{"id":11102,"date":"2019-04-24T14:46:28","date_gmt":"2019-04-24T14:46:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?page_id=11102"},"modified":"2019-07-24T13:44:25","modified_gmt":"2019-07-24T13:44:25","slug":"divination-py-a-lyric-algorithm-for-the-augury-of-attunement","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?page_id=11102","title":{"rendered":"“divination.py”: A Lyric Algorithm for the Augury of Attunement"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Lisa Swanstrom<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

In the ancient world, augury described the act of discerning the future from the behavior of birds: their feathers, their entrails, their patterns of flight. In his Natural History<\/em>, Pliny the Elder devotes an entire chapter to the biology of birds, providing a detailed description of each kind\u2014size, wingspan, habits of predation\u2014and, when applicable, its divinatory import.  Roosters, for instance, \u201chave a knowledge of the stars\u201d and \u201cgive or withhold the most favorable omens.\u201d  As if their celestial prowess were not impressive enough, Pliny attests to their political might: \u201cCocks hold very great power over the government of the world,\u201d he notes, on account of \u201ctheir entrails and innards, as acceptable to the gods as the most costly victims.\u201dBut the practice of augury went beyond the merely aviary. Pliny notes the divinatory import of bees, beasts, lightning, and teeth; more broadly still, the skill of augury required one to read omens from all sorts of natural signs: water, weather, flora, fauna, fire, smoke, vapor, and stone. A priest skilled in augury could determine whether such signs were propitious or inauspicious, portentous or banal. Depending on his assessment, wars were waged, lives sacrificed or spared, fortunes lost or gained. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my own work as a scholar of\nliterary and natural history, I have begun to think seriously about augury. In\nour current age of environmental fragility, augury has the potential to help us\nreframe conversations about imperiled ecologies.  If we can think of the term more generally, it\ncan serve as a useful heuristic. Augury in this more expansive sense becomes\nless a practice of prediction than a method of deriving meaning from natural\nsigns\u2014a way to access nonhuman modes of autopoetic expression, communication,\nand agency. Looking at the flight patterns of birds in a contemporary context,\nfor example, might not tell us how the future will unfold, but it will provide\na wealth of information about the weather, the wind, the birds, and what it\nmeans for such beings to traverse the earth and sky of our shared habitat. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have been writing about augury as\nan artistic strategy or a historic curiosity for many years. As a participant\nin the Finnish Bioart Society\u2019s Field_Notes Laboratory, however, I was\nprivileged to have the time to engage with augury as a daily practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Kilpisj\u00e4rvi, a biological research station in northern Finland, I was a part of a research focus group called \u201cAugury: Machines which look at birds,\u201d hosted by Martin Howse.  Before we met in Finland, Martin sent us a reader of several hundred pages, a collection of writing and art and scientific practice related to divination, broadly conceived. As with all the groups that made up Field_Notes, once we arrived in Kilpisj\u00e4rvi we spent most of our time outdoors, conducting aesthetic experiments. While our colleagues in the \u201cSurfing the Semiosphere\u201d group studied the patterns and actions of lichen, rocks, and plant life, and while those in the \u201cHumus.sapiens\u201d group collected and considered the texture and function of soil, and while the \u201cReciprocal Sensing\u201d group explored and expanded the limits of human sensation, and while the \u201cSecond Order\u201d group studied us all as we went about our tasks, we in the \u201cAugury\u201d group practiced divination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our first experiment occurred on\nour first day together and involved geomancy, in which we counted items of\nsignificance in the meadows of Saana. These included berries (4), reindeer\ndroppings (30), mountain peaks (7), and spots of lichen (235). We were\ndelighted to learn, after consulting our reader, that these were propitious\nsigns. The next day, we hiked through Malla, a strictly enforced\nnature reserve. It is an arctic forest filled with lakes, fells, and rough,\nrocky peaks. Moss and lichen carpet the stones; pools of water collect with\nalmost symmetric precision. Reindeer roam freely. In Malla we attempted\nhydromancy (divination through water) as a part of our fifteen-kilometer hike\nthrough the fells. The third day we experimented with a variety of other\ntechniques: attending to the presence of flora, fauna, weather, clouds, sound,\nsoil, scent, light, shadows, dreams, and the electromagnetic emanations of the aurora\nborealis.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By\nthe third day, I was wholly overwhelmed. The other members in my group were\nskilled artists. They were comfortable sampling sounds from rivers, rocks, and\nplants.  They were adept at coaxing\nnatural elements into artistic compositions. In their hands, pinecones, leaves,\nmushrooms and deer-fleece transformed into stunning photographic portraits of\nthe landscape. Melted wax transformed into astonishing, pearlescent sculptures\nwhen cast into icy lake water. The slow flow of the northern lights refracted\ninto pink nebula, captured by a camera lens the size of a matchbox.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\nlike to think of myself as an ecologically minded person attuned to her\nsurroundings. Yet the torrent of natural signs that flooded through me in\nKilpisj\u00e4rvi\nthreatened to destroy this self-perception. I am used to analyzing\nrepresentations of things that have already been shaped, molded, edited, or\ncurated\u2014words, images, colors, and sound. I learned in Finland that I am far\nless adept at confronting raw material. The\nnatural world offers a such a diversity of information that it often exceeds\nthe ability of the human mind to comprehend it. There is a broad spectrum of\nnonhuman signaling that our senses are too limited to capture. Natural data, in\nother words, is overwhelming in its abundance, and it can be difficult to\nattend to its specificity because of this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cdivination.py\u201d addresses this\nproblem. A computer script composed in a lyric mode, written in the Python\nprogramming language, \u201cdivination.py\u201d functions to help narrow one\u2019s focus and\nattune one\u2019s self to the surrounding ecosystem. It is a playful attempt to\nrepurpose augury for the Age of Information. By inviting the supplicant to\nparticipate, it acts at once as hex and haruspex, i.e., as spell and\nspell-caster. It directs the supplicant and channels her focus according to\nfloral, faunal, mineral registries. At the end of each session, it produces a\nsuccinct set of instructions that varies for each user.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inspired by my participation in Field_Notes, \u201cdivination.py\u201d is\nregionally specific, although I am exploring the possibility of expanding the\nprogram so that it is attuned to the geocoordinates of each user. Feel free to\ntinker with the code, which is housed on the accompanying website\n(divination-dot-py.org), along with a set of instructions for running it from\nthe command line. Feedback and comments are warmly welcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Access “divination.py” here.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\n\n\n\n

Lisa Swanstrom<\/strong> is the author of Animal, Vegetable, Digital: Experiments in New Media Aesthetics and Environmental Poetics <\/em>(Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2016), and an Associate Professor of English at the University of Utah. Her research and teaching interests include science fiction, natural history, media theory, and the digital humanities. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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