HEX:: A story of situated, multispecies worldbuilding
Duncan Paterson
(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 system, 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.
[Sens0r surveillance of y0ur insect0id Umwelt,
We will see when y0u m0ve,
Taste the air that y0u breathe,
Hear y0ur hatching, humming, y0ur drumming,
Harvesting, tagging and st0ring y0ur w0rld,
We are gifted 0ur 0wn permissi0ns]
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 0f sixness, fr0m Sumeria/Babyl0n}
{crystal ball sequence f0r hexag0nal lattice}
{Sixth sp0ke of a hexag0nal spiral}
[1, 7, 19, 37, 61, 91]
[127, 169, 217, 271, 331, 397]
//Instructi0n p0inter 0n 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 ; * /
~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) ~
~ March is Hexagonal Awareness Month ~
~ Hex is for Maggie Roberts::0rphan Drift ~
