TRACE

TRACE is a kinetic installation of suspended lasers and illuminated rings that rise, fall, and rotate in response to encoded numerical data drawn from the khipu of ancient Incan and Andean civilizations. Khipu were knotted-cord recording devices used to register census counts, tribute, and the cycles of the agricultural and ritual year.

These knotted cords were not writing in the alphabetic sense but a three-dimensional protocol: meaning carried in the geometry of a knot, its color, and its position along a primary strand. Andean knowledge systems registered time and quantity through tactile and spatial relationships rather than inscribed surfaces — a grammar the Spanish colonial project largely destroyed, and one still being recovered.

In TRACE, motion and light, synchronization and delay, become the contemporary analogues of knot and cord. You read the data the way the khipucamayuq once read the cords — not as a fixed record, but as a living language unfolding in space.