About the Khipumancer (Khipumancy and the I-Ching)

The Khipumancer is the portion of the project that plays with the idea of what could have been. Frank Salomon, recognized scholar investigating current Khipu usage, based his research in a small town in the highlands of Lima's province, Tupicocha, that belonged to the very few towns in Peru that still kept the Khipu tradition partially alive. Even if they lost the ability to understand the information they stored, Tupicochans use these fiber devices still up to date, in the ceremony known as the Huayrona, which is of Inca origin, and related to the public accounting of both materials and behaviour of the townspeople. Interestingly enough, there were stories of an elder who indeed, until rather recently, he claimed he could “read” khipus: when I traveled to Tupicocha, they told me about this, and I could actually get in touch with one of the sons of this elder, that still keeps this tradition alive but was extremely secretive about it. Turns out, as mentioned in the book, that there is an alternative practice related to khipu interpretation among this particular family, connected to the divinatory: it would relate to occult practices, hence the secretive attitude of the family member. Even if the methods used are not very clear, Salomon does explain them in his book, “The Cord Keepers”: I take what it is known about this secret practice, meant to foretell the future, and propose a system similar to the Chinese I-Ching, where combinations of lines make the symbols that are linked to precise meanings, but, for the particular artwork, the combinations of knot positions will be the ones delivering the meanings, in this case the spoken poetry generated by the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer2-based neural Language Modeling system, or GPT-2, a deep neural network, and Tacotron 2 (plus a decoder), a model form a text-to-speech system that enables synthesising of natural sounding speech, in this case, based on a dataset taken from clips of Jorge Eduardo Eielson's voice found in public domain, a Peruvian poet and visual artist that worked with knots due to his interest in khipus .