Divination.py

Introduction

The natural world offers a such a diversity of information that it often exceeds the ability of the human mind to comprehend it. There is a broad spectrum of non-human signaling that our senses are too limited to capture. Natural data, in other words, is overwhelming in its abundance, and it can be difficult to attend to its specificity because of this.

"divination.py" addresses this problem. A computer script composed in a lyric mode, written in the Python programming language, "divination.py" functions to help narrow one's focus and attune one's self to the surrounding ecosystem. It is a playful attempt to re-purpose augury for the Age of Information. By inviting the supplicant to participate, it acts at once as hex and haruspex, i.e., as spell and spell-caster. It directs the supplicant and channels her focus according to floral, faunal, mineral registries. At the end of each session, it produces a succinct set of instructions that varies for each user.

Inspired by my participation in Field_Notes, "divination.py" is regionally specific, although I am exploring the possibility of expanding the program so that it is attuned to the geocoordinates of each user. Feel free to tinker with the code, which is housed on the accompanying website (divination-dot-py.org), along with a set of instructions for running it form the command line. Feedback and comments are warmly welcome.