The Cykofa Narration CLI (Command Line Interface) App is a tool for writing collectively authored fiction and poetry. The Cykofa Narration CLI is used as a teaching tool at Seeda School. If you would like to invite Seeda School to facilitate a Cykofa Narration Workshop please reach out via email.
- Fork and clone this project.
- Open your terminal and run
$ json-server --watch db.jsonin the project directory to start the server. - In another terminal tab, run
$ node index.jsin the project directory to start the application on the command line.
We know this place as the North Carolina Black River, they know it as Cykofa. A parallel universe suspended among past and future — where cornrows are cryptography keys, data farms are data forests, the weaving loom is a computer, a cloth is a document, and chain link fencing from demolished prisons are used as architectural membrane woven with plant life. In Cykofa the trees have learned to speak using the data Cykofians have encoded in the tree’s DNA and tree ring memory.
Remembering that we can store data into the DNA of plants and read information from a tree's rings through dendrochronology, I developed Cykofa Narration as a methodology. Cykofa Narration is a storytelling technology/methodology that relies on ecosystems reverence, collective voice, re-appropriation, and computer collaboration. Developed and published during the Ginkgo Bioworks Creative Residency, Cykofa: The Seeda Origin Story is a long-form poetry narrative told through the journal entries of a non-binary biotechnologist named Seeda and the found data within an ancient, 2,600+ year-old bald cypress tree named Cy. Our narrator is a tree but also a portal, allowing us to traverse deep time and connections. The people of Cykofa have traditionally hosted their data within the DNA of their trees, but what happens when Seeda discovers a rip in the dendrochronological memory, exposing select datasets from our world?
Through foraging seed data related to biotechnology, poetry, abolition, southern self taught art and more—YouTube transcripts, found PDFs, website text, poems, journalism articles, etc.—are blended into a non-linear, choral hymn and Cy’s voice emerges. I have written a JavaScript program that splits paragraphs at punctuation marks such as periods and randomly recombines the paragraphs using a shuffling algorithm, resulting in Cy’s Narration and a woven world on the page. In many ways, Cykofa: The Seeda Origin Story was not written — it was grown.
Cykofa Narration is a story telling aesthetic that helps us write collectively authored fiction and poetry. This aesthetic allows us to explore non-linear storytelling and imagine new worlds using the data of our current one. Another world is possible. We may feel this by now, but how might we collectively imagine our way inside this unknowable future? By gathering found data — from poems, YouTube transcripts, love letters, twitter threads, zines, spells, reclaimed academic PDFs etc. — and algorithmically weaving the seemingly disparate text, we can begin to generate a collective voice as a prompt to tell a different story that troubles individual authorship and linear time.