An Artist Gives Voice to Traditional Peruvian Textiles

Paola Torres Núñez del Prado is a Peruvian multimedia artist known for exploring the limits of sensorial experience using both traditional and contemporary technologies. 

Her work has been exhibited and performed at Malmö Art Museum, Alliance Française, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lima, among others. 

Knots of Code seeks to develop machine learning tools that explore and decode new meanings within quipus. Quipus are a pre-Columbian notation system that is based on the tying of knots in ropes. 

The textiles use a positioning system of knots along strings to represent numbers from units to tens of thousands. Likewise, the colors of the chords and the structure of the threads and knots contain information about what was counted and recorded in each quipu. 

It is possible, though not yet proven, that quipus also record other kinds of information or genealogies, like the agricultural calendar or perhaps, even narrative traditions.

Knots of Code is a continuation of an enquiry related to code and tactility that I began in 2003 when I moved to New York from Lima, Peru. 

In New York, my approach to art completely changed. I longed for painting to be more dynamic, to pour out from the enclosure of its frame. I wanted it to move, to make sounds, to react and change when viewed. 

This is how I became interested in new media – and pushing human computer interaction beyond what we usually expect from devices and its materials.

For this project, I wanted quipus to speak again, and for that, I needed a voice.

I trained a machine learning on the poetry and the voice of Jorge Eduardo Eielson, a Peruvian artist and poet who also worked with quipus to explore material, form and the process of communication. 

To create an A.I. entity that was essentially of Latin American origin, I really wanted to emphasize the Peruvian accent and style of speech. I worked with Google creative technologists to identify the right pairing of deep learning models that would achieve this effect.

 After trying numerous models, each with varying architectures, and many versions of corpus data, we finally selected two models that we fine-tuned using first, an Argentine voice, and then, with the voice of Eielson.

In a text called "Horrifying Sculpture," Eielson wrote of a talking doll made up of, among other things, a magnetic tape recorded with the most important poetic texts that "will continually recite the most beautiful poems conceived by man."

I consider this album, El Tiempo del Hombre, not as a deep fake, but rather, a project that plays with what could have existed, with what the poet wanted to do but couldn't, and with what these tools for artistic creation offer us (and its implications).

Listen to El Tiempo del Hombre (The Time of Man) on Bandcamp.