Jovencio de la Paz is an artist, educator, and Zen monk living and working in Eugene, OR, where he is also the Head of Fibers at the University of Oregon. His current work examines the joint history of computers and weaving. Interested in the relationships between the digital, language, code, the embodied, and the phenomenon of emergence, de la Paz’s work takes the form of textiles produced with the aid of digital software and the TC2 Jacquard loom, pushed the extremes of functionality. At the breaking points of the software, ghosts in the machine emerge, and these unexpected specters of data reveal an organic world of liminality, set in contrast to the rigid binaries of 1’s and 0’s.
For more information, please see: http://www.jovenciodelapaz.org, or on Instagram @jovenciodelapaz.
Jovencio de la Paz, No Future Homeworlds, 2020. 84” x 24”. Jacquard handwoven cotton. Image courtesy of the artist.
“This textile, it’s structures, and the landscape it depicts, was created by adapting an artificial intelligence called gauGAN, developed by nVidia in 2019. The AI, which translates simple line drawings into photorealistic landscapes, was adjusted to weaving structures compatible with digital jacquard weaving. This work is inspired by Baroque tapestries, such as the Baberini Tapestriesof 17th Century Italy, whose history rests largely in the retelling of empire and colonization. In contrast, my artificial landscapes tell of the digital non-places through which we seem to wander.”
First, and most importantly, how are you doing? How are you navigating the highs and lows?
Generally I am doing well, though this week I seem to have a slight cold, probably from getting caught in the rain while doing some yard work. I feel I have been incredibly lucky to be going through this challenging time of lockdown in a place surrounded by trees and birds, mountains and valleys.
I don’t know if I can say that I have been employing a particular navigational strategy for the highs and lows of this time. I’ve just been trying to listen to what comes up physically and emotionally on a very day by day basis. In addition to being an artist, I am also a Zen Buddhist monk, so I’ve been practicing social distancing with a group of people who live at my temple, which has been closed for almost 4 months now. We have quite a rigorous daily schedule… and the regularity helps!
Jovencio de la Paz, Redactions 1.1 & 1.2 (Installation View), 2018. Jacquard handwoven natural and synthetic fibers. Image courtesy of the artist.
“Rather than using industry standard weave structures, these textiles we produced by drawing directly into the TC2 Digital software. The result is cloth woven directly from hand to computerized loom, by-passing the typical codification necessary for making computer design textiles. The texts that were used as the base for these “redactions” include selections from The Oregon Exclusionary Clause, written by Peter Hardeman Burnett, which forbade African Americans and people of color from owning property in the state of Oregon until 1925. Though repealed in 1925, the clause was not removed from municipal documents until the 90s, due to the clerical expense of redacting the clause from documents such as property deeds and insurance documents.”
It would be great if you could briefly talk to us through your practice. Understanding it is integral to appreciating the multivalence of your work.
I am primarily a weaver, but I also do quite a bit of hand-sewing and stitch work. For the last several years I have been working with the digital TC2 (Thread Controller 2) Jacquard Loom. I manipulate design software, pushing it to the limits of what it can interpret or understand as instructions. I do this in a variety of ways, either by manipulating code directly or by generating erroneous visual data to feed into the design software. I often try to do very little design work. Rather, I like to create parameters, contexts, or directives for design algorithms to generate weaving designs on their own. Weaving is very systematic and numerical, but it is also surprisingly organic. Numbers in nature always peak my interest. I have always been caught between an interest in language and an interest in deep time. My mother was an ESL teacher and my father was a geologist-turned-computer engineer, so as long as I can remember I have been bouncing between the strangeness of words and codes and the vastness of land, time, and a kind of unrelenting nature of what it means to belong to the planet earth.
To be honest, I have learned to be quite wary of poetic license in my process. I don’t want to do things to author meaning or express something in my heart or psyche. I am more drawn to pointing out something hidden within the systems around us, or see together more clearly something that emerges in the sea of complexity that has always been out there. Much of my current work does this with software and programming, expressed as weavings. There is such a fascinating history shared between computers and cloth, looms and computers, you can really see that in the way a pixels resemble weave structures, and how computers and looms speak the same binary language. These are technologies that rhyme across history. My weavings are almost always an attempt at conjuring out a ghost in the machines I use, living happily in secret amongst the data; capturing them in physical space as textile sometimes feels like magic.
Jovencio de la Paz, These Numbers are the Body of the Fog (installation view), 2019. Jacquard handwoven cotton. Image courtesy of the artist.
“These textiles were handwoven on a digital loom by corrupting image files, manipulating the loom software to generate designs and patterns based on errant data. The resulting cloth represents a collaboration between my own initial design and the computer’s algorithmic response. I am interested in the sometimes conflicted meeting place between human intention, emerging technology, and the ghosts that arise in machines.”
Are you thinking differently? Coping differently? Inspired differently?
I have been thinking about white supremacy a lot, about protest, and about the nature of Liberation. As a Chinese/Filipino American, and more generally as a queer person of color, I experienced very early on in the pandemic new, blatant expressions of racism directed towards me. Of course the old, non-COVID, related racism persists as well. Sometimes people get the idea that Oregon is some kind of twee, liberal, outdoorsy utopia because they have watched Portlandia, but it is really a region with a deeply challenging history of white supremacy. I have been inspired by the life and words of Grace Lee Boggs, and the importance of Asian Americans to show up for Black lives.
Jovencio de la Paz, These Numbers are the Body of the Fog 1.3, 2019. 84” x 29”. Jacquard handwoven cotton. Image courtesy of the artist.
“In this particular iteration from the series, These Numbers are the Body of the Fog (2019), a recursive algorithm within the digital loom software was employed to generate detailed weaving patterns, or structures, in conflict with areas of the design I left intentionally void of information. Taking advantage of the loom's capability to self-correct, this cloth is woven both forwards and backwards, reflecting the pattern on top of itself in intervals to complete the cloth.”
What is bringing you solace, or even joy, in this moment?
Someone once said to me as I became a Zen monk, oh you must be so peaceful and free from the little nuisances of daily life!I always laugh because actually the truth is quite the opposite. Yes I am more mindful, certainly there are skills and techniques to calm the mind, to be in the present moment, to breathe more at ease. But at the same time these practices also serve to make life more acute. It is not that suffering goes away the more you practice Zen. But in a way you can start to see how suffering actually illuminates life as much as joy, or that they are the same luminosity that allows us to see our lives completely. Separation is what causes distress, whether that is when I try to compartmentalize my life into good and bad times or attempt to keep pain at arm’s length. But it isn’t that you just go limp and let the world rail on your either. Instead, moment to moment, as difficulty arises, you try to know it as integral to your experience, completely your life, and then try and stand a little more upright, making decisions or changes with more integrity. I think there is solace in the idea that this is all a process, and we are doing something quite extraordinary every time we wake up in the morning.
Jovencio de la Paz, Didderen, 2018. Jacquard handwoven cotton. Image courtesy of the artist.
“Dithering, which comes from the Middle English, Didderen, is a process by which data noise is intentionally added in order to randomize quantization error. Used commonly in digital image processing to convert color or spectral gradients into binary operation, these textiles capture a programming error in Photoshop software. The given diffusion dither function in Photoshop’s last several generations fails to seamlessly convert 50% photographic gray into the anticipated ½ white and ½ black pixel field. Instead, a ghost in the machine is revealed. That lapse in the software’s capacity to generate a smooth space is output directly into woven cloth.”
What research or writing are you doing that you find compelling?
I’m currently working on a research project that has been in the works for well over a year now. I’ve called the project Bionumeric Organisms (2019-ongoing), and it employs one of the earliest pieces of complex software designed for a modern computer, written by Nils Aall Baricelli for use on the infamous “Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer” (ENIAC). ENIAC was famously designed to model atomic blast yields for the Manhattan Project in the early 1940s. Baricelli’s program, however, was used immediately following the end of the Second World War to model the way in which single celled organisms evolve and survive disaster. I am interested in the contrast between these models, Genesis and Apocalypse, that one could utilize the ENIAC computer to first develop a weapon of mass destruction, then use it to understand the origins of life. Working closely with programmer Michael Mack, I have adapted Baricelli’s original software to develop a tool to “grow” and evolve weave structures for the TC2 loom, capturing the growth and decay of these Bionumeric Organisms as woven cloth. The resulting textiles are self-generating genealogies written line by line, pixel by pixel, by each pass of the weaving shuttle. What the software has been outputting is visually quite striking, but also I think the work has something to do with speaking of on-goingness, or the way things persist or survive. Because the campus where I teach is closed for the moment, I haven’t had access to the digital loom to actually weave anything as part of this research, so it remains quite theoretical.
What are you reading?
“The Beginning Place” - Ursual Le Guin
“Tarot of the Spirit” - Pamela Eakins
“The Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra”