Case Study
In Irish mythology Macha is one of the triadic goddesses. She is one of the members of the triple goddess known as The Morrigan. Macha was a king maker, a sovereign goddess, warlike, and a fierce mother, reputed to have damned Ulster (Northern Ireland) to unrest. Her name was given to a hill in Armagh (Ard Macha) also called Emain Macha (Macha’s Twins), and the panopticon prison which is Armagh Gaol. Armagh or Árd Macha (Macha’s height)was during the Irish Revolution (1920's) and during the Troubles (late 1960s - 1998) the prison for female political prisoners. A place for women who refused to be subjects of the imperialists.
Her more-than-human shape-shifting turns her into a cypher in the journey from trans-polytheistic to monotheistic cultures. I wonder if she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess?
"Our origin myths and cosmogonies, are the storytelling “grounds'' of the institution of initiation, by means of which we fictively auto-institute or pseudospeciate ourselves as hybridly human." Sylvia Wynter
The Macha Algorithm a speculative re-engineering of one of Ireland’s nation-building myths. After Sylvia Wynter, I describe myth as an algorithmic process in which culture and story function as code, instituting and maintaining social norms. I’m investigating the long history of its patriarchal misuse, and opening avenues for the radical, queer, feminist and anarchist re-appropriation of the cultural algorithm.
“Singularities fuse only to the extent that they cannot exchange or hear each other.” Lyotard [Nous ne nous entendons pas: we don’t get along/ we don’t hear each other]
I apply the tactics of borrowing, echoing, collage, etc. across, writing, film, and audio essay.
The notion of the collective calso deeply informs this research. A sense of collectivity that was born on the dancefloor of rave and underground clubs. The genesis of this music directs me to Reggae and Dub and its message of revolutionary love transmitted sonically through the bodies of the dancers. A form of intelligent syncopated disruption to the biopower of control matrices. I note Glissant’s poetics of relation as a framework, for a provisional patchwork or indeterminate lived process concretely embodied in the compositional tactics of Dub makers.
My methodology involves looking at cultural myth making as an algorithmic procedure. I am guided in this by the writings of contemporary theorists of complexity, cybernetics, and political organising.
“If we are imprisoned by language, then escape from that prison-house requires language poets, a kind of cultural restriction enzyme to cut the code; cyborg heteroglossia is one form of radical cultural politics. “ Donna Haraway
I come to theory from an art making perspective. I approach research with a flat hierarchical view, I use assemblage to construct my work. I am exploring the shift from Intersectionality to Assemblage theory as a way of making sense of current feminist knowledge production.
“No matter how fluid, hybrid, or unbounded, when addressing a collectivity the racial has already inscribed as subaltern, the cultural acquires a descriptive sense that does not and cannot communicate interiority, as is the case with the nation, the historical signifier. It does not and cannot precisely because it remains fully within a scientific (anthropological) terrain of signification. As such, it reinforces the effects of signification of the racial: exterior determination. In short, it cannot institute a transparent (interior/temporal)—that is, self-determined.” Denise Ferreira da Silva
I write texts for my short films using a polylogical approach, after Bahktin and speculative and critical fabulations, after Saidiya Hartman, to consider overlooked perspectives on overlooked and under-told women's stories. And this allows me to consider the recoverable feminist, relational, anarchic, etc. elements in their story. It allows a topographical analysis of the landscapes around Armagh–the site of the myth. And also a starting point from which to set forth and to trace, map and expand the tale–into the future present.
My vision for the project is to research and present the story of the algorithm and the goddess of sovereignty Macha. These building blocks will act as sources for speculative thinking.
The form of the work will be an audio essay. Featuring a plurality of voices it will use Dub as the basis for the sound. The sonic process that has self-replicated, morphed and adapted itself across oceans, through time and shaping listeners through infectious earworms. One of Dubs forms is Reggae which often espoused ‘love’ as its central message as well as the notion of ‘one blood.’
A part of the process will be to collectively source the code of the future Macha Algorithm from the cohort of the Intelligence - Love - Revolution. Through the research I will compose a series of questions to be answered, in coding terms both predictive and bidirectional thinking, framed in the Irrealis Mood. To construct the audio essay I will invite my fellow participants to answer some questions as voice recordings. The goal of the project is to create a polylogic, polyvocal audio essay that will include the collective speculating or/ and fabulating new futures, inventing, through dialectics, adaptable road maps to peace.
I will create a speculative fiction, questioning whether any myth or algorithm is a trap, use noise theory to speculate on the outside of the signal, questioning the logics of terraforming the earth by rationalisation, questions about the Rational turn and Enlightenment thought, questions about labour, colonial logics, reification, question power structures of patriarchal and colonial subjugation, question the construction of futures, question whether its possible to activate pacifism through mythopoesis, questions on the queerness of neutrality...
The Macha Algorithm is a subset of Fellow Prisoners my main research project. My vision is to philosophically and sonically explore the notion of mythopoetics and algorithmic control. I intend to use this time, space and collaborative learning to focus my writing on these themes.
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