Alejandra Sosa Lopez, a graduate of Texas State University's bachelor of fine arts in communication design program, is combining computational design, Indigenous languages, and textile practices to investigate how cultural knowledge changes as it moves between language, computer code, and material forms.
Her design research project, “Spinning the Digital Thread,” sits at the intersection of design research, digital humanities, technology and society, and cultural preservation. Through computational tools and traditional textile techniques, Sosa Lopez is developing a new way to study how meaning is preserved, transformed, or lost as languages are translated across different systems of communication.
The project grew from Sosa Lopez's earlier research on nepantla, a Nahuatl word meaning "the middle" or "in-between." The concept describes how after Spanish colonization Indigenous communities adapted their languages, beliefs, and traditions to preserve their cultures and identities. This blending, called syncretism, created new cultural traditions that combined Indigenous and Catholic beliefs while helping Indigenous knowledge survive.
As Sosa Lopez studied this adaptation, she became interested in how meaning changes when it is expressed in different ways. If Indigenous languages survived by adapting over time, could computational methods reveal what is preserved, transformed, or lost when those same words and symbols are translated into new forms?
"In simple terms, I am connecting different concepts of language, such as programming language, Indigenous language, colonial language, and translations between those," Sosa Lopez said.
To answer these questions, Sosa Lopez developed the Syncretism Library, a web-based platform that allows anyone to upload images and text from historical sources for translation. Using TypeScript, Processing, bitmap conversion, and generative AI, the platform converts those materials into binary code, ASCII text, and bitmap images, creating digital representations of the original language and imagery.
Those encoded outputs are then translated into weaving, knitting, and crochet patterns. By comparing each stage of the process, Sosa Lopez creates a “translation pipeline” to learn how meaning shifts across spoken language, digital systems, and material forms.
