Jovencio de la Paz works in a space between digital technology and hand weaving. Focused on creating specialized designed software and drawing tools, de la Paz collaborates with algorithms, self-generating patterns, and computational creativity to explore the related histories of technology and the loom. The resulting textiles, hand-woven on a computerized Thread Controller loom, display a tension between the physical world and the digital, the organic and technological, and the haptic quality of cloth versus the perceived rigidity of the numerical. De la Paz is an artist, weaver, and educator and their work explores the intersection of textile processes such as weaving, dye, and stitch-work as they relate to broader concerns of language, histories of colonization, migrancy, ancient technology, and speculative futures. Interested in the ways transience and ephemerality are embodied in material, de la Paz looks at how knowledge and experiences are transmitted through society in space and time, whether semiotically by language or haptically by made things. De la Paz is currently Assistant Professor and Curricular Head of Fibers at the University of Oregon.
