H ; e ;
l ; d ; *
; r ; o ; w
l ; ; o ; * 4
3 3 ; @ . >
; 2 3 < \
4 ; * /
~words on the wing~
~ This speculative fabulation tells of a planned collaboration between myself and Aude Vuilli, Doctoral Researcher at Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, UCL (and fellow wasp ally), to install an array of sensors in a wasp nest ~
~ The common wasp communicates by (among other methods), gastral drumming, a vibrating of the abdomen against the nest walls. Rather than syntactic language, it perhaps signals state-changes in hive consciousness; we hope to find out more ~
~Social wasp culture undergoes an annual ‘reset’, when the community dies out at the onset of cold, apart from a single queen, who repopulates the nest in the following spring, when the community’s culture builds anew ~
~ Umwelt or ‘Life World’, as imagined by Jacob von Uexkull. The wasp Life World is “like an Internet of chemicals”, 'Endless Forms', Seirian Sumner (2021) ~
~ Material semiotic apparatus inspired by 'Fingeryeyes: Impressions of cup corals', Eva Hayward (2010), who in turn was inspired by ‘When Species Meet’, Donna Haraway (2008). Both teach us how to be with more-than-human beings ~
~ Code example from Hexagony, an EsoLang by Martin Ender ~
~ Hexagonal number descriptions from the online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, founded 1964 ~
~ Some words borrowed from ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’, by WB Yeats (1899) ~