The House of Asterion
(after Borges, for Le Guin and to Haraway’s chthonic ones)
“Are computers what we think they are?”
This is an exploration of an alternative mode of computation, a multispecies cyborg assemblage that can, perhaps, help us crawl towards tentacular answerings of certain questions.
It’s a celebration of alternative computational histories (and possible futures); an articulation of Object Oriented Ontology; a cry against extractivist machine-figuration; whispering of a world where meditative divination is the driving algorithm and refuge is the anti-teleological point.
So what’s going on here?
The ants, as they forage, generate numbers. Here they are a form of processor. These numbers are mapped against a database of Things (or objects), a non-encyclopedia with a flat ontology, itself compiled by foraging webcrawler programs. These Things constitute a memory. The viewer then encounters a unique reading, where new associations can be made of the previously unrelated. It also asks the viewer to leave behind digital and physical traces of their presence in the machine’s memory/shrine, ever-deepening its resources and possibilities.
It’s necessarily a troubled, labyrinthine, entangled thing, which resists linear interpretation and rejects hierarchical, anthropocentric ways of being.
Inspired by three ideas of difference
The House of Asterion is a queer computational space, which thrives outside of the usual capitalist/tech tropes. It takes its name from a Jorge Luis Borges short story. It tells the seemingly familiar tale of Theseus and the Minotaur, yet with one important difference: the story is told from the Minotaur’s point of view. This focussing on making the subject the ‘other’ is something also reflected in the writing of Ursula K LeGuin, specifically her story ‘Mazes’, where in a story of laboratory experiments on a captive alien, we are given the creature’s point of view as it tries without success to communicate with its human captor. I was also mindful of Carravagio’s painting of Medusa, which portrays her not as a murderous monster, but as a sentient creature, shocked and bewildered by her brutal slaughter at the sword of a stranger.
The technology
I used a PS3 Eye camera to monitor ant movements (primarily on the symbolic, decaying apple), along with a computer vision program, based on the C++ OpenFrameworks code we developed in WCC pt2. Every 6 seconds this delivered a number, based on the change in black and white pixels. This number was mapped against an Ontograph (compiled from a list of ‘things gathered in a variety of ways - folk games, web scrapers and user contributions), to deliver a ‘reading’ to the observer, displayed via a Processing sketch.