Ariadne's Thread
By Andres Salas, Garrett Lockhart, and Max Symuleski
Ariadne’s Thread traces the voyage of the Ariadne, a fictive traveling vessel, as it attempts to navigate the Zone, a speculative future-version of our techno-environmental present. Pieced together from audio, video, image and text documentation of the Planetary Futures sites, Ariadne’s Thread offers a complex mapping of these sites and the course themes of extraction, colonialism, and speculation, while refusing any coherent narrative or overarching perspective. Visitors to ariadnesthread.ca will navigate an interactive web-based archive of this documentation embedded in a map of the Zone. Archival content appears in the form of log entries told from the perspective of Ariadne’s crew, which form a shifting, multi-perspective account of the Zone that ultimately explores the ways in which sense, affect and language shape knowledge.
Excerpts from Ariadne's travelogue
As we approach the Zone water flows faster, maps change, land changes, everything does repetitively. We notice we just enter the system. Fears in present time shape it. Each corner of it is a reflection of our own anxieties. Mix sceneries appear in our navigation systems.
Anxiety caused by being lost is causing extra energy consumption; as we take resources to keep operations up, memory interferences become stronger. One would say that our past, our memories are erased as we take from the zone.
Silence levels decreasing as we go through the zone. What we identified as a maze becomes more complex as data coming from our navigation systems is analyzed. How can it be human error?
Contrary to data analysis results, signs collected at different stages indicate we need to head to what seems to be the closer moon; this conclusion has appeared at every test. Why?
At this point it is impossible to recall our own lives. Our memories, just as our feelings, get mixed and share; trauma sharing implies the need to recover and reconstruct the past as a collective experience, making it possible to configure a balanced prediction system.
