Islands to Port Eighty
Submission Type
Performance
Start Date/Time (EDT)
20-7-2024 7:15 PM
End Date/Time (EDT)
20-7-2024 7:30 PM
Location
Algorithms & Imaginaries
Abstract
The performance “Islands to Port Eighty” invites readers to generate in concert diverging versions of a “poem” - a mock archaeological tablet - while following the Paxos distributed consensus algorithm. Leslie Lamport’s 1988 paper “The Part-Time Parliament” introduces the Paxos algorithm, used to establish consistency between unreliable processes, through the frame fiction of an archeology paper about the democratic rulers of an invented Ionian island state. Lamport later republished the result within a more traditional form for computer science research, but its name and origins maintain this gesture towards allegory and archaeological history. This algorithm and its successors enable the operation of the globe spanning database infrastructures which store and process our digital presences. “Islands to Port Eighty” implements the Paxos algorithm in a critical context to draw out the role of metaphors and historical representations in shaping a scientific field associated more often with futurity, and to raise questions of consensus and dissensus in reading.
The text generators draws on bronze age inscriptions to make statements and develop a lingua-franca between the participants in the performance. The words are assigned various tags, with each participant starting on an “island” associated with an archaeological transcription and possessing its language. Participants are sequentially given the chance to broadcast one of their assertions to all the other “islands” - each recipient then may decide whether or not to add this statement to the common vocabulary. If a majority of recipients agree to learn the statement, all “islands” then incorporate all the words in that statement as well as its pattern of tags into their own generator. At each stage, their “tablet” grammatically generates additional statements from their “island”’s personal vocabulary and syntax, as well as its prior utterances. The statements are assertional, cryptically authoritative, and focus on rulers, deities, and commerce like their source materials.
A digital performance will allow enough readers to be present making the text(s), while the contrast of their personal versions with the one on my own screen (which I share and read on Zoom for those who choose not to participate directly) emphasizes the gaps as well as moments of contact between readers. The performance is conducted through client-side web pages making use of a Javascript peer-to-peer communication library and an API to broker connections. A technical proof of concept version of the piece has been written with plans for substantial revisions. Participants only require a web browser.
Distributed systems theory is full of metaphors about political power with its Byzantine generals and part-time parliaments (and even disturbing reference to “master” and “slave” processes), simultaneously centering and effacing more classical rhetorics theorizing systems of (algorithmic) control. See Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s _Control and Freedom_ for a study of the tensions between visions of “freedom” and operations of control in networked computation. Although distributed systems are most famous now for blockchain protocols and tokens, blockchains are not directly or substantially addressed in this performance (while elements of the discourse surrounding them are relevant).
Recommended Citation
Duvvoori, Kavi, "Islands to Port Eighty" (2024). ELO (un)linked 2024. 52.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2024/algorithmsandimaginaries/schedule/52
Islands to Port Eighty
Algorithms & Imaginaries
The performance “Islands to Port Eighty” invites readers to generate in concert diverging versions of a “poem” - a mock archaeological tablet - while following the Paxos distributed consensus algorithm. Leslie Lamport’s 1988 paper “The Part-Time Parliament” introduces the Paxos algorithm, used to establish consistency between unreliable processes, through the frame fiction of an archeology paper about the democratic rulers of an invented Ionian island state. Lamport later republished the result within a more traditional form for computer science research, but its name and origins maintain this gesture towards allegory and archaeological history. This algorithm and its successors enable the operation of the globe spanning database infrastructures which store and process our digital presences. “Islands to Port Eighty” implements the Paxos algorithm in a critical context to draw out the role of metaphors and historical representations in shaping a scientific field associated more often with futurity, and to raise questions of consensus and dissensus in reading.
The text generators draws on bronze age inscriptions to make statements and develop a lingua-franca between the participants in the performance. The words are assigned various tags, with each participant starting on an “island” associated with an archaeological transcription and possessing its language. Participants are sequentially given the chance to broadcast one of their assertions to all the other “islands” - each recipient then may decide whether or not to add this statement to the common vocabulary. If a majority of recipients agree to learn the statement, all “islands” then incorporate all the words in that statement as well as its pattern of tags into their own generator. At each stage, their “tablet” grammatically generates additional statements from their “island”’s personal vocabulary and syntax, as well as its prior utterances. The statements are assertional, cryptically authoritative, and focus on rulers, deities, and commerce like their source materials.
A digital performance will allow enough readers to be present making the text(s), while the contrast of their personal versions with the one on my own screen (which I share and read on Zoom for those who choose not to participate directly) emphasizes the gaps as well as moments of contact between readers. The performance is conducted through client-side web pages making use of a Javascript peer-to-peer communication library and an API to broker connections. A technical proof of concept version of the piece has been written with plans for substantial revisions. Participants only require a web browser.
Distributed systems theory is full of metaphors about political power with its Byzantine generals and part-time parliaments (and even disturbing reference to “master” and “slave” processes), simultaneously centering and effacing more classical rhetorics theorizing systems of (algorithmic) control. See Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s _Control and Freedom_ for a study of the tensions between visions of “freedom” and operations of control in networked computation. Although distributed systems are most famous now for blockchain protocols and tokens, blockchains are not directly or substantially addressed in this performance (while elements of the discourse surrounding them are relevant).
Bio
Kavi Duvvoori is a writer (and other things) currently based in Kitchener, Ontario, on the Haldimand tract. They have studied math, literary arts, digital arts and new media, and english. Their interests include experimental and constrained literature, birds, borders and migration, speculative fiction, lists, linguistics, the limits of language, worldbuilding, infrastructural geographies, the search for ways of living that reject hierarchy and domination, sauteing, maps, and evasiveness. They have published a couple small pieces in online publications.