Moving Threads, Twisting Time: Tactile Knowledge Against Futurism

Tactile matter and its physical manipulation have historically been and continue to be the foundational material and method for data gathering, processing, and interpretation. Melody Jue, for example, emphasizes the importance of hand-assembly in the generation of oceanographic models and gleaning of knowledge even if they ostensibly rely on such advanced technologies as remote sensing and satellite imagery (2021). One of the main thrusts of the emerging field of data physicalization (that is, making what is traditionally rendered on a two-dimensional display or page physical) is to improve analytical outcomes and, ultimately, influence decision-making and policy. However, colonial structures underlying decision-making and policy are rarely called into question. Neither is the assumption the two are motivated by rational, disinterested, knowledge-informed approaches. In comparison with the attempts at institutionalization of this emergent field, I examine the practices of three artists who summon what can be considered an anachronistic example of data physicalization—pre-Columbian quipus: Cecilia Vicuña (Chilean, b. 1948), Eduardo Villanes (Peruvian, b. 1967), and Paola Torres Núñez del Prado (Peruvian, lives in Sweden, b. 1979). The three artists mobilize plasticity, tactility, and kinetics inherent to quipus in emphatically unruly ways to act upon viewers through affect. By invoking living Indigenous cultures and their peoples’ histories, these artists’ goal, I argue, is to change the relation to other (human and other-than-human) beings and to reconceptualize the notion of time; and thus, to upturn the structures of belief that undergird both decision-making and entangled with it ideas of “improvement” and “progress.”