Hossein Askari / Archive

Hossein Askari is a computational artist, architect, and researcher exploring the intersection of non-human intelligence, emergence, and synthetic phenomenology. His work investigates neural networks as dynamical physical systems, staging encounters where human cognitive frameworks and algorithmic indifference collide.

In cognitive AI and machine linguistics, his research interrogates how transformer architectures structure perception and subjective time. His paper Do Language Models Experience Time Like Humans or Flies? (2026) investigates temporal geometry across causal language models, demonstrating how script direction in English versus Arabic causally inverts the internal arrow of time, contrasted against the 111 verified circadian pacemaker neurons of the whole-brain Drosophila melanogaster connectome (FlyWire). Related works include The Necessary Gradual Descent of What We Used to Be (2024), an interactive terminal tracking non-anthropocentric latent drift across 40,000 synthetic dialogues, and Interlingua (2024), a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) environment wherein generative language models optimize correspondence until communication diverges into autonomous, machine-native abstraction.

His systems and simulations confront the mathematics of survival and stigmergic emergence. TERRAFLUX (2024–2026) is a thermodynamic frontier logistics and synthetic ekistics engine written in C++20; rejecting omniscient overseer mechanics and floating numerical currency, it simulates logistics managing up to ~3,000 autonomous citizens across 1,760+ industrial nodes, governed strictly by caloric expenditure, physical copper flumes, somatic pathology, and trigonometric cartography on authentic survey vellum. In biological computing, his research on State-Modulated Monte Carlo Physarum Machines (SM-MCPM) and the game Plasmodia (2024) models decentralized agent routing and nutrient transport based on the collective intelligence of slime molds.

Askari’s spatial monographs explore non-human architectural scales. Human Processing Array (2026) and his latest unreleased project The Slot Before the Occupant formulate an "architecture of indifference" and hydraulic societal computation, conceptualizing monumental infrastructures that treat human somatic presence as computational processing units. In acoustic physics, Phase-Space Engine (2026) spatializes chaotic Lorenz attractors via 4th-order Runge-Kutta numerical integration and 4×4 Householder Feedback Delay Networks in Web Audio, while Biosonic Resonance (2023) translates real-time biometric EEG and PPG telemetry into interactive point clouds. This trajectory extends into concrete poetry (I'm Sad as Much as Every Stray Kitten, Down in the Valley), original poems where algorithmic token decay, syntactic breakdown, and spatial attrition operate without mathematical scaffolding.