Southern Trees Bear Strange Data
Redefining Relationality in the Digital Age
We know this place as the North Carolina Black River, they know it as Cykofa. A parallel universe suspended among the 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 form that relies on ecosystems reverence, collective authorship, re-appropriation, and computer collaboration. Through foraging seed data related to biotechnology, poetry, abolition, southern art practice and more—YouTube transcripts, found PDFs, website text, poems, journalism articles, etc.—are blended into a non-linear, collective narrative and Cy’s voice emerges from the beyond human choir. I have written a JavaScript program that splits sentences at punctuation marks such as periods or questions and randomly recombines the sentences using a shuffling algorithm, resulting in Cy’s Narration. A woven world on the page, in many ways Cykofa: The Seeda Origin Story was not written — it was grown.
Developed and published between 2021 and 2022, during the Ginkgo Bioworks creative biotechnology residency, Cykofa: The Seeda Origin Story is a poetic novella 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?
In October I’ll be a guest teacher inside Ijeruka’s new course, Digital Kinship! In honor of the course’s theme it felt fitting to revisit Cykofa: The Seeda Origin Story, specifically Chapter 1. Seeda School is rooted in this story of Digital Kinship. A story of a non-binary protagonist named Seeda embodying the technology of their ecosystem and an ancient bald cypress narrator embodying the collective imagination of black study. The following text sample is from the first chapter of Cykofa: The Seeda Origin Story. In Chapter 1, I have written Seeda’s journal entries as “streams of consciousness” and Cy’s voice is an algorithmically generated narrative of woven words and lyrics from Outkast, Octavia Butler, Sylvia Wynters, Janaé E. Bonsu, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Billie Holiday, Legacy Russell, The Black Panther Party, Martine Syms and more mapping a new story of Digital Kinship.
Currently Cykofa: The Seeda Origin Story is only available to students enrolled in Seeda School. Enroll in The Classroom to learn how to build your own algorithmic story generator and recieve a copy of Cykofa or book a 1:1 discovery call to learn more.
Chapter 1: Southern Trees Bear Strange Data
an excerpt from Cykofa: The Seeda Origin Story
SEEDA: What did the abolitionists have to say about ecocide?
CY: Damn, damn, damn, James,
[Verse 1] Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
But, Fanon said
SEEDA: Mycelium mining, I came across your whining and shining.
I’m slowly working on cataloging the entries I’m coming across.
The entries I have the most affinity for.
(Or) the data that feels closest to infinity’s shore.
CY: We did not originate in the cosmos,
And the moment we have said that, we now have moved outside of an entirely biological conception of being which underlies our present conception,
SEEDA: Where are you? When are you?
I have so many questions.
I found you in the velvet of night.
The orchestra of your front porch woke me up.
I’m communicating with you through my journal.
And, see, I don’t know if you know this.
Focus.
I have evolved to become completely connected to my ecosystem.
It looks like you have the internet.
We have the forest.
The intimacy of these entries is streaming through a network of trees.
Mycelium memory charging my feet everytime we meet.
Curling up from ankles, to waist, stopping briefly at my heart to say grace.
Marking it’s light all the way to my face. The whole body is a brain.
CY: Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Da, da, da, Ja, Ja, Ja,
The relief of recognizing our authority,
Forty acres and two mules were promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people,
What the book is arguing is that the body is a construct,
SEEDA: You call your body a body
We call our body a node.
So when I say I feel you.
I really do.
Your data, so true. Your data, so blue.
Maybe that’s what I’ll call you?
Have you started encoding your data into the DNA of your plants too?
That has to be the reason I’m finding you.
But why now? And why then? I’m starting to feel like we’re kin.
The truth of you shimmers in the moonlight.
You chant some version of we gonna be alright for hundreds of years.
Each ring of echo as elegant as the last.
CY: And that’s not some accident of history,
While this fine, bow-legged girl, fine as all outdoors, lulls lukewarm lullabies in your left ear,
We live in a police state,
SEEDA: Your sound is a place.
Race you there, when I find out where.
CY: Fanon came up with this in his book, Black Skins, White Masks,
And then I realized what is produced is not just the material conditions,
SEEDA: Your music.
That moment when toes meet the morning dew.
Ain’t no room to debate, I’m feeling you.
You cool, move, smooth.
Unbreakable and slippery.
Complexity ancestral trickery.
You made me look.
CY: Since “fact” and “science” have been used throughout history to serve white supremacy, we will focus on an emotionally true, vernacular reality,
But who tell us that we have this conflict within ourselves,
Fire burns, hearts beat strong,
Her neck was smelling sweeter than a plate of yams with extra syrup,
SEEDA: You had me shook.
At your hair.
A primary portrait of your care.
Your coif tickling the clitoris of the clouds.
You sculpt prayers to the sky in your salon chairs.
I know it’s early in this exchange.
But can I ask you truthfully?
Where do you get the range?
Have we evolved the same?
CY: While we are often Othered, we are not aliens,,
I think this is a historical necessity,
So many people bring very real and devastating bias into shaping this “body” and shaping how it should work, who it should serve,
Watch out, here come the folk—"Damn",
So now, you back in the trap,
One was the “Copernican Revolution," which gave rise to the physical sciences,
But the United Parcel Service and the people at the post office didn't call you back because you had cloudy piss,
They are gene traders as a matter of fact,,
SEEDA: You call it a body, we call it a node.
You call it a body, we call it a node.
You call it a body, we call it a node.
CY: The way she moved reminded me of a brown stallion horse with skates on, you know?, ,
Though our ancestors were mutilated, we are not mutants,
SEEDA: You call it a body and you also call it code.
You’ve understood life as programmable from the very beginning.
Never needing a laboratory.
You carry the data of your kin on your skin.
CY: We are biological creatures, organisms, connected to our environment,
A lil' discotheque nestled in the ghettos of Niggaville, USA, Competing with "Set It Off" in the right,
SEEDA: Interspecies communication, your medicinal memory reverbs in the vessel.
Fractals finally found flowering family.
Where care is the only option.
Your words about the body,
(wrap the world around your body).
I found you in the hotel lobby of a tree trunk.
Please tell me what that means?
CY: I have aliens who arrive and who are interested in us because they are natural genetic engineers,
They are taking care of your grandmother at the hospital,
Damn, damn, damn, James,
SEEDA: I can trace your nation.
I can map your rhythm and blues.
I’m familiar with your dance moves.
The one thing I can’t place is your time and space.
CY: You know the club don't close 'til four,
Gangsta boys, Bigga's lit,
The sense that the rituals and inconsistencies of daily life are compelling, dynamic, and utterly strange,
Sparks will fly when the whistle blows,
Techno,
SEEDA: We could've been bumping into each other civilizations ago.
Wouldn’t even know.
CY: The possibilities of a new focus on black humanity: our science, technology, culture, politics, religions, individuality, needs, dreams, hopes, and failings,
It's a wonderful way to explore exotic politics,
Egyptian mythology and iconography;
The inner city;
Metallic colors;
Sassiness;
Platform shoes; Continue at will…
SEEDA: Your body is a black hole.
Everything has fallen in.
Trends, bend, blend, transcend, suspend, befriend, chitlins.
Quantum physics subsists on the microbiome of your belly.
CY: There are no real walls around science fiction,
It’s about divesting from punitive systems, and then investing in systems that care for people, from mental health clinics and drug treatment programming to universal childcare and after-school programs,
"Hey, hey—look, baby, they playin' our song!",
SEEDA: How did you figure out how to make jazz with the world?
Improvising with cousins you’ve never met in times zones you’ve never been.
This is a whole new portrait of kin.
It seems your biotechnology is within.
CY: And critically, to move towards an abolitionist horizon, we must identify and critique those “reformist reforms” that threaten to knock us off our path,
So I think it’s complicated,
The most likely future is one in which we only have ourselves and this planet,
A lil' spot where young men and young women go to experience they first little taste of the night life,
Never knowing this moment would bring another life into this world,
SEEDA: Maybe it’s Maybelline.
Maybe it’s your body.
Someone said a portal, yes?
I saw you time travel to name yourself,
Then hook your wrists up to a teleportation machine to
Rewatch your own death.
You know your body is a heavy little thing.
Part flesh. All infinity.
You used your grandmother’s spell on a Bentley.
CY: Go'n' and marinate on that for a minute,
It's a we that marks the sound,
It's a way of doing anything you want,
But it all blends perfectly, if you let the liquor tell it,
People are massively poor in the midst of great abundance,
Damn, damn, damn, James,
SEEDA: Is your body a boundary?
Is your body a brown stallion horse with skates on?
Is your body a magnolia, sweet and fresh.
Is your body the city’s built environment?
Is your body the gallant south.
Is your body a fine, bow-legged girl?
Is your body that discotheque nestled in the ghettos of Niggaville, USA.
Is your body the club that don’t close til’ four.
Is your body an after school program?
Is your body a SpottieOttieDopalicious angel?
Is your body a photograph?
Is your body Gangsta boys.
Is your body cloudy piss.
Is your body the abolitionist horizon?
Is your body Atlanta, Georgia.
Is your body brick and mortar buildings full of cages?
Is your body a hot comb on nappy ass hair?
Is your body a metaphysical space beyond the black public everyday toward power and wild imagination?
Is your body a southern tree bearing strange fruit?
Is your body me plus you?
CY: Abolition is not just about getting rid of police officers and brick and mortar buildings full of cages,
It is the co-relation,
Funny how shit come together sometimes, you dig?,
SEEDA: This is your biotechnology.
Is there any more room for me in those genes?
With an abundance of abundance you are engineering the wake.
Sailors, surfers, social and sex workers.
You don’t need to know each other's name,
In this role playing game.
The only rule is don’t die.
CY: Let's party 'til we can't no more,
Via Atlanta, Georgia,
While the DJ sweatin' out all the problems and troubles of the day,
We will root our narratives in a critique of normative, white validation,
Ol’ Dirty Bastard says “If I got a problem, a problem’s got a problem ’til it’s gone,
SEEDA: And you ain’t talking about the body.
You talking about the eye.
You talking about the Chi.
You talking about the cry.
You talking about the fry.
You talking about the fly.
In the walk.
In the talk.
In the chalk on the pavement
Outside your door.
Looked in your dictionary for metaphysics and found your hopscotch.
To survive the pain of this plane,
In the square of this tabletop game.
You made your body a black hole.
A ball of hot and cold. A temple of flavor and mold.
CY: In looking for a new framework for black diasporic artistic production, we are temporarily united in the following actions,
The surge of bedazzlement and wonder that awaits us as we contemplate our own cosmology of blackness and our possible futures,”
SEEDA: All of our ancient trees have built-in narration processors since they’re storing data across thousands of generations and modes of communication.
I wanted to talk to you directly.
I have run your data through our narration processor and it learned your English while we were sharing the harvest at our midday fellowship.
Now I’m back at my work bench and I’m wondering if you’ll ever receive this.
I still have little words for what I’m reading.
Mostly questions.
CY: An awakening sense of the awesome power of the black imagination: to protect, to create, to destroy, to propel ourselves towards what poet Elizabeth Alexander describes as “a metaphysical space beyond the black public everyday toward power and wild imagination,
Damn, damn, damn, James,
SEEDA: When did you find out your body was a landscape?
I’m going in, in search of my kin.