Featured Essay
by Sarah Diver
Under a magnifying glass, the works of artist Jovencio de la Paz are simply warp and weft, the threading of delicate fibers under and over each other to describe striations of heathered greys, soft oranges, and plush ivories. Inherent to their creation, however, through the literal and metaphorical combination of hand and machine, de la Paz’s textiles operate as portals into liminal planes, envisioning a humanistic and collaborative relationship to technology.
Born in Singapore before immigrating to Gresham, Oregon, as a child, de la Paz looked to the imagined worlds of science fiction and video games to shelter themself from the violence of living as a queer person of color in a rural community; as they have described, “I needed other worlds as a means of survival.”1 As an undergraduate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, de la Paz was recommended to the Department of Textiles, which had recently purchased a Thread Controller, a computerized Jacquard loom that allows for any digitally created image to be woven into fiber. The Jacquard loom, developed at the turn of the nineteenth century, is a mechanized weaving system that originally used a paper punched card to instruct the machine on how to complete a pattern.2 The punched cards of the early Jacquard looms provided information to the weaving mechanism through either the presence or absence of paper; this information is now given to the loom through binary code. Using the Thread Controller, the artist taught themself both to weave by hand and to interface with the machine on a programming level, giving rise to a multiplicity that became a launching point for years of creative investigation. They received an M.F.A. in Fibers from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and currently serve as Assistant Professor and Curricular Head of Fibers at the University of Oregon.3
The Thread Controller 2 (TC2) loom remains central to de la Paz’s practice as a means of visualizing technological phenomena through fiber, a hopeful vision born from the artist’s early love of sci-fi. In the same way that the human hand controls the output of a textile in weaving, so does the computer in following its operational software. Each adheres to a pattern or set of instructions. Like spoken language, coding is an idiosyncratic expression that reflects onto the personality and voice of the speaker, and thus, the trace of the human author, “the ghost of the machine,”4 can be found in the tiny infractions and inconsistencies in the software’s code, as the artist describes, the “computational creativity of the algorithm.”5 For de la Paz, these discrepancies are rich material for artistic representation in fiber, an ideal expression for visualizing the politics of language encoded in these tools.
Four works in Portland State University’s collection come from de la Paz’s Didderen series. In reference to the computer-generated origins of their content, these works are titled according to standard updates of a software, 1.1, 1.6, 1.7, and 3.1. “Didderen” is a Middle English word meaning “to tremble” and is the direct etymological ancestor of the verb, “dither.” Dithering in the colloquial sense can refer to being indecisive or unsettled, but in the digital realm, it refers to a process where data noise is intentionally added to randomize quantization error. When the additional error is correlated, this allows the file to be converted, in the case of image processing, from greyscale to black-and-white. In the titular fiber works, de la Paz exploits the limits of Photoshop to reveal the failure of the machine. Photoshop’s dither function fails to seamlessly convert greyscale. Relinquishing control of the finished product, de la Paz purposefully programs the TC2 to represent this inconsistency in the textile. Recalling the white noise of a television screen, the speckled texture of each work results solely from the software’s mis-integration of color. Decentering authorship and queering the binary distinction between manmade and machine-made, the Didderen series acts as a literal representation of the imperfections inherently built into Photoshop, and thus, reveals its humanity.6
Where the Didderen series reveals the failings of the machine, the Redactions series uses the loom as a means of hope and reclamation. The TC2 uses corrective software, such that when a design is uploaded, the loom’s computer translates the image into code that follows industry-standard weave structures. Circumnavigating the machine’s corrective properties, de la Paz hand drew the designs for Redactions directly into the machine, bypassing codification. The artist complicates this gesture by using text from the Oregon Exclusionary Clause, which prohibited people of color from owning property in the state of Oregon. Though the law was repealed in 1925, the legal language was not removed from most municipal documents until the 1990s due to the clerical cost of redaction.7 Through the visualization of redaction in weaving, where fibers obscure the written word, de la Paz reclaims the act of erasure and affirms the rights of people of color to be equal citizens. Overriding the machine, de la Paz asserts themself as author, thus also declaring the rights of people of color to narrativize their histories.
Textiles today occupy a complicated space. Handiwork has canonically been relegated to the lesser-valued realm of the domestic or ornamental and, with it, its makers, who have historically been people of color. The readymade banished the expressiveness of high modernism, eclipsing the trace of the artist’s hand with the advent of postmodernism in the mid-twentieth century. Add to this distinction the conditions of a globalized marketplace. Textiles epitomize the geopolitical hierarchies inherent to global capitalism, whereby labor is performed by former colonies; the colonized labor industry reinscribes the histories of oppression and exploitation. Insisting on the value of textiles, queering the possibilities of mankind’s relationship to technology, Jovencio de la Paz offers a vision for a future where the computer becomes a tool of empathy and renewal, upsetting histories of marginalization.
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Sarah Diver is a writer and curator who has written for Denny Dimin Gallery, International Print Center New York, and Storm King Art Center. Previously, Diver graduated from Columbia University with a Master’s in Modern Art: Critical Curatorial Studies in 2016. She currently lives in Portland, OR.
1. “Artist Talk | Jovencio de la Paz.” Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU. Youtube, November 3, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvf8n8m-sxw
2. Da Cruz, Frank. “The Jacquard Loom.” Columbia University Computing History, April 6, 2021. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/jacquard.html
3. De la Paz, Jovencio. “Jovencio de la Paz.” https://jovenciodelapaz.org/
4. Ibid.
5. Yerebakan, Osman Can. “10 Questions With… Jovencio de la Paz.” Interior Design, June 29, 2021. https://interiordesign.net/designwire/10-questions-with-jovencio-de-la-paz/
6. “Art + Design Faculty Work: Jovencio de la Paz.” College of Design, School of Art and Design. University of Oregon, 2021. https://artdesign.uoregon.edu/art-design-faculty-work-jovencio-de-la-paz
7. Ibid.