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 ; * /
~notes~
~ 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~
~ 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~
~ The yellowjacket wasp communicates with gastral drumming, a vibrating of the abdomen against the nest walls. Rather than syntactic language, it perhaps signals state-changes in hive consciousness; we’re looking 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 used by Jacob von Uexhell. The wasp Life World is “like an Internet of chemicals”, Endless Forms, Seirian Sumner (2021)~
~ 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]