The Inca khipu are textile prehispanic devices for recording information, made of cotton or camelid fibre strings that store data coded as knots. The khipu are considered pre-hispanic ecological computers. These computers were made with organic materials such as stones, wool, vegetable fibres, ceramics, seeds, and even the human body itself is part of the computer system (fingers and toes encode and the user’s brain processes the information). The importance of these computers lies in the transcendental, cosmic significance and the transmitted wisdom of our native peoples.

This piece is an open-source textile computer based on the manufacture of an astronomical khipu.

The installation of this piece consists of an antenna of about 6 meters in diameter that is composed of 180 ropes. Each of them were hand-spun from a mixture of copper wire and alpaca wool. These ropes are connected to an electronic circuit that amplifies and sonifies the electromagnetic changes present at the installation site.

This piece was done for a group of five women in an experimental creation laboratory, called “Textile Computing and Spectrum Sonification”, in order to study the signs of the traditional Inca khipu and the analogies between this system of knots and the current binary coding system.

The information collected into this khipu includes a spectral classification of the main stars of Boötes, a constellation located in the mid sky –zenit- during the dates of the open laboratory.

This project is a sound and arts interpretation of the technology, wisdom and history of our ancestors, meant to express how the universe is governed by harmonious numerical proportions. What we are hearing now is thus the amplification of inaudible space, the voices of spectres visiting the void, a celestial score, the music of the spheres: the voice of silence.

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Image: Courtesy Ars Electronica: Khipu- Electrotextile Prehispanic Electric Computer by Constanza Piña Pardo

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