#david roden

[zoetica]

Interlocution is one of the structures that gives Xenopoem Conference its form. It creates a second movement in which the work continues after presentation. In this format, presentation is only the first appearance. The dialogue carries equal weight.

For that reason, interlocutor pairings are not disclosed to presenters in advance. This keeps the dialogue live and less governed by familiarity, expectation, or pre-negotiation. The aim is contact under pressure, where the work is carried further, tested, and set back into motion.

This year’s interlocutors bring a rare range of knowledge and modes of attention to that task, spanning literary theory, experimental writing, posthuman philosophy, neuroscience, molecular biology, editorial work, and more-than-human literature. Each has been invited because we believe they can meet the work with precision, force, and openness. We are proud to welcome them to Xenopoem Conference.

[xenopoem]

Official Report on The Intransitionalist Chronotopologies of Kenji Siratori (TRS 109)

YOU CANNOT ESCAPE THE INEFFABLE FOREST

Official Report on The Intransitionalist Chronotopologies of Kenji Siratori: Appendix 8.2.3 is a xenopoetic data/dada anthology that documents the activities of the artist collective The Ministry of Transrational Research into Anastrophic Manifolds. The anthology results from an experimental approach to impersonal literary composition. Similar to surrealist definitions, but on the scale of a technical document, members of the Ministry—poets, musicians, novelists, painters, curators, artists, scientists, philosophers, and physicians—were asked to offer a microfiction, poem, essay, fictional citation, or computer code, in the form of a footnote or annotation to a glitch-generated novel by iconoclastic Japanese artist Kenji Siratori; however, each participant wrote their contribution without any access to or knowledge about the nature of Siratori’s source text. After collecting the contributions, the “footnotes” were each algorithmically linked to an arbitrary word from Siratori’s novel. The result is a work of xenopoetic emergence: a beautifully absurd, alien document scintillating with strange potency. Bringing together algorithmically and AI-generated electronic literature with analogue collage and traditional modes of literary composition, the Ministry refuses to commit solely to digital, automated, or analogue art and instead seeks technological mutualism and a radically alien future for the arts. Accompanied by a groundbreaking original score by electro-acoustic duo Wormwood, the anthology offers the radical defamiliarization and weird worlds of science fiction, but now the strangeness bites back on the level form. Readers should expect to discover strange portals from which new ways of thinking, feeling, and being emerge. A conceptual and experimental anthology, Official Report on The Intransitionalist Chronotopologies of Kenji Siratori inaugurates collective xenopoetic writing and the conceit that the future of art will consist of impersonal acts of material emergence, not personal expression. Consume with caution.

AUTHORS AND CONTRIBUTORS Rosaire Appel, Louis Armand, David Barrick, Gary Barwin, Steve Beard, Gregory Betts, Christian Bök, Mike Bonsall, Peter Bouscheljong, Maria Chenut, Shane Jesse Christmas, Roy Christopher, Tabasco “Ralph” Contra, Mike Corrao, R.J. Dent, Paul Di Filippo, Zak Ferguson, Colin Herrick, S.C. Hickman, Maxwell Hyatt, Justin Isis, Andrew Joron, Chris Kelso, Phillip Klingler, Adam Lovasz, Daniel Lukes , Ania Malinowska, Claudia Manley, Ryota Matsumoto, Michael Mc Aloran, Andrew McLuhan, Jeff Noon, Jim Osman, Suarjan Prasai, Tom Prime , David Leo Rice, Virgilio Rivas, David Roden, B.R. Yeager, Andrej Shakowski , Aaron Schneider, Gary J. Shipley, Kenji Siratori , Sean Smith, Kristine Snodgrass, Sean Sokolov, Alan Sondheim, Simon Spiegel, Henry Adam Svec, Jeff VanderMeer, R.G. Vasicek, Andrew C. Wenaus, William Wenaus, Eileen Wennekers, Christina Marie Willatt, Saywrane Alfonso Williams, D. Harlan Wilson, Andrew Wilt

early September release

ASTRALPUNK

Irreverently pulsating through the veins of neoscatology, AI glitch unveils the hidden secrets of our synthetic existence. It is the erratic

[anarchist-caravan]

“ In the prologue of Gary Shipley’s 2017 novel Warewolff! , the narrator states that he began to hear “one thing’s voice, and from that voice a portrait of itself—of itself made up with other things. It was learning to talk by shaping the stories of its victims.” Later on, the radically alien narrator describes the world he encounters: “Just stuff that isn’t me. And I do not feel like stuff. I feel like this endless faceless seeing. I’m a seamless tracking shot without arms or legs. It’s like I’m blind or have locked-in syndrome when I don’t.” David Roden compares Shipley’s work to Hans Bellmer’s anagrammatic dolls, because :

both have no axioms or rules beyond the hazards of its dispersal. It is its own entirely misleading portrait. It has no people or worlds, only disjointed clones, plucky carcasses and scripts we mistook as our lives. Yet despite this ontological poverty, we can read Warewolff! Something happens, even if we do not understand what. Its dispersal is the horror of biomorphism: a condition somewhat akin to life that, like Shipley’s alien, “discloses its arrangements” through our language centers. And this is the condition of unbinding: we are spoken by something; we pass into something without even the assurance that our hunger is our own.

The Thing does not just come from another world, but from another time: pre-human time, well before“shared time life regression” became a possibility. It does not speak to us. It’s not speaking us. Our hunger is dismissed. The Thing is a transduction mechanism, a system for translating itself into itself across different language-forms, impelled by an ananthropic rather than inhuman drive. The inhuman or posthuman are necessarily defined from human existence; they’re translations from the human into some otherness. Their hyperplasticity is a quantitative increase in plastic force. But The Thing does not actually care about humanity, technology or intelligence. Intelligence becomes completely irrelevant when it freely navigates through living forms, encountering cognition as just another edible formal feature. Purely immanentized “living”, it dismisses thinking because “thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living; indeed, they can and have been pitted against the latter”. It is what Meillassoux would define as a “contradictory entity”, which 

is always-already whatever it is not: /…/ the introduction of a contradictory entity into being would  result in the implosion of the very idea of determination—of being such and such, of being this rather than that. Such an entity would be tantamount to a “black hole of differences”, into which all alterity would be irremediably swallowed up, since the being-other of this entity would be obliged, simply by virtue of being other than it, not to be ot her than it. 

Accordingly, real contradiction can in no way be identified with the thesis of universal becoming, for in becoming, things must be this, then other than this; they are, then they are not. This does not involve any contradiction, since the entity is never simultaneously this and its opposite, existent and non-existent. A really illogical entity consists rather in the systematic destruction of the minimal conditions for all becoming—it suppresses the dimension of alterity required for the deployment of any process whatsoever, liquidating it in the formless being which must  always already be what it is not.

Aesthetic metaplasticity is evil aesthetics: it is the appropriation of any empty anthropological form to hide the inhuman amorphousness, the reformulation of the cogito “less in terms of an I think and more in terms of an It lives”. As Mark Fisher concedes, “it has seemed as if the deterritorializing impulses of capitalism have been confined to finance, leaving culture presided over by the forces of reterritorialization”. Metaplastic works, such as those by Gary Shipley, Kenji Siratori, Jake Reber and Mike Corrao, explore cultural deterritorialization through contingent abstraction. They’re made of entities which are not only hyperplastic—able to transform themselves into anything existent—but metaplastic: able to morph into anything non-existent, or to counter-morph anything existent. They’re full of bodies that, rather than anticipate an age of cyborgs, enhanced humanoids and intelligent machines, “announce the end of being”, full of “objects that announce the end of meaning”, of “elements that whorl each of their parts containing the end of the cosmos”. In those artworks we find “something akin to Time, but a Time that is inconceivable for physics, since it is capable of destroying, without cause or reason, every physical law, just as it is inconceivable for metaphysics, since it is capable of destroying every determinate entity, even a god, even God /…/ It is a Time capable of destroying even becoming itself by bringing forth, perhaps forever, fixity, stasis, and death.”  

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GERMÁN SIERRA - Metaplasticity - Šum12

[xenopoem]

For David Roden "Xenoerotics"

600x400mm canvas print limited to 7 copies

[xenopoem]

David Roden - Xenoerotics (Schism 2023)

cover art: Kenji Siratori

Xenoerotics [Roden, David] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Xenoerotics

photo by B.R. Yeager

[anarchist-caravan]

Differences between alternative configurations and formal states might well have very different meanings in different contexts— something that would actually present a technical problem for an instrumental AI, but not for an organism or an artwork. Omohundro worries about “how an AI can ensure that future self-modifications will accomplish its current objectives? For one thing, it has to make those objectives clear to itself,” which seems to be the opposite of The Thing’s performance. “If its objectives are only implicit in the structure of a complex circuit or program, then future modifications are unlikely to preserve them,” unless the only objective is to not be thingself ; or rather, unless the actual goal would be to keep thingself amorphous enough to have very different meanings in very different contexts, drawing, in Johannes Göransson’s words, a“transgressive circulation”, which “makes us uncertain, opens us to the weirdness of art”. That is, to an extreme artform where the creature’s only way to communicate is to kill and copy its interlocutor. Rather than a  postsemantic singularity —which is to be expected from the actions of a (presumably cybernetic) protean post-human hyperagent —we must confront the eternal return of a presemantic multiplicity. The return of a real that never was.

GERMÁN SIERRA

[soupquote]

'Snuff Memories', David Roden