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SLIDE ONE: TITLE
Thank you for inviting me here. I’m sharing with you today
one thread through three decades of research on writing technologies. This is something
that keeps getting re-entangled into
what I do, no matter where my transdisciplinary work takes me! It is something
that is spun anew with changes in
research happening over this time period, as well as rewoven into shifting contexts for knowledge makings. This
thoroughly transdisciplinary something is called a khipu, which means knot in
Quechua, a language of the Central Andes of South America. And it is not only MY
imagination that has been engaged, but that of many others ACROSS knowledge
worlds, within and beyond globally restructuring academies. Many of us are
“affected” by the khipu, that is to say, it alters our sensory apparatus across
materialisms, and actually ADDS elements to worlds and embodiments we both
know, and that we can say caringly, are emergent. (Haraway 2011; Latour 2004)
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Pinning things together....
SLIDE TWO: BLOG SITE
Thoroughly altered myself by writing technological
infrastructures, processes, and cognitive reassembly, when I share my work, I
tend to do so as a kind of transmedia story. (King 2011) A story both you
and I gather and pin together across media, platforms, sensory
channels, and forms of sharing. I have created this website to accompany this
talk, but really it was also a kind of sandbox for thinking it out as I
prepared to come today. And I use the web as a SET of sandboxes, or maybe
better, knowledge weavings for
intellectual play for all my work nowadays.
Such play helps me think in pictures, to move around and
interconnect knowledges distributed among worlds, to talk to myself and others
both verbally and non-verbally. My website concentrates this TALK today, it has
LINKS for overviews, it links to more CONTEXT, for how it fits into the range
of work I do, it collects links to other work on the web – notice that each PICTURE
is also a link – and that the website shares multi-MEDIA, videos, slides, my handout,
google books, and it stores a BIBLIOGRAPHY, many LINKS here for your further
attention, later, after our meeting together. You can engage a
transdisciplinary extensive range,
and you can explore intensive
communities of practice and their very specific meanings too, link by link.
This is a transmedia form that modestly MAKES knowledges,
as well as sharing and demonstrating them, storing and using them. It is not at
all a transparent platform for content: but rather, as feminist theorist Donna
Haraway reminds us about speculative feminisms of all kinds:
"It matters what matters we use to think other
matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it
matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie
ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.” (Haraway
2011: 4)
It matters that I share with you thinking in this
transmedia storytelling form. This is a DESIGN FORMAT that matters: itself an
assemblage of expressive and evocative objects that live in a range of
materialities and infrastructures. This is one way now I am learning to be affected: learning to add
to my distributed embodiments and being, and thus to my and OUR worlds.
Notice you have a handout too, also downloadable from the
website: with quotations and bibliography. It shares with you the links to this
website and to others in an additional and alternative platform and set of
writing technologies. I both talk ABOUT and AM MYSELF a transmedia storyteller.
===
We are all entangled of course.
SLIDE THREE: TANGLED WITH THE WEB
When I first started playing with html for making websites
in the late nineties, it was in the evenings in between knotting embroideries
or crochet lace, or later, spinning fiber or knitting. For many of us this web
was always textual as in textile,
sensory as in fingery, and worldly as
in full of worlds maybe only half glimpsed visually yet still palpably immersive across distributed
communities, technologies, embodiments, practices, and sensoria.
SLIDE FOUR: SHARING KNOTS
Thus it is not surprising that many feminist speculative
worlds of materialities, aesthetics, design – “new,” critical, “post” – are
thoroughly knotted in common interconnections with (including
"against") the so-called new aesthetics, even when feminisms are taken
too much for granted or not acknowledged. Consciousness of play among worlds
dynamically re-enveloped across temporalities is a bit in sf ecologies
including all of these…. Who do we want to share worlds with, why, when, and
how? How
shareable can knots be? How "material"? How
"entangled"? I like what I call “worn tools” as well as what counts
as “new” in any particular frame of reference, considering such “worn tools” as
“warmed up, not worn out.”
A range of feminisms today work across materialities....
hope even to work across trans knowledging processes…. materializing.... (Hayward
2010; Haraway 2011; King 2011, 2012; Vered 1998; Bleecker 2008)
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So nowadays I find myself in Knots.
SLIDE FIVE: KHIPU = KNOT
As ethno-mathematician Gary Urton… (He is the guy who won
a MacArthur Award in 2001 for demonstrating that thinking of khipu as if they
used computer machine language, allows us to understand, across time, just how
much information such past forms of binary coding might have been able to hold….)
As Gary Urton, and khipu database administrator and web designer, textile
historian and anthropologist Carrie Brezine, say… (on the online database that hopes
to collect for worldwide scholarly attention the material details of all known
khipu across museums and collections, and shares with a range of publics why all
this might matter….) As Urton and Brezine tell us at that website:
“The word khipu comes from the Quechua word for ‘knot’ and
denotes both singular and plural. Khipu are textile artifacts composed of cords
of cotton or occasionally camelid fiber. The cords are arranged such that there
is one main cord, called a primary cord, from which many pendant cords hang.
There may be additional cords attached to a pendant cord; these are termed
subsidiaries. Some khipu have up to 10 or 12 levels of subsidiaries. Khipu are
often displayed with the primary cord stretched horizontally, so that the
pendants appear to form a curtain of parallel cords, or with the primary cord
in a curve, so that the pendants radiate out from their points of attachment.
When khipu were in use, they were transported and stored with the primary cord
rolled into a spiral. In this configuration khipu have been compared to string
mops.” (Urton & Brezine 2003-)
SLIDE SIX: HOW BINARY?
How could these things possibly be “binary”? What
does that mean here?
Andean social and conceptual systems are radically
dualistic: for example, a common person might wear a tunic woven from yarn spun
z or clockwise and plied s or counterclockwise, while a pacu or shaman might
wear a tunic woven from yarn spun s and plied z. On the left hand of this slide
is a schematic of the 7 bit binary code Urton theorizes the khipu uses, taken
from his book Signs of the Inka Khipu.
(2003) He calculates that this system could manipulate 1536 unique units,
comparable to the sign capacities of early cuneiform, Shang Chinese ideograms,
and Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs. Seven types of information are coded in
binary bits: • the material a string is made from, • the color class
of each string and • its spin/ply relationship, • how it is attached
to other cords, • what s or z direction the knot is tied in, • which
of two number classes it belongs to, and • which of two kinds of khipu
string it might be, either one for recording numbers, or, Urton theorizes, one
used to record histories, "poetry or other ritual, canonical narrative
forms." (48) On the right hand side, is the binary “signature” of one knot
on a khipu, showing how this 7 bit code could be used.
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SLIDE SEVEN: THINK WITH AND ABOUT
It was in the context of research on historical and
cross-cultural writing technologies that I first learned about khipu, these
Andean recording devices made of strings and knots, not all that long ago
considered by academics to be "counting" and not "writing."
What counts as writing? as counting? as connecting or disconnecting them?
Restructuring knowledge systems in the nineties and after create contexts –
economies, critical design, speculative feminisms, technology infrastructures,
excavations, new historical knowledges – for cascading • forms of attention and
• frames of analysis for alternative khipu speculations at different • grains
of detail. The khipu is both something
to think WITH and something to think ABOUT.
Khipu knowledges today are created, shared, demonstrated, used,
and stored in many writing technological forms: not only monographs, books,
conference talks, but also websites, databases, images, exhibitions,
reenactments, television documentaries, tourist and heritage tours, sites and
festivals, as well as village and kinship ritual work processes. Gender and
nationality, ethnicity and race, indigenous politics and university
restructuring, all play roles in such systems entangled as current processes of
globalization. (King 2010 [2008]; Anderson et al. 2009; Beynon-Davies 2007;
2009; 2012; Lechtman 2010; Bongen & Karahalios 2009; and others linked on
my Pinterest site)
A week ago Thursday, National Geographic UK broadcast a
television documentary in which the khipu figured. I was in the US and did not
see this on TV. Did anyone here see it?
I did see “The Incan Code” webisode for it online from the site for the series
Ancient X Files on National Geographic Channel. (There is a link to the
webisode on my Pinterest site.) The show features the work of Sabine Hyland,
Andean ethno-historian who, like others, is attempting to decode khipu. (She comments herself online on the webisode,
as do various of her colleagues and students.) Her particular share of khipu
knowledges come from working with the only currently known to scholars
khipu-alphabetic text, a recently discovered khipu board with both knot strings
and apparently, corresponding alphabetic writing, the only something as close
to that elusive model of decipherment, the Rosetta Stone, as scholars have
found today.
Who knows what about various khipus and when? We will
have to keep returning to this question across worlds, temporalities, and
knowledge agencies…. It is a transdisciplinary question, one that does not
assume that objects are unitary, that knowledges are universal or expert, or
that times are not interactively in contact remaking each other.
In the seventies US scholars Marcia and Robert Ascher
demonstrated just how a decimal numeric reading of specific “counting” khipu
works. They began a process of collecting data of material significance,
something that changes, on every surviving khipu, at that time in museums
across Europe and North and South America, a process continued since by Urton
and Brezine. The Asher code books are in eformat available for download today,
and the Harvard database site is still in operation, although Brezine is no
longer its manager. Brezine has also worked with anthropologist Frank Salomon,
who has documented on the web the current display and ceremonial use of khipu
in Rapaz, Peru, where a storehouse of khipu still exists in community. These
differ strikingly from the Inka khipu described by Urton: not in decimal array
for sure, but rather full of objects tied onto a single cord. (Salomon
2005-2008)
Khipu are things
in the sense joked about by French science studies scholar Bruno Latour: "Facts
are no longer the mouth-shutting alternative to politics, but what has to be
stabilized instead. To use another etymology, 'objects' which had been
conceived as wholly exterior to the social and political realm, have become
'things' again, that is, in the sense of the mixture of assemblies, issues,
causes for concerns, data, law suits, controversies which the words res, causa,
chose, aitia, ding have designated in all the European languages." (Latour
2002:21; Bleecker 2006 [1993])
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SLIDE EIGHT: DESIGN FICTIONS
In some communities of practice, is it fun, a kind of
serious play, to consider khipu even as design
fictions: and then wonder for whom and how? (Latour 2002:21; Bleecker 2006
[1993]) As my fellow alum of the program in the History of Consciousness in
California, and “Director” of the NearFuture Laboratory online, Julian Bleecker
asks:
“How do you entangle design, science, fact and fiction in
order to create this practice called ‘design fiction’ that, hopefully, provides
different, undisciplined ways of envisioning new kinds of environments,
artifacts and practices.... Design Fiction is making things that tell stories.”
(Bleecker 2009)
• Specialist in ancient technologies Heather Lechtman
teaches her undergrads at MIT about textiles as engineering materials, and
recently they made a giant khipu in order to explore fiber as THE fundamental
Andean technology. (Lechtman 2010) • Computer scientist Karrie Karahalios,
heads the Social Spaces group at the University of Illinois, working out new
ways visualizations and physical space can shape interactive media. Photo Khipu
is a group project made with grad student Kora Bongen that uses khipu knot and
cord positions to connect collective interactive photo albums that narrate
social transactions. (Bongen & Karahalios 2009)
SLIDE NINE: YOU TUBE VIDEO
• You can see a brief khipu video in the media
section of my talk site made by ecoartist and film poet Cecilia Vicuña, or her
website linked in the bibliography to her set of installations and performance
pieces on The Menstrual Khipu, or streams of blood. (Brown 2011)
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SLIDE TEN: WRITING WITHOUT WORDS
In the Introduction to his book The Cord Keepers, about Andean cultural continuities, multivalent
and multi-temporal, anthropologist Frank Salomon speaks of
“Khipus in Search of Contexts and Vice Versa” (Salomon 2004:18)
What would writing have to mean to include what “we” (who
is this we?) may perhaps know about the khipu – so far? What does this
something called a khipu have to teach “us” (which us?) about thing-ness? And
what sorts of temporalities do “we” need
to share with khipu in order to
figure with them or to figure them out? They seemingly have their own
temporalities to teach us.
Khipu can be understood for us as interrogations
themselves about assumptions embedded in all of these. As agents of and for
knowledge play. Anthropologist Salomon likens them to infographics, but he
means by this to suggest that khipu have a sort of agency we usually reserve for
only one side of that gap we think we jump across to create a “representation”
or to engage in “making.”
Khipu possibilities in speculative play today consider how
writing might operate as a system or perhaps several interacting systems, each with
alternate layers of semiosis mapped onto or perhaps better, mapping themselves together with other
objects and features of the world than words, indeed some never verbalized.
Some of the most exciting rethinkings of khipu today involve what we might call
workarounds for something we might
still want to mean by “writing.” The Andes become then a multi-temporal geopolitical zone for considering “writing without
words,” the title to a ground-breaking book on alternative literacies in
Meso-America and the Andes. (Salomon 2001; Boone & Mignolo 1994; Brokaw
2010a, 2010b)
Salomon points out “the fact that data can be formulated
as speech is not the point. The quipocamayo process would have compacted social
process into an impressively data-dense medium whose clarity did not depend on
expansion into words.” (Salomon 2001:266)
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data writings: visualization, sonification, dramatization, textilization
SLIDE ELEVEN: DATA
How
would this work? Caringly working out in great detail bits of who
knows what over which ranges of Andean cultural continuities, Salomon in The Cord Keepers pays close attention to
the transpositions of content over time among different historical khipu
sharing worlds with us. Such continually re-enveloping temporalities that khipu
now impress upon us, flickering among progressive chronologies, wormholed
simultaneities, cyclical coincidences, and other time-traveling ecologies,
require us to cultivate the sort of knowledge making that Bruno Latour reminds
us, has never been modern. (Latour
1993 [1991]) The pastpresents (all
one word strung together) of binary coding, allow us to play extensively and transcontextually, at the very same time
that they urge us to finer and finer grains
of detail, carefully textured and textiled.
Salomon asks us to consider khipus as “an immensely
consequential data writing.” (Salomon 2004:281) Data writing is a term that
emerges from current data analytic practices, which today play consciously among
sensory modalities: taking for granted, say data visualizations or even data
sonifications, just now suggesting data dramatization, and you will even find
on the web, data textilization….
Salomon and others working out among Andean “writings
without words” extensively connect across time and technologies forms in which
processing information does not have to jump a gap created by ideas about
language.
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SLIDE TWELVE: DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE SENSORIUM
In chapter after chapter Solomon teaches us how to
understand in detail a highly complex and multiply embedded Andean system of
social organization, • both hierarchical but also contingently collective
among possible groupings; one with • different kinds of interactivities
possible with each range of connection in attention, as well as • altered
in cycles that do not recur in any simple way; and one • always
imperfectly “known,” in any time period, to any set of people, both cooperative
but also idiosyncratic. He calls khipu in this context “reciprocity made
visible” (279), but means by this something more variantly sensible than vision
as they “allow one to use different parts of the sensorium for grasping the
different variables.” (281) In pairs and used differently at different moments
of social and ritual purpose, in some parts of “their use cycle” (278) khipu
are simulation devices and at other
parts agents in performance of duties and
entitlements.
The kind of “aboutness” here is not representational, not
a way of keeping abstractions layered by logical type, but rather a kind of
recursive relational agency, both “of” and “about” reciprocities in worldly
processes. Salomon understands khipu in pairs worked as both • simulation
devices knotted and unknotted in projection, planning, enactment and
re-enactment; and also as • records of how things have happened, with
whom, when, with what informational needs, and sometimes as agencies travelling
worlds. (276)
“Semiotically heterogenous” is what cultural studies
scholar Galen Brokaw calls khipu themselves, khipu contexts, and khipu
techniques. That different khipu “developed at different levels of society”
over time, but worked at historical moments simultaneously across worlds, means
that both standardization and idiosyncracy existed among khipu literacies. In
other words, “the existence of different levels or domains of khipu literacy…often
employed different types of conventions and exhibited different degrees of
standardization based on the nature and relationship among the institutions
functioning in each domain.” (262)
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transdisciplinary: both extensive and intensive
SLIDE FOURTEEN: TRANS
Who knows what about various khipus and when? Let’s
return to this question across worlds, temporalities, and knowledge agencies….
I would argue that it is not by accident that semiotically
heterogenous khipu become interesting to so many so extensively at a time
period in which it is to our own advantage to come to terms with our own practices
of semiotic heterogeny ourselves.
Khipu live with us now in media ecologies that are not an
area of study only, but the very air we breath, quite as much a part of global
ecologies as global warming, if also ambivalently politically charged and
attended to. Media ecologies include the hormonal and neurological circuits
within and extending beyond human bodies, along lines of ecological action and
distributed being. Even what we might call social media learning takes place
across whole systems not just in human heads. Mass and burgeoning new media
have many demonstrations for any of “us” moving among knowledge worlds of what
we might work with as transcontexualities. And political affects come
necessarily to shape work now in and around academies, opposing and investing
in, for example, current budgetary crises and realities, explosively media- and
activist-intensive.
A posthumanities emerges out of a political, intellectual,
and affective double bind of having both • to address many diverging audiences
simultaneously under the threat of survival, while also having • to author
knowledges as merely one of multiple agencies with very limited control. In
such an environment the mapping of messages onto audiences becomes increasingly
tricky as authorial and receptive agencies, partial and highly distributed,
require affective labors not simply anchored by human bodies, although also
sifting among authoritative and alternative knowledges and attempting to
clarify affiliations, or to inspire trust. Feminisms are affected;
"we" learn to be affected.
Salomon speaks of sharing agency with khipu that “never
ceased to be updated, never stopped changing, and therefore never ceased to be
of ‘live’ interest.” (233) How to share agency with and among things as things
ourselves is a design fiction khipu help us to narrate in an ecology we begin
to want to inhabit explicitly.
Thank you.
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From Star, S. L. (2010). This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept. Science, Technology & Human Values, 35(5), 601-617.
In a last essay published before her tragic, unexpected death in 2010, feminist theorist Susan Leigh Star reflected on her history with a concept she produced in various collaborations, that of a “boundary object.” The essay, entitled “This is Not a Boundary Object,” noted jokingly how “unseemly” it would be for her to attempt to adjudicate how others use this term! Boundary objects are “organic infrastructures” that come into being to address “‘information and work requirements’ as perceived locally and by groups that wish to cooperate.” (Star 2010:604, 602; Star & Griesemer 1989, Star & Ruhleder 1996, Bowker & Star 1999) Boundary objects shift temporally and pragmatically through a cycle. First arising in response to residuals, anomalies, or othernesses left out by practices coming into some sort of standardization, they then become tacit workarounds robust enough to connect across various ranges of practice, while simultaneously permitting divergent communities of practice each to deepen and clarify their own meanings and uses. “Over time,” Star says, “people…try to control the tacking back-and-forth” – attempting to make these as equivalent as possible. “[A] cycle is born” as “the movement within and from those inhabiting [what are now become new] residual categories” requires formation of new boundary objects. This cycle can be more and less tacit and explicit across practices and their communities. (Star 2010:613-4)
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*Handout12 Khipu Goldsmiths
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