D. radiodurans fluorescing with mCherry, the segment of genomic mutation which evokes the rosy glow of the poems’ dialogue. Courtesy of the artist.

Elisabeth Sweet: The Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice remains central to The Xenotext. Different versions of the story have persisted over time, so can you please recount the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in your own words very briefly?

Christian Bök: Mourning the demise of the nymphet Eurydice (killed by a viper), the herdboy Orpheus descends into the Underworld, striving to rescue her from the kingdom of Death, all the while using his songs to quell the dangers en route. And while leading her home, he suffers doubt that she follows him across the threshold into Life, and because he looks back, he loses her forever, squandering his chance at salvation. The sorrow of Orpheus (after this forfeiture) so offends the witches of Dionysus that they dismember him during their bacchanals. The story perhaps provides an allegory about the failure of poetry to bring the dead back to life, suggesting that poetry can serve only as inadequate expression of grief in the face of such a failure.

E: You cite William S. Burroughs’ famous aphorism, “Language is a virus from outer space” in the book, and theVERSEverse has lifted this aphorism for the title of the exhibition. What can you tell us about the influence of this line by Burroughs, or perhaps his work more broadly, upon the overall concept of The Xenotext?

C: William S. Burroughs provides a paranoid statement about language, suggesting that it might, in fact, be something ‘alien,’ a viroidal parasite that has colonized our brains, transforming them into organs for its own reproduction, evolving for its own sake, with instincts separated from the interests of its ‘host.’ The Xenotext has, likewise, hijacked the biogenetic mechanisms of a deathless bacterium, implanting a package of ‘alien words’ into the genome of a life-form so that it becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also an operant machine for writing a poem in response — a poem that can literally survive forever. I have, in effect, created a work of ‘living poetry,’ whose words can literally reprogram the behaviour of living things.

E: Has your perception of The Xenotext changed with the reception of the works created for the Special Edition by your peers, nine of whom we are celebrating in this exhibition?

C: The Xenotext probably transcends my own attitudes about it, since the work now has a ‘life of its own’ (so to speak) — and I can never predict how a work might find its audience in the world. I think that, given the heroism of this project in the face of the vast odds against its fulfilment, I might have created a canonically significant work of art (one that has the capacity to inspire the ambitions of other poets), and I feel gratified to know that peers have taken inspiration from my perseverance. A work of art might depend upon its own viroidal capacity to ‘influence’ the minds of others, causing them to add value to the work by commemorating it — and I like to think that the nine contributors to this exhibition might help to make the work even more ‘infectious.’

‘The Fay Imp in All Living Things’ depicts a colony of D. radiodurans, fluorescing with a ‘rosy glow’ under the influence of ‘The Xenotext.’ Courtesy of the artist.

E: With The Xenotext, you have effectively implanted a virus (language) into a bacterium (D. radiodurans), which does not easily evolve, because it resists mutation, repairing damage to its own DNA very rapidly. But with your chromosomal implantation, the behaviour of the bacterium changes, responding to the poetry by emitting a rosy glow. So I wonder: could this poem be a forcing function for the bacteria’s evolution?

C: You have asked a very incisive question. I have chosen D. radiodurans as the ‘host’ for my poem, in part, because the ability of the germ to repair its own DNA makes the germ a durable archive. I have designed a viable, benign protein that might persist long enough in the cell for the poem to remain both detectable and isolatable, before the cell metabolizes it. I do not yet know if this protein offers any ‘benefit’ to the survival of the organism (albeit such a benefit seems unlikely) — and in any case, drift in the replication of the gene can degrade the integrity of the poem over time (perhaps causing the germ to evolve back to its ‘normal,’ wilder state); nevertheless, this process is likely to be very slow, given these biogenetic mechanisms of repair.

E: How does The Xenotext engage with the generative dimension of genetics?

C: The Xenotext resembles an algorithm (written according to a set of restrictive constraints, all of which allow the poem not only to survive in a living microbe, but also to produce a viable protein). The poem becomes what it says that it does. When the organism generates the protein that enciphers a text, whose first lines say: ‘The faery is rosy/ of glow’ — the organism glows in response, fluorescing rubescently, like the ‘faery’ described in the poem itself. The work establishes a dialogue between the genetic code and an English text – and the sheer scale of the strictures upon such a dialogue might make this work one of the most stringently constrained poems ever written. A gene is, in effect, a kind of poem that makes life live.

‘Protein 13’ depicts the pliant ribbon for the sequence of 140 amino acids that encode the poem ‘Eurydice’ from ‘The Xenotext.’ Courtesy of the artist.

E: In the book, you write that there exist 7,905,853,580,625 encipherments of the English alphabet, from which you might have derived The Xenotext (and almost all of these ciphers result in absolute nonsense). You have, in fact, found the only encipherment that can make a pair of eloquent poems. Are you the progenitor or the discoverer of them?

C: The Xenotext partakes of some spookiness. The chances of these two poems arising from the constraint fall within the range of one in eight trillion — odds that might rival the chance of any planets hosting life, like ours, among the billions of stars in the galaxy. As far as we can tell, only our planet among the trillions of likely worlds seems to harbour any poetry at all — and for this reason my two poems provide an allegory for the anomaly of such an occurrence, replicating the cosmic rarity of life itself. I might note that the odds of finding a protein that can encode the second sonnet remain even more colossally improbable. I have not written these poems so much as I have derived them, finding them, hidden with the rules that govern our biochemistry.

E: We have discussed how the Earth might be either a lone culture left to itself in the cosmos or a late culture among many potentially adversarial civilizations, stealthy and watchful. A host of questions about readership and the relevance of poetry written by humanity arise in these speculations — and since The Xenotext addresses the role that poetry might play in the deep time of the cosmos, what becomes of the reader? Does a poem simply need to exist to matter, or must it be read and by whom?

C: The Xenotext takes some of its inspiration from Voyager 1 — the space probe that has left the imperium of the Sun, bearing a golden record that features an anthology of sounds and images from the heritage of our species. I regard this object as the most important of all artifacts ever made by us — and yet its contents might go unread for the lifetime of the universe. I believe that, if a poem needs a reader to matter, then every poem must, perforce, already matter, because every poem has at least one reader — i.e. the writer, appraising the work after completing it. I think that, in the case of The Xenotext, I aspire to have a ‘thinkership,’ in which no one needs to read my work — but everyone must, nevertheless, admit to its significance.

E: How do you think “beings” in the future might decode and then peruse The Xenotext?

C: The Xenotext might resemble a sphinx carved from a black block of granite in the desert, like a cenotaph bedecked with hieroglyphs that no one can understand — and yet, even though no readers might decode these messages, the craftsmanship of the work testifies to the intelligence of the maker. The future aliens who might listen to the golden record on Voyager 1 are going to learn much about us without ever having to ‘understand’ what we say. I think that I have left a lot of evidence in the genome of D. radiodurans to testify to the ‘artificiality’ of the organism — and if any hierophants of the future discover it, the fact that such a monument even exists at such a small scale already says much about the mind that has preceded their minds.

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Visit the exhibition The Xenotext: “language is a virus” on objkt

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Christian Bök is the author of ‘Eunoia’ (2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has won the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. After 25 years of effort, Bök has completed ‘The Xenotext’ — a project that requires him to encipher a poem into the genome of a bacterium capable of surviving in any inhospitable environment. Bök is a Fellow in the Royal Society of Canada, and he teaches at Leeds Beckett University.

Elisabeth Sweet is a poet exploring patterns of randomness. Her practice infuses ritual with critique on contemporary society, namely the forfeiture of attention in return for convenience. She leads communications and production at theVERSEverse, a digital poetry gallery where poem = work of art. Elisabeth’s poetry has been exhibited in London, New York City, and Paris, with a solo show in Berlin. She publishes weekly writings to her Substack, Species of Value.

With My Back to the World (cover)

Elisabeth Sweet: Where did the motivation for the poem visualizations come from? Was there a poem or one of Agnes’ paintings in particular that catalyzed the creative undertaking of these accompanying works?

Victoria Chang: Once I finished writing the poems in conversation with Agnes Martin and On Kawara’s artwork and writings, I didn’t feel truly “finished” conversing with these artists. I had an impulse to occlude the poems themselves, I’m not sure why, but perhaps because ultimately language feels inadequate to me to get at some of the things I was exploring in my poems. Perhaps mark-making through language wasn’t enough so I began to mark-make more in Martin and Kawara’s language which were more like strokes.

“Untitled #5, 1998” by Victoria Chang

“Happiness (from Innocent Love Series, 1999)” by Victoria Chang

“Perfect Happiness (from Innocent Love Series, 1999)” by Victoria Chang

E: Lines create a sense of security and expectation that allow minds and bodies to move and express freely within recognized boundaries. Later in life, Agnes spoke of living “above the line” always and not going “below the line for anything,” which you quote directly in “Perfect Happiness (from Innocent Love Series, 1999).” Yet, it seems that in life some lines are meant to be crossed, or at the very least examined from different sides in order to live at all. Throughout the process of writing this book and creating the poem visualizations, did you feel as though you were crossing lines, either self-established or imposed by others, even Agnes?

V: I think what Agnes Martin is saying is that she was at a different place when making those pieces such as “Perfect Happiness.” I’m not sure if the lines move or we move or both, but nothing is ever static. I think Martin’s work shows this transformation. For example, I think while I was writing the book, I was definitely below the line, to use Martin’s terminology. But years later, I am currently “above the line,” and perhaps working on that book helped shift my psyche above the line.

from “Today” by Victoria Chang

E: Can you tell us a bit about the process and intent behind redacting certain days in the visualizations for “Today” (Jan.8.2022, Jan.22.2022, Feb.6.2022)? Does redaction signal a heavier weight felt on those days or perhaps suggest events or experiences more private occurred? I cannot help but notice that on Feb.17.2022 the word “blossoms” burst through the dark.

V: I’m not sure, honestly. I think your guess is a good one. I think the act of erasure is the continued exploration of the inadequacies of language, like I mentioned above, perhaps a way of saying language is insufficient in the end, but perhaps the process was important for exploring some of the more difficult emotions I was exploring such as sadness, grief, mortality.

– – –

Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems is With My Back to the World, published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the U.S. and Corsair/Little Brown in the U.K. It received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection. A few of her other books include The Trees Witness Everything, OBIT, and Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. She has written several children’s books as well. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.

theVERSEverse has curated Victoria’s work into two seminal exhibitions: POÈME SBJKT, an exhibition of literary arts held in Paris at Librairie Métamorphoses, and FeralVerse, the first exhibition of poetry on Feral File. in POÈME SBJKT, Victoria showed “2022 #1” her collaboration with Dianna Frid, a work which emerged from Victoria + Dianna’s shared interest in the obituary form and its potentials. the physical manifestation exhibited in Paris while digitized + minted versions of the work can be found on objkt: “2022 #1, Folio 1“, “2022 #1, Folio 2“, “2022 #1, Folio 3“. in FeralVerse, our team invited Alexandra Crouwers to visually + sonically interpret Victoria’s poem “Some Last Questions” which you can watch here.

Elisabeth Sweet is a poet exploring patterns of randomness whose work has been exhibited in Berlin, New York, and Paris. She is a core member of theVERSEverse, leading communications and conversations with poets + artists breaking ground in the digital. find her on socials @speciesofvalue.

read INVISIBLE VALENCE, the second movement of encapsuled: var(semic) below.

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Elisabeth Sweet (ES): in this conversation, we’ve explored the illusion of randomness, the miscalculation of newness, and the incoherence of miracles. still, these three propositions – randomness, newness, and miracles – maintain a firm grip on the human mind. the fear or yearning for some random event to change one’s life, the revelatory impact of experiencing something new, and faith in the occurrence and possibility of miracles serve as conscious guides to life, singularly or in combination.

randomness, newness, and miracles all carry a tremendous amount of uncertainty, but not necessarily doubt. Hume argues vividly against the tyrannical doubt which Skeptics hold dear, and Wittgenstein sums up the cruelty of doubt (through the English of G.E.M. Anscombe): “Just try — in a real case — to doubt someone else’s fear or pain.”

what makes uncertainty a better philosophical guide than doubt?

Michelangelo (M): the two phenomena are quite similar, as they both refer to a lack of knowledge about something, some missing associations between perceptions we had or between a perception and its context. with both, our mind does not have a path and it’s working hard to create one.

the main difference between doubt and uncertainty is our inclination to form the path. in the case of uncertainty, we want to create it, while in the case of doubt, we are more inclined to reject it. so uncertainty is the result of an open attitude while doubt is a reflection of our inclination to stick to our current paths.

in this light, uncertainty is decidedly a better philosophical guide as it’s more adaptive and makes us incorporate new inputs, resulting in more complete and malleable theories and less dogmatic beliefs.

ES: in “Of Standards of Taste” (1757), Hume writes, “The object of eloquence is to persuade, of history to instruct, of poetry to please by means of the passions and the imagination.” eloquence, history, and poetry are transmitted through embodied language, spoken and written.

in Philosophical Investigations (1953) Wittgenstein (through the English of Anscombe) writes: “It would never have occurred to us to think that we felt the influence of the letters on us when reading, if we had not compared the case of letters with that of arbitrary marks. And here we are indeed noticing a difference. And we interpret it as the difference be- tween being influenced and not being influenced.”

asemic writing may be defined as a mix of symbols and lines written without meaning, or even perhaps as “arbitrary marks,” as Wittgenstein describes above. as your practice is heavily rooted in the asemic, and considering the statement and sentiment of Wittgenstein alongwith the significance inculcated by Hume, what is the influence of “arbitrary marks” where one might expect a codified language?

M: it’s all about the significance of the marks. a symbol is something that stands for something else, and one needs a way to decode the symbol to understand what it stands for. in the case of arbitrary marks there is no decoding possible, and so the marks are not symbols and as Wittgenstein points out they cannot influence us.

when asemic writing is used how I use it, the decoding is not explicit, but possible. there is an intent in my creative process, an idea behind the order that can be found. this makes my asemic marks symbols. in action painting, for example a painting by Pollock, there is no idea or order, hence nothing to decode. it simply is and it doesn’t stand for something else, so it cannot be a symbol.

asemic writing invites the viewer to decode in private. the endeavor activates their imagination, which is often sleeping, and they complete the process by returning to the original message, finishing the art- work themselves.

ES: “Beauty, whether moral or natural, is felt, more properly than perceived,” writes Hume in the final section of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). nine years later, Hume writes, “Beauty is no quality in things themselves.” beauty felt may be followed with the hope of making its impression indelible on the mind, body, or soul. whether we develop an affinity or a fear, as Rainer Maria Rilke writes of the terror born in beauty, it may be said that we are guided by what creates a sense of beauty within us. 

I cannot help but connect beauty in this context to intuition: the feeling of knowing what is right or wrong without evidence stronger than an internal sense. intuition is our greatest guide through uncertainty. of intuition, Wittgenstein (through Anscombe) writes, “If intuition is an inner voice—how do I know how I am to obey it? And how do I know that it doesn’t mislead me? For if it can guide me right, it can also guide me wrong.” Wittgenstein highlights how challenging it can be to hear and follow one’s intuition, if in fact it is a source of deep knowing.

if beauty only exists in the mind of the perceiver, might uncertainty bear the same weight? is uncertainty, like beauty, more properly felt than perceived, thus exerting its influence more on our senses rather than on reality?

M: our senses and reality can never be separated, together they form our experience, so what influences one inevitably influences the other. we can never be in contact with the naked reality, it always comes to us through a lens and with a context.

uncertainty in particular is subjective as it pertains to a judgement we make towards some perception – we are not certain of what will happen next. it may be because the context is not familiar or because our senses are not receiving the expected inputs. a missing path that is not within reality itself but in our mind.

beauty is very similar, as it’s a judgment we make pertaining to a specific object or experience. while there may be some generic property that is often associated with beauty, I’d argue that it’s a result of our previous experiences. we are taught from the very beginning of our life what is beautiful and what is not, and our concept of beauty evolves in response to our experiences.

ES: what is the sound when a mind transitions from uncertainty to certainty?

encapsuled:

– – –

read the first and second movements of encapsuled:var(semic) here.

read ONLY MIRACULOUS, the second movement of encapsuled: var(semic) below.

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Elisabeth Sweet (ES): if proximity and repetition guide our perception, it might be said that something familiar is an impression held close and repeated often. thus some- thing unfamiliar would be far away and infrequently experienced, if ever. we can explain the familiar while the unfamiliar is unexplainable. that which is unexplainable is typically dismissed, feared, or revered. why does the unexplained – the unfamiliar, the far and infrequent – intrigue a human mind so set on pattern-seeking?

Michelangelo (M): exactly because it breaks the pattern. when the unexpected happens, it means that our system failed to predict the course of events, it made an error. errors are fatal in evolution: what cannot adapt perishes. so it’s critical for us to take into account this new piece of information – the unexplained – and explain it, incorporating it in our realm of possibilities so that we are not taken again by surprise. fear and reverence are opposite ends emotionally but they share the same high intensity, reflecting the importance of this new information.

however, incorporating new information means that we need to restructure our system and that is very hard to do, often even traumatic. so rather than going through this process, an easier answer is denial, dismissing the possibility of our system being wrong. this can be useful to preserve some coherence in times when our system is already challenged but usually leads to less adaptation – and adaptation is necessary for existence.

ES: part of the seduction of a miracle is that it can never be proven, yet this uncertainty is what gives it the strength to withstand reason. miracles rely on human testimony, which Hume says is something we can never fully believe because “it is nothing strange that men should lie in all ages,” yet it is the central thing we hold when considering history. miracles are used to codify religion and create an aura of sanctity around people and objects, yet their persistence throughout history points to a real impression – therefore a perceivable truth – experienced by one or many. when can we know if something is “only marvellous, [or] really miraculous”?

M: miracles are a specific category of facts. facts are quite complex phenomenons: they cannot determine themselves, facts require explanation, interpretation. there is always a context associated with a fact and the context is what determines the meaning of the fact and its truth or falsity. for example, what does “coming back to life” mean?

to answer, even literally and not metaphorically, we need to define what “life” is. every time a human interacts with another, they share parts of them- selves that become part of each other. these parts remain even after the physical death and inform our decisions, our actions, our future. “coming back to life” can mean that the influence a person has on us becomes stronger.

language requires definition, definitions are made by humans, humans necessarily have a specific context. “only marvellous” or “really miraculous” are subjective lenses applied to an objective fact, remembering that a fact can never be observed without a lens.

ES: Wittgenstein writes much about the “ostensive definition” of words, or what a word points to in reality. one might think of this as the role of the word. what is the role of “miracle” in lan- guage and subsequently in society?

M: ostensive definitions work when the par- ties involved understand the category that is being talked about – referring back to the blue walnut example, if I point to it and say “blue” to someone who does not know English, they might think that “blue” refers to the type of nut and not to the color. it’s important that the people in dialogue are in agreement on the category that is being talked about, and I think that a misalignment in categories is often the problem.

a group of people may think “miracle” as “act of God(s)” while others may think about it as “something unexplainable”. but these two categories are radically different, for one implies the existence of at least one superior being and the other not. I think that “miracle” is a polarizing word and as such should be used carefully, thinking about the tension mentioned earlier.

ES: fusing Wittgenstein and Hume, a miracle is “a proposition” in “violation of the laws of human nature.” to believe a miracle, one must suspend their continuous impression of reality and allow an anomalous category of facts to become the pattern. if a person did not witness the miracle directly, then they place belief in the testimony of others, which amounts to agreement with the language used to express an impression or experience.

Hume says testimony is a challenge because men lie while Wittgenstein might say that even the testimony, because of its root in language, hides the reality or essence of the event. yet despite argument and disagreement, miracles and their claim persist throughout history, demonstrating the strength of their proposition and thus the power of their original and continuous impression. what might we call a miracle everyone agrees on?

encapsuled:

– – –

read the first and third movements of encapsuled:var(semic) here.

read PARSING PATTERNS, the second movement of encapsuled: var(semic) below.

– – –

Elisabeth Sweet (ES): in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), David Hume writes, “Every idea is copied from some pre- ceding impression of sentiment; and where we cannot find any impression, we may be certain that there is no idea.” how do you think about randomness in this context?

Michelangelo (M): I’m aligned with Hume. all we know is due to our previous impressions, what we call perceptions in the modern context. without perception there is nothing, and yet from connecting perceptions we can form new ideas. so, nothing is ever really new or random. every individual will necessarily evolve and move through space and time as a result of all previous experiences. it’s much like seeded randomness in generative art: not true randomness but only apparent.

in generative art, what usually happens is that the artist crafts an algorithm with some parameters that have a degree of freedom, which is a complex way of saying “a set of choices”. to go from the algorithm to a specific output (often called “iteration”), choices need to be made. that’s normally the job of the seed. given a specific seed the algorithm produces all the choices, necessarily. no matter how many times it’s executed, with the same seed you get the same result.

it looks like randomness to an external observer, but the algorithm already had all the choices inside of it. reality is much the same: there are rules that control everything even if those rules are not evident – secret rules like secret powers – not secret in absolute, they are possible to know in theory, we’re just not there yet.

ES: thinking about Ludwig Wittgenstein through the lens of Hume, Wittgenstein digs into what Hume calls the “secret powers” of words as they appeal to our “sensible qualities” which allow us to communicate with each other through language. how do words create impressions of the world and invoke experience beyond the moment of dictation or conversation in which they arose? what might Wittgenstein say about impressions or experiences formed beyond words?

M: I’d love to ask Wittgenstein and Hume this directly, but without knowing their perspective I’ll talk from mine instead. I’d say that the secret powers of words are storage, abstraction, and condensation. language is able to draw from the existing impressions of the world that form from our experience and extend to new ideas that then become part of our domain of knowledge.

a basic example: think of a blue walnut. assuming you’ve never seen a blue walnut before, you can still picture it in your head by applying the property “blue” to the object “walnut.” language extended your knowledge without you having to experience the object directly. this is a very basic example, but it extends all the way to “best practices in project management” and other abstract concepts. properties of existing experiences can be applied to new ones, so that with only a few words you can expand knowledge by a lot.

so, to define the secret powers of words: storage: ability to “store” an experience to be communicated with other people abstraction: ability to extend an existing experience or part of it to a new experience condensation: ability to craft new words to summarize complex concepts

ES: Hume’s bold argument about the doctrine of necessity analyzes our bias toward believing in cause and effect, neither of which we can really know. his rebuttal of causality makes us question the Western conception of reality. Wittgenstein’s concept of simple component parts provides a map for under- standing the essence of an object – reality – by looking at the pieces as an approach to estimating the whole. how would you think about the human in this context?

M: I agree with Hume: the concept of cause and effect is flawed, there’s only proximity and repetition. so the only difference between a cause and an effect is that one occurs before the other, but it’s also impossible to think of a cause with no effects or effects without a cause, since the terms are defined interdependently. causality is something we define to help us understand, organize, and predict the world, but I don’t think it’s some- thing that belongs to the world itself.

to me the human is an inevitable and continuous reality. an effect of all precedent moments and cause of all sub- sequent. the only difference is the moment we are considering.

ES: considering the continuity of reality amidst the semblance of change described in different yet intersecting ways by Hume and Wittgenstein, it might be said that nothing is ever really new, nothing ever really changes, and everything is known but not by a single mind. however, we can point to examples from cognitive memory and the present that would qualify as new, suggesting that there is an experience or reality of newness. given this paradox, what could we call something that is not new but previously unknown?

encapsuled:

– – –

read the second and third movements of encapsuled:var(semic) here.

ES: It sounds like listening is a whole-body experience for you – your senses lock into the world and unlock a poem. Beyond the primary five (sight, smell, sound, touch, taste), which senses empower you most as a poet?

KHD:

from KHD: var(listen). visit the project which culminated in “Howling” by Katie Dozier

ES: It sounds like listening is a whole-body experience for you – your senses lock into the world and unlock a poem. Beyond the primary five (sight, smell, sound, touch, taste), which senses empower you most as a poet?

KHD:

from KHD: var(listen). visit the project which culminated in “Howling” by Katie Dozier

ES: The ears are always open; we cannot close them. We hear the world around us, but that does not mean we listen.

If we hear with our ears, what do we listen with?

KHD:

from KHD: var(listen). visit the project which culminated in “Howling” by Katie Dozier

read the triangulated dialogue here:

aurèce vettier: var (mount dialogue, line 1)

aurèce vettier: var (mount dialogue, line 2)

aurèce vettier: var (mount dialogue, line 3)

aurèce vettier: var (mount dialogue, line 4)

aurèce vettier: var (mount dialogue, line 5)

aurèce vettier: var (mount dialogue, line 6)

aurèce vettier: var (mount dialogue, line 7)

conVERSEverse     {

aurèce vettier: var (mount dialogue, line 7);

// triangulated dialogue technique: each line from the poem prompts ES (Elisabeth Sweet) to create a dataset of resonant texts, quotes & questions. PM (Paul Mouginot) uses the resonant dataset as input for his dialogue with the poem, making invisible connections within aurèce vettier’s Potential Herbariums ecosystem visible. 

“you are dying too.”

PM: I think I share these words by Daumal about death.* Often, the fear of something reflects the longing for its opposite, and in this sense, the fear of death often reflects the longing for life, the desire to express oneself, to share, to explore

When I meet people of all ages who sincerely do not seem to fear death, they are often people who have achieved a kind of absolute freedom, who live not for others but for themselves, and who manage, as best they can, to situate themselves perfectly in the present.

New technologies continue to change our relationship with time, notably by speeding up production times.

These new tools, and in particular artificial intelligence, have two faces: they can further increase the context of over-supply and frenzy but through their ability to digest, they can also help us focus our narrative, our story, and improve our capacity for introspection.

Personally, this is what I’m totally passionate about.

// link to piece

}