Back in 2018 artist Oscar Santillán and curator Alessandra Troncone began a collaborative research on khipus, which explored some of the endless histories behind this material code. The resulting publication ‘The Andean Information Age’ (Bom Dia Publications, 2020) adds up another layer to the historical account, it envisions connections between this form of indigenous knowledge and emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality.
For thousands of years, knotted ropes called ‘khipus’ were used in the Andes to encode numeral and textual information.
Fragments of the publication later became the script for an audiovisual piece, with its own autonomy.
Departing from the same notion, the alignment of technological pasts and futures, Santillán used a microcomputer in order to hack an old slide projector. This allowed him to control the duration of every slide and to synchronize it with a soundtrack created for this piece.
‘The Andean Information Age’ becomes a near cinematographic work. Complementary, the images in the analog slides were produced by means of a 3D software.
These images, with a sci-fi energy, took inspiration from khipus and colonial chronicles. The result is a large vertical projection, made from a sequence of 80 slides, synced to an audio piece (28 minutes long).
