Sir-Aha is a speculative narrative proposal for a Yakutian-based AI almanac which confronts industrialized time with the possibility for alternative temporalities. Inspired by the concept of “cosmotechnics”, it connects existing Sakha subsistence practices to ecological cycles and puts the conceived temporality and folk wisdom of its specific local context into practice.

The almanac, which is a holistic system of data derived from different wearables, learns the intricacies of the Yakutian environment, generating new convergences of time and space as it trudges through seasons, years and decades. It translates the tacit knowledge of herding, farming, foraging and hunting into machine language and reversibly communicates nuanced sense data to human beings. As such, it guides newcomers and provides support to locals by supplementing indigenous practices with biosensing, as these practices have been eroded by global climate change.

Twitter: @sir_aha

Project Websites: https://siraha.atavist.com, http://sir-aha.net

Booklet PDF: https://drive.google.com/open?id=168xDC3W7HX4afUj2bXupcfc0w33dv9Uk

Fiction Piece: https://siraha.atavist.com/in-a-second-of-time

A retired paramedic AI, in which medical data of its patients was erased, was dropped into Yakutsk, Siberia. Originating from a different cultural and geographical spatiotemporality, it fails to comprehend and thus functionally extract data from its environs. In its nauseating and involuntary abstinence from data, it regurgitates functional and discursive data from the past, which came to inform it of the agents it interacted with. This is also a story about a long bus ride.