s.t. lore

DIRTY SOFTWARE

“… Even when the termite colony is dead: the mound material is a conspicuous action figure. A repository. A museum. A humidicrib of in-organic filth. Stigmergy is the stigma— “mark, sign” and ἔργον ergon— “work, action”, a network concept that captures the notion we act as insect entities—both virtual, living, legal, and fictitious—crawling in mechanisms of relative indirect coordination to carve out borderless tracts.

As we detach from our calendars—optioning out from a religion of the sun—copulating in a liminal-blanket of ‘necro-corpescent machine numbers’ we are conditioned to enjoy a united monarchy of material victories while abandoning older funerary beliefs and death practices.

Yet inside digitally mediated systems we soil our trails with tokens, cookies, and traces: operant signs—sensed and sniffed-out by machines— as tactile communications that in turn determine, incite, or even predict contingency for future actions: & so on, & so forth. So, backward soldier, forward soldier. One—Step. Two—Step. Treading uneasily on bits of digital labour force is a diaspora of technoactions ingesting our centipede legs. As data traffic generates, it swarms and increasingly bores through rare earth metal constructions of wire, casings, synthetics—an e-waste heap of a ‘teletopology’ environ—loosed with viruses, worms, codes of immeasurable friction to hammer static, historical inselbergs of sovereignty and nation, and stable economy, and cooperative state. By deploying termites as analogies for behaviour modelling and internet modem connections (swarming as intelligent routing algorithms) this project conjours up Negroponte throwing gerbils into a computer-block world as ‘what designers already do does not seem to work’ and without experimenting ‘we can get inbred modus operandi …that make bad architectures more prolific.’ By using these ethico-insect-architects to guide us in a data bank understanding, we may finally observe ‘data consists of materials, details, inscriptions and symbols in motion’ and creates tangled lines of sentry labour re-drawn in ancient mineral sands…”