Ethnocomputing Experiments

Two systems of representing the world, both mathematical in their treatment of line, projected onto one another.

Presented at Pioneer Works for Second Sundays on 8 April 2018 and open to visitors until 22 April.

A set of Angolan traditional patterns known as Sona, from the Chokwe people, recreated in Processing, following the heritage algorithm embedded in the originals, which were made as finger drawings in sand while a story was told aloud.

We chose one pattern to project over a painting inspired by an early seventeenth-century treatise on linear perspective by the Dutch artist Vredeman de Vries. The pattern tells the story of a wild chicken running from a hunter: the line is the path the bird takes as it fools him and exhausts him, before returning to its hidden home, which sits exactly where the run began.

The main inspiration is the academic work of Paulus Gerdes, the Dutch–Mozambican author who was a prominent figure in ethnomathematics, alongside Ron Eglash’s work on ethnocomputing and heritage algorithms.