Amor Muñoz

Tactile Translations
March 28, 2023

For more than a decade, artist Amor Muñoz has worked with media such as crafts and experimental electronics, most specifically, with electronic textiles. This connection between technology and craftsmanship has driven her to develop three lines of work and research: Labor and Techno diversity, Poetic Codifications and Bio-Tech Crafts. ‘Tactile Translations’ displays glimpses of different branches that belong to Poetic Codifications, a project that seeks to connect nodes as text - textile - code - language, translating zeros and ones and bringing them to a poetic field.

Upon entering the gallery, the Notes & Folds series greet visitors as they’re confronted with three different versions of pleated textile bodies whose patterns are translated into a musical annotation, as if these textures were each a musical partiture. Notes & Folds is a project that intertwines sound and shape and programming with craftsmanship, inspired by Ada Lovelace’s work who related automat computational programming to create music, as well as by the practices of two twentieth century composers: Morton Feldman, who based several of his compositional techniques in asymmetrical patterns of Middle East rugs (i.e. Coptic Light for orchestra) and Conlon Nancarrow, with complex compositions for player pianos that connect the artisan’s work to programming when codifying their music with perforations done by hand on paper rolls.

Also in the first gallery room, Muñoz’s collaborative project Meteorite Poem, invites the public to watch and think about a light blue space it displays and to write a poem on the same. Poetry is then transformed into information particles that shape a series of meteorites. The piece is created using a 3D modeling software in which an algorithm processes the poems via textual analysis rules that translate hundreds of parameters into numeric values that result in points, spaces, concave and convex surfaces in a determined space, configuring rock-like geometries. The digital forms that derive from this event are 3D printed and sent to their authors in the form of a meteorite poem.

Following the exhibition to the second gallery room, works from the Memory and Matter series surround the audience, the project being a reflection on coding systems, language and memory, in this case, memory as a data container. The series’ textiles and installations are inspired by the magnetic core memories of computers from the 50s and 60s and the works of Anni Albers (Codes, 1962). During her residence at Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Muñoz created a graphic language based on binary code, using it to produce a series of textile works and spatial interventions that contain encoded information in the form of expanded memories and other forms of interactivity.