Haecceity Stack

Media: Indium Tin Oxide (ITO) coated glass, LEDs, RaspberryPi cluster, PureData distributed software, phototransistors, headphones, and 3D-printed Doric columns.
Dimensions: 90cm x 20cm x 10cm
Year: 2018
Exhibition: Goldsmiths

"Today we lack the adequate vocabularies to properly engage the operations of planetary-scale computing. Going forward we really do need new and better models, because computation already operates in ways that have surpassed and overflowed the regular cartographies." (Bratton, 2015)

Haecceity Stack is an exercise in creating experimental audio-visual speculative designs rooted in complexity science. As a black stack prototype^[1], it’s emergent program iteratively mutates a dataset representing interlinked levels of planetary-scale computing that enable global forms of power. The levels of the dataset gradually affect one another as the program executes and are continuously outputted as a series of modulating lights that viewers can see evolve. By wearing phototransistor-headphones, viewers can directly translate the (data as) modulated light into interlinked audible sounds of minerals, machines, animals, and human voice.

Like a world map, Haecceity Stack creates a simplified representation of a complex system, but it is a useful system model nonetheless. This speculative system model illuminates the commonly hidden emergent structures of connection and power rooted in the most basic physics of atoms, encodings of bits, and formulations of humans.

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