, United Kingdom