The Machinery of Weaving and the Woven Being: Decolonial Voices through Textile Computation

This article presents TmaqT, a research-creation project that explores how the notion of voice-sound can be reconfigured through physical interaction with a handcrafted textile surface, where tactile contact continuously modulates sonic processes. Instead of treating the voice as a pre-existing expressive capacity of the speaking subject, this idea redefines it as a relational and emergent acoustic field produced through the interaction between the body, the textile material, and algorithmic artificial intelligence systems. The system consists of a textile interface with integrated sensors that register variations in touch and translate them into real-time sonic transformations. These transformations are not conceived as linear input/output operations, but rather as dynamic covariations within a distributed field of material, temporal, and computational relationships. In this configuration, sound emerges as an unstable modulation process, rather than a discrete signal or a fixed sonic representation, avoiding dependence on presets or predefined audio files and instead activating latent computational spaces and AI-based processes. Framed within media archaeology and decolonial theory, TmaqT re-examines Mapuche textile and sonic practices, including weaving, but specially the kultrun, as alternative genealogies of memory, tactile interaction, and sound. This archaeological perspective brings historical tactile media into dialogue with contemporary algorithmic systems, proposing relational modes of sonic interaction based on touch rather than control. In this way, the project conceives of textile practices not as peripheral craft traditions, but as computational and epistemic systems that challenge linear narratives of technological progress. In general, a conceptual framework is developed in which the voice is understood not as an individual property, but as a co-emergent phenomenon that arises from the continuous interaction between textile surfaces, body gestures, algorithmic processes, and is approached as a distributed acoustic field generated through constant tactile variations, where material, temporal and bodily relationships become audible without stabilizing in a single origin, subject position or fixed representational structure.