Unwhorl

Can gastropod gestures inlfluence and redirect the attention economy?

Snails make music and sketches collaboratively with other snails, or humans, across time and space, signals broadcast in real time online. Unwhorl is an experiment in platform ethology.

Making The World and Time Traveling with Snails

Unwhorl aspires to be both a purely speculative gesture towards the future of fauna-facing tech, and a hardware for a specific mode of cultural production. With Unwhorl we aim to consider how existing interspecies technologies may be freed from the singular purpose of the translation of animal subjectivity to humans, instead seeking for a more encompassing exploration of the intuitive connections all species share through the act of creating experimental fictions.

Fictioning, we posit, creates enduring bonds between individuals, spaces, and temporalities. Humans have fictioned into existence entire worlds, yet it is still difficult for us to presume that other species, too, rely on fiction to make sense of their experiences and to form cultural communities. Interspecies bonds, we speculate, may depend on shared fictions.

Interfacing Uncertainty

Unwhorl is an interface built on Java script that turns any touchscreen device into a real-time interactive plane for interaction with, and by, garden snails. It works by converting the input from snail gestures into sketches and sounds and by returning vibrational outputs. Snails that climb onto an Unwhorl can make music, and sketches, collaboratively with other snails, or humans, across time and space. Corresponding to the gestures of the snail, the app creates and records durational artworks: e.g., dot line drawings, dot-line drawing films, and music both in live and recorded formats. The signals, broadcasted in real time online, allows anyone anywhere in the world a peak into the snails’ process. The works, considered concluded once the snails leaves the Ipad, can be made legible and interpretable through the act of sustained attention as well as the attention to recurrent patterns (and anomalies).