created 2024-04-19, & modified, =this.modified
Radical Fiber - Threads connecting art and science
Humans first developed string - drawn and twisted plant or animal fiber - more than 120,000 years ago.
Warp is a vertical thread, Weft is horizontal.
“Stitching and Suturing… each word describes a similar act, but it its own way, suggests something different disciplinarily and a unique type of sensibility.
Given another body’s heart the immune system will reject it. A ghost heart is washed clean, leaving just an extracellular matrix. She has accidentally found the fundamental form of the heart that poetry has been searching for for a millennia.
“I spent decades on a college campus where it was not infrequent for people to in the arts and humanities to express how they felt dismissed, like the stepchildren of the liberal university, or that they had lost out to the sciences in some way.’
After the heart surgery “Mr. Karps’s wife asked her husband if he still loved her” “In the design stage of a beatless heart, why not fold in poetic questions along with the engineering ones”
Dario Robleto “You make the world a better place” - for two years I secretly picked a little piece of line or thread, sometimes a hair off various people’s shoulders. - little action we have probably done to others, a small gesture of kindness or affection. I gathered it all together, and spooled it, like with a record, onto a wooden spool of my grandmother’s.
In civil war soldiers took it upon themselves to literally carve their own new limbs, often from wood - it was before anyone expected the government to supply such things
SETI: if we received an extraterrestrial message tomorrow, and it was a question - what would we say back?
Essentially woven structures are where programming was born; before the advent of computers, people programmed Jacquard looms. Nearly two centuries later, in the 1980s and 1990s the abundant creative possibilities of Jacquard tech were expanded by contemporary artists who used digital hand looms to fabricate woven textiles that rise to the levels of “great art”
Quipu are still used, and we know from written accounts they were capable of reading just about anything that could be written. Inca recorded their laws, histories, and religious practices along with statistical information such as censuses, tribute information and the recording of time on quipus.
“the price you pay to come into the physical reality is that you have to give up perfection”
Thought
For instance even writing the numbers of pi - that’s a physical, tacticle thing, but if I don’t watch it I’ll make a mistake. If a computer did it, that would be different. But if I’m going to do it I’m goping to really get into the paper, and the writing and the paying attention… maybe the humanity lives in the imperfection.
In the Andes culture is driven by duality — upper and lower communities - and they see everything as paired (binary). And so, if you have 1 + 1, representing a husband and a wife, they see that marriage as the third component. But yet, the man and the women have separate identities. In this respect they see 1+1 as equal to 3. They also see it as equal to 2, because they count to two like we do but they conceptualize it differently.
The quipu encoded information with multiple animal fibers, llama, alpaca, guanaco, vcuna, viscasha, white tailed deer. All the cords look the same macroscopically, but each fiber carries haptic information and Sabine was taught how to distinguish these fibers by feel. The Incas were using feel in addition to color to represent categories of information.
Thought
How would our world be if we conveyed information exclusively through colors and numbers? Would we be reading in the form of colored barcodes? Would we chose the colors of our clothes differently because everything we wore actually said something? How would our aesthetics be different.
Mathematicians who work at the highest level are conceptual artists.