Anansi is an African trickster figure personified as a spider with human features or vice versa. According to Analytical Psychology, the trickster archetype mediates between everyday awareness and the numinous realms of the unconscious psyche.

Anansi has eight (like the infinity symbol) eyes like there are eight dancers in a typical squared set. This visual endowment grants him many simultaneous perspectives on any situation yielding multidimensional perceptions ranging from the secular to the sacred (like a set of square dancers). Square dance callers (and dancers, too) are tricksters in several respects: they are storytellers, they are creative, they choreograph labyrinthine puzzles, they are practical jokers, and the list goes on.

Square dancing is a unique combination of ethnic dance traditions with contributions from the African, European, and North American continents.

Computational reflection is characteristic of African American culture especially playful riffing, revising, and tinkering toward innovation. “Play-it-by-eye-and-play-it-by-ear” learning and improvisations are at the roots of old-time square dance music and calls performed by pioneering Black musicians. Call and response, sight calling, patter, calls like Birdie in the Cage, and more have characterized the art form for hundreds of years. The math and computing ideas present in the ethnic plaiting of square dance choreography make it a rich ethnocompuational design matrix.

The symmetric geometric choreography is composed flexibly. The calls themselves are composed of procedures and have distinctive properties like names, number of dancers involved, and duration. Each square dance song contains an algorithm ordering the sequence of calls even when composed on-the-fly when sight calling as each call has dancer formation requirements like starting from a line or circle. The paths forming the geometric figures are vectors mutable by linear transformations. These same principles apply to graphic design, motion design, data visualization, data analysis, software development, and quantum computing.

The Eyes of Anansi envision colorful people with fresh ideas elevating the experience and relevance of square dancing and international square dance culture. Square dance choreography is algorithmic and creates beautiful symmetric designs in the paths dancers trace. The modular structure of square dance calls enables them to be purposefully sorted, arranged, and nested to create sophisticated multisensory engagements. This generative matrix of sight, sound, movement, and feeling has far-reaching applications as an aesthetic wrapper around discrete mathematics, algebraic geometry, and computation. It is no coincidence that MIT and Stanford have square dance clubs and callers use group theory and category theory to deepen their appreciation of this inspiring cultural phenomenon.

Dal is a designer and business systems analyst specializing in concept and workflow visualization.

He is a fifth-generation Oregonian of European and African ancestry. His diverse heritage is complemented by (neuro)divergent interests branching from loves of music, dance, visual art, analytical psychology, mathematics, cultural theory, and gardening.

This is a lyric from the song Yellow Rocking created by Eyes of Anansi. It means we find signals where others find noise and communicate the discovered information to the world in Trickster fashion like Mercury, Hermes, Thoth, Raven, Rabbit, and Anansi.

We believe the collaborative togetherness modeled by square dancing combined with the computational know-how made accessible via this robust art form can make critical contributions to the global empowerment of individuals and communities to develop regenerative solutions to climate change.