Non-human Poetry: Eighty Days
POETRY
Non-human Poetry: Eighty Days
Written in Collaboration with a Digital Location Application
by Marilyn Allen
Enable jets aura
Bikes reshape decisive
Dialect songs demoted
Fewest reform scar
Rounds flyover audiobooks
Panting equipment wishing
Revealing voted dusty
Tolerable shipped clutter
Touchy evoke encoding
Shade rally port
Rope invoices burden
Rockets travels working
Zombies purples pictures
Bags energy shakes
Leave target paths
Blip unattached saved
Dragon baggage diggers
Dogs motion device
Foster cities wallet
Wipes melt lend
Reflections attends burning
Even bless doll
Wins drums juror.
‘Eighty Days’ is a poem written in collaboration with the digital location application what3words – a geocode system designed to identify any location with a resolution of approximately three metres. what3words has divided the earth into a grid of 3-by-3-metre squares and encoded these geographic coordinates with three-word combinations. ‘Eighty Days’ was generated by inputting the travel destinations of Jules Verne’s fictional protagonist Phileas Fogg, thus engendering a socio-digital collaborative process. (Around the World in Eighty Days was chosen for its inherent association with global travel and as a subtle reference to the cultural shift from Phileas Fogg’s movement via mechanided systems to the contemporary potential for digital nomadism). Performance philosopher Laura Cull suggests that we typically use the term collaboration to refer to working with other people, however, Cull extends the concept of collaboration to include non-human collaborators. She proposes that;
we expand our idea of collaboration beyond any necessary constraint to working with knowing, intentional or rational others and to include our openness to being altered by the other material bodies involved in our processes.1
Enable jets aura
When working with non-human collaborators we are, perhaps inadvertently, establishing a mode of practice in which the cultural privilege afforded to human authorship is reoriented to formulate a new collaborative paradigm. The use of AI and digital applications, such as what3words, has engendered an anomalous alliance between human and digital subjects wherein language is not simply mediated by technology, but transformed and intensified by it. The atypical use of what3words to generate poetry has inevitably enacted a transformation of the poetic tradition, notably enacting a shift from the established rhythms of sonnets, haikus, and limericks, et al. to the mechanical pace of the application’s three-word system.
Bikes reshape decisive
Rather than perceiving technology as exterior to the human subject, ‘Eighty Days’ explores the phenomenon of the digital as a prosthesis. A cursory consideration of the neologism ‘digital-prosthesis’ may situate digital technologies as supplementary to the human subject, however, poststructuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida’s theorisation of the supplement (Of Grammatology, 1967), affords digitality significant agency within this socio-digital configuration. A supplement is generally perceived to be something secondary, serving as an addition; Derrida proposes that nothing complete can be added to and therefore suggests the notion of an originary lack2 in supposedly present phenomena. The supplement (in this context the digital) does not replace the existing system (human authorship) but rather compels that system to adapt to its presence, and it is this adaptive response that results in the production of difference. Difference is understood in this context as the implementation of new processes in literary composition and the subsequent production of new textual rhythms. Although difference is articulated in this poetic experiment through a constraint-based process, the impact of technology on poetry and discourses of difference must acknowledge that the gatekeepers of technology are still predominantly white Western males (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, et al.), and the gatekeepers of contemporary avant-garde poetry are also predominantly white Western males (Kenneth Goldsmith, Craig Dworkin, Christian Bök, et al.). As such, new technological knowledge systems may be predisposed to purport outdated social, cultural and political biases.
Dialect songs demoted
Derrida writes that “The supplement and the turbulence of a certain lack fracture the limit of the text, forbidding an exhaustive and closed formalization of it.”3 The Derridean critique of logocentrism is integrally linked to the supplement through the suggestion that a dominant ideology is always subject to a process of supplementation and deferral.
Fewest reform scar
Mobile technologies are theoretical and physical prostheses, devices designed to exist in close proximity to the human body. American poet Kenneth Goldsmith writes that:
There was a time when the divide between being online and off was clear. It used to be that when I was online, I was sitting at my desk, tied to a computer. During that time, I was clearly online. When I was done, I’d shut down my computer and take a walk around the block, being clearly offline. Today, I don’t leave my house without a device; I’m still online when I take my walk around the block, smartphone in hand, at once straddling the physical and the virtual.4
Rounds flyover audiobooks
Mobile technologies have engendered a complex relationship between humans and digital phenomena; the intimacies of touch and swipe are intensified through the interplay of knowledge systems, wherein “the production of meaning in the process of signification is continually deferred and supplemented in the play of more-than-one.”5 The play of more-than-one is implicit in all collaborative practice, whether in the archetypal artist-to-artist configuration or, in the context of ‘Eighty Days’, a human-digital configuration.
Panting equipment wishing
All forms of collaboration may be considered to indirectly engage in a critique of the artist as a romanticized figure producing internal, autonomous expressions. Eighty Days is a reimagining of artistic identity; from the solitary figure of the poet and resultant monologic text to a processual work of fiction generated through an oscillating assemblage of human and digital subjects.
Revealing voted dusty
The combination of words and textual rhythms in ‘Eighty Days’ are unlikely to have been generated in an exclusively human or an exclusively digital authorial system, thus, the digital application’s transposition of a fictional journey (that of Phileas Fogg), articulated by a human subject (Jules Verne), speaks of the possibility for new narrative flows to be generated in a socio-digital paradigm. To acknowledge the interrelation between humans and machines as collaboration is an attempt to deconstruct the assumption that humans communicate, and machines mediate. In the process of writing ‘Eighty Days’, human authorship – perceived as the dominant language –, is unsettled and the tangibility of a human-digital alliance performed.
Tolerable shipped clutter
The knowledge-configurations produced by our algorithmic others do not necessarily produce logical narratives but rather elucidate the potential for new rhythms to be produced.
Touchy evoke encoding
These divergent linguistic associations do not always proffer coherent sentences but alternatively explore the conversions and translations that successively disrupt the materiality of narrative information in a post-digital context.
Shade rally port
‘Eighty Days’ is a work echoing the ethos of the OuLiPo group, a collective of writers, poets and mathematicians, who rejected ideologies of inspiration and expression, and alternatively developed the concept of systematic writing.
Rope invoices burden
‘Eighty Days’ enacts a systematic method of composition. It is a textual event situated at the intersection between a work of fiction, the human and the algorithmic subject. The production of this poem is an exploration of the emerging relationship between poetic writing and digital technology, traversing the theoretical landscape of Gregory Ulmer’s electracy: a neologism synthesising literacy, Derrida’s trace and the electronic. Ulmer writes that: “What literacy is to the analytical mind, electracy is to the affective body: a prosthesis that enhances and augments […] organic human potential.”6 ‘Eighty Days’ is an act of co-production between the human and the digital, a poetic event that reconsiders technology as a ‘knowledge source’ rather than simply a ‘knowledge channel’.
Rockets travels working
When vocalising digital texts, texts that typically lack the syntactic regularities of conventionally authored scripts,
Zombies purples pictures
human subjects intuitively attempt to inflect their performance with the rhythmic stresses and modulations associated with poetic form; however, when performing ‘Eighty Days’, the human voice inevitably oscillates between a human understanding of poetic pace, and the machinic rhythm of the application’s three-word system.
Bags energy shakes
American poet and critic Kenneth Goldsmith’s hypothesis that any text can take on poetic value (a proposition explored in ‘Eighty Days’) is exemplified in his 2014 reading of an American newspaper, a journalistic narrative re-orientated to inhabit a poetic space.7 In ‘Eighty Days’, a digital location application is reorientated to produce a new system of writing, a collaborative system (comprising human and digital subjects) with the potential to generate socio-digital literature that complicates and augments a contemporary comprehension of textuality; an existentialist poem for the post-digital age.
Leave target paths
In The Piecemeal Bard Is Deconstructed: Notes Toward a Potential Robopoetics, Christian Bök writes that “The involvement of an author in the production of literature has henceforth become discretionary. Why hire a poet to write a poem when the poem can in fact write itself?”8
Blip unattached saved
Kenneth Goldsmith notably made the following statement in relation to his creative practice: “I used to be an artist; then I became a poet; then a writer. Now when asked, I simply refer to myself as a word processor.”9 In the production of ‘Eighty Days’, I assume the role of data processor, processing the travel destinations of Verne’s fictional protagonist.
Dragon baggage diggers
The procedural poetics of ‘Eighty Days’ is a convergence of biological and technological forces, a postdigital coupling akin to Donna Haraway’s companion species: “Telling a story of co-habitation, co-evolution, and embodied cross-species sociality.”10
Dogs motion device
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari speak of ‘cut-flows’ and ‘break-flows’, trajectories that are interrupted via their relation to other machines. Every connection between desiring machines is a disruption and every disruption permits a further connective flow. Interruption in the context of a desiring-machine is not the negation of an existent trajectory but the relation between conjunctive and disjunctive forces. Desiring-machines are autopoietic multiplicities, fragments without totality that produce cuts in the flow of matter. They are machines used in a contrary way to their preconceived function.11 The ‘Eighty Days’ poem exceeds the function of both the fiction novel machine and the what3words machine and subsequently confounds the paradigm of authorial contrivance.
Foster cities wallet
‘Eighty Days’ is perhaps best described as a parapoetic gesture. As poet Steve McCaffery suggests, it is “Deracinated and detached from poetics proper.”12 Parapoetics is not the poet’s facility for invention or the intentional digression from tradition but the aleatoric gesture of language and its relations.
Wipes melt lend
When I speak the poem’s three-word rhythms,
Reflections attends burning
I am reminded of Mladen Dolar’s text A Voice and Nothing More where he writes that “Every emission of the voice is by its very essence ventriloquism.”13 When ‘Eighty Days’ is spoken the human body becomes a machine to speak the digital, a practice I name posthuman ventriloquation.
Even bless doll
The three-word rhythms produced by the ‘Eighty Days’ socio-digital machine enact a syncopated play of coherence and disjunction, staccato sentences that emerge as patterns and structures against the foreground of local incoherence, obfuscating referential narrative in favour of paratactic textual events.
Wins drums juror.
MARILYN ALLEN is an artist and writer (understood as coexistent and coextensive practices). Allen contemplates the potential for new narrative flows (both actual and potential) to be produced through deconstructive processes which unsettle the perceived fixity of writing, with specific emphasis on the oscillating dynamic between human and digital phenomena.
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Edited by FLORA SAGERS
Proofreading by JOSH WEEKS
Lead image by Roke via Wikimedia Commons.
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