bankoo (n. mandinka) land, country, soil, nation. Ñiη bankoo maη wara. This country is not big.

Bass Blood and The Songlines

Back in 2019 I made Bass Blood, a mixed media piece that took inspiration from the songlines and that expressed the role of music in my journey through the urban territory of Bogotá. However, at that moment, I did not do a very deep reading about the term itself.

More recently, around August this year (2022) I tried to find and acquire all the books I had on my waiting list. The Songlines by Bruce Chawtin was one of them. Reading it opened my mind to a wider understanding of the term. People in Australia not only use songlines to guide themselves through the land; their reality, their being, and their social dynamics are build and shaped by them. Moreover, song and language are creative mediums and a point of connection between different planes of existence.

By singing the world into existence, he said, the Ancestors had been poets in the original sense of 'poesis', meaning 'creation'. No Aboriginal could conceive that the created world was in any way imperfect. His religious life had a single aim: to keep the land the way it was and should be. The man who went 'Walkabout' was making a ritual journey. He trod in the footprints of his Ancestor. He sang the Ancestor's stanzas without changing a word or note - and so recreated the Creation. (Bruce Chawtin, 'The Songlines', 1987)

N'Ko and the Manding Continuum

After my September exploration of the Thaana script from the Maldives I started doing some research on the next block in the Basic Multilingual Plane of the Unicode standard: Nko (U+07C0..U+07FF). Coincidentally this happened at the same time as I was finishing Bruce Chawtin's book and, coincidentally, this script has a special relationship with the land.

I will not tell the whole story of creation of the script as it is detailed in its Wikipedia page and various books and articles from Dianne White Oyler —I recommend the article The N'ko Alphabet as a Vehicle of Indigenist Historiography, originally published in the Cambridge University Press' History in Africa Vol. 24 (1997) which can be read here—, but I will highlight how Solomana Kanté, its creator, and early users of the script linked language and the living/inhabiting/traveling of a territory.

From the Dianne White Oyler article mentioned before:

After developing the alphabet, he [Kanté] called together children and adult illiterates and asked them to draw a line in the dirt; seven out of ten drew the line from right to left. In his efforts to make the alphabet easy to learn and easy to use, he chose a right to left orientation when writing in the alphabet (p. 246)

Many of the initial students of N'ko were merchants who carried the new alphabet with them along the trade routes to the farthest reaches of Mande-speaking West Africa. (p. 246)

It is impossible to estimate the number of people that one N'ko teacher could affect during his travels throughout the Mande-speaking world. An example of how this process worked, however, can be seen in the history of one individual informant. Although not a merchant, this informant made varied contacts and possessed information on the status of Nko in distant places. The informant said that he learned N'ko in Kissidougou and had taught it at Koumban, Kankan and Faranah, in Haute-Guinée and in Mali, in the cercles of Kaaba and Sibi. (...) He deposited the seeds of N'ko over a large portion of the Mande-speaking world. (p. 247)

Kanté spent much of his life traveling throughout the Mande world gathering knowledge about healing techniques and plants that produced medicines. He compiled a book of pharmacopoeia that Mande healers use to treat illneses. (p. 249)

The N'ko script is a writing system for the Mande languages, specifically the Manding languages of West Africa —more about the classification of the Mande-speaking world here—. I was surprised to discover that this group of languages is a dialect continuum: a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varieties may not be.

Firstly because the name sounds like a time-bending physics theory and secondly because it's a term in-between geography and linguistics, a concept between land and word. And although it seems like the spacial treatment of linguistic processes has its critics, the field is an exciting approach to language that allows us to find awesome imagery like this, this and this.

v1: collage

With all these concepts and ideas in my mind, I began the creation of a generative piece. At first, the shapes, the colors, and the mix of symbols and land drawing in map imagery had a very strong influence on me, so I decided to do generative collage mixing N'Ko words and map cuts.

But after some days of cutting and saving map pieces, I realized:

• For me collage is more a spontaneous and intuitive action than a methodical activity.
• I couldn't find a way to mix the N'Ko script with the maps cuts in a way that it could be the protagonist but still could blend with the land.
• The fx(hash) 30mb upload limit won't let me include all the map cuts I would like.

So...I'll do generative collage some day for sure but not for this project.

v2: cables.gl patch

I decided to start fresh with a different tool, keeping the influence of map imagery but with a clear goal of creating land that blends with the glyphs of the N'Ko script. Using cables.gl I created a patch that can be described in two parts:

• It creates procedural terrains with a chain of different kinds of noise following this useful blog post by Josh Klint .
• It creates N'Ko strings made from 8 random letters.

The patch blends them and continuously reveals a new string combination. This way, the word affects and reshapes land in an eternal cycle.

As a plus, the user can change the view using the keys from 1 to 4 and, as a plus-plus, the user can save a black and white image from the terrain using the S key to use it as a height map or to listen to it using Pixelsynth (a tribute to the songlines).

Final words:

Maybe I'll try to mix the cables patch with the Pixelsynth code as an experiment. For now, this has been a fun end-of-year project. I need a rest from the BLOCKZ so we'll see when I get back for a new glyphs adventure.

Thanks for reading! ⛰️