#1 bold text The House of Asterion #2 italicized text (after Borges, for Le Guin and to Haraway’s chthonic ones)

#2 italicized text“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), a cry against capitalist machine-figuration, whispering of a world where meditative divination is the driving algorithm and refuge is the anti-teleological point.

#2 italicized text “So what’s going on?” 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’s necessarily a troubled, labyrinthine, entangled thing, which resists linear interpretation and rejects hierarchical, anthropocentric ways of being. The House of Asterion is a queer space, which thrives outside of the usual story. 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.