Duncan:: Hex

HEX:: A story of situated, multispecies worldbuilding

(Human, Wasp, Machine)

What Latour would call a negotiation

Seems too transactional for this territory.

Rather, a tracing of intricate intra-actions

A weaving of ‘heavens’ embroidered cloths’

Dancing, chanting, spiky and always curious

Thinking-with, diffractive intent, treading softly.

Us critters are not companion creatures

We do not promise you honey.

Guided by spirits of electromagnetic noumena

Thinking 30 times quicker than warmbloods

We drum and dance as one

We drum and dream venomous raptures.

/*Sensor surveillance of your insectoid Umwelt

We will see when you move

Taste the air that you breathe

Hear your hatching, humming, your drumming

Harvesting, tagging and storing your world

We are gifted our own permissions*/

Our culture captured by your machine

Saved forever in reductive alien binary

Where is our six-fold reality?

Where everything fits as it should

And, with each Autumn exhale, dies.

How can we live without death?

Hexagonal thinking means six-word worlds

And counting otherwise, in sacred sixness.

Borges’s Hexagonal infinite Library of Babel

Shows us shapes knowledge can be.

Grouped together in discreet, tessellating units

The shape of perfect paper wombs.

{mathematics of sixness, fr0m Sumeria/Babylon}

{crystal ball sequence f0r hexag0nal lattice}

{Sixth sp0ke of hexag0nal spiral}

[1, 7, 19, 37, 61, 91]

[127, 169, 217, 271, 331, 397]

//Instructi0n p0inter m0ves on infinite hexag0nal grid

Why archive so much, seemingly forever?

Always expanding, all-too-material cloud

Eating everything, locust-plague hungry.

Cloud also means threat, blight, trouble

Injustice as content, trained and ingrained.

Time for Hex:: matriarchal wasp reset?

H    ;    e    ;

l    ;    d    ;    *

;    r    ;    o    ;    w

l     ;      ;     o     ;     *   4

3   3    ;    @   .    >

;    2   3   <    \

4    ;    *   /

~thoughts 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 with, 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 colony 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 Uexhell. 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)~

~ March is Hexagonal Awareness Month~

~ Hex is for Maggie Roberts::0rphan Drift~

[ends]

Bibliography

HAYWARD, EVA. (2010). Fingeryeyes: Impressions of cup corals. Cultural Anthropology. 25.

HARAWAY, DONNA. (2008). When Species Meet, University of Minnesota Press.

SUMNER, SEIRIAN. (2021). Endless Forms, Harper Collins.