Ben Lieberman - a novel in the tradition of the nouveau roman and in the tradition of no novel at all. A prison guard at a provincial military brig is compelled to investigate the death of a prisoner he was charged with escorting. At every step, he is harried by the prison's commandant, Major Carruthers, a bureaucrat with his own set of problems, and a coterie of hooligans, small-town grifters, barracks-bound drunks, and of course the fuzz.

 

Ben Lieberman, Filthy Synechdoche, Corona Samizdat, 2022

Filthy Synecdoche is a novel in the tradition of the nouveau roman and in the tradition of no novel at all. A prison guard at a provincial military brig is compelled to investigate the death of a prisoner he was charged with escorting. At every step, he is harried by the prison's commandant, Major Carruthers, a bureaucrat with his own set of problems, and a coterie of hooligans, small-town grifters, barracks-bound drunks, and of course the fuzz. The novel assembles a series of set pieces not at all resembling the life of the author, who was indeed in a military organization not unlike the one portrayed in the story; regrettably (or perhaps not), the author has passed on, and has fulfilled that theoretical challenge to the reader at no cost to them or their loved ones.

Bori Praper - A cast of hilariously eccentric characters get sucked into a maelstrom of ridiculous events: can they stumble blindly out of a complex and terminally dangerous conspiracy with their hides intact – and save the world while they're at it? Finnegan Frotz, an anonymous, bitter and extraordinarily pale black musician, lyricist and compulsive cynic of German-Scottish origin, flies from Kirkwall, Orkney Islands, to Slovenia

Bori Praper, Cynicism Management. River Boat Books, 2013

A satirical tour through contemporary Europe, from the Orkney Islands, to airport toilets, Slovenia, and, well, either Africa or the Middle East, for two plots are misaligned in the manner that our dystopian modernity manages quite easily. If you have a tattoo on your ass, you might be of more interest than you ever wanted to be as a musician. Ironically, the music is actually produced, laced throughout the novel, and is available through some mysterious processes younger people than I will have no difficulty navigating. That must make this meta-publishing. The plot of the novel is thoroughly senseless, yet easy to follow, as it amounts to a satire involving recognizable 21st century humans being manipulated by opaque forces, and generally running about attempting to avoid senseless annihilation. It is not history, but neither, unfortunately, is it fantasy. There is indeed an evil corporation called Omnipile, and that alone should sell the book to any remaining thinking primates. The virtual need to compare the book to John Kennedy O’Toole’s suicide not is prevented by the insistent repetition of Bob Dylan sardonic comment after meeting Columbus: I just said good luck.

A cast of hilariously eccentric characters get sucked into a maelstrom of ridiculous events: can they stumble blindly out of a complex and terminally dangerous conspiracy with their hides intact – and save the world while they're at it? Finnegan Frotz, an anonymous, bitter and extraordinarily pale black musician, lyricist and compulsive cynic of German-Scottish origin, flies from Kirkwall, Orkney Islands, to Slovenia, a small country to the northeast of Italy. Upon his arrival he joins Amalia Winegirl, songstress and occasional fling, and her half-brother Randy, bass player and herb aficionado. Together they form a band called Cynicism Management and pump all their efforts into creating what can only be described as a collection of smash hit singles in odd time signatures. However, prying eyes notice Finnegan at the airport. Something has been etched into his skin, and this catches the wrong kind of attention. Unbeknownst - at first, at least - to any of its members, Finnegan's band finds itself in the middle of a complex international conspiracy involving a malevolent corporation and a couple of executives with a diabolical plan. Add a colourful crowd of peculiar characters, an ad hoc group of female undercover agents, a voluptuous Portuguese nymphomaniac, a few bearded mujahideen, a sexy case of Stockholm syndrome, an online computer game, a slightly out-of-place but horny U.S. marine, a swarm of nosy cockroaches, and Bear in Underwear to the mix... And get ready for a roller-coaster of entangled plot lines, bizarre dialogues and ridiculous incidents, culminating in a shocking revelation. Please note that this novel is adult, poignant satire. As such it contains explicit language, sex scenes, politically incorrect depictions, and may be offensive to the more irritable readers, particularly those who hold the values of the American (or Slovenian) Dream paramount. This is the second edition of the novel, containing many improvements and formatting changes. The novel also includes links to free music by the fictional musicians appearing in the story - to the actual soundtrack for this literary work.

Bori Praper, Pendulum Pet. 2016

Pendulum Pet is a romp through the vicissitudes of a gregarious advanced culture with too much time, information and technology on its hands. Paranoia is placed and misplaced, the devious succeed through manipulations of those who gaze in wonder at the mundane like chimps on acid, or fail when the truly bizarre and unthinkable inadvertently stand in their way. Civilizations clash, as they will, when Metaore, a transnational mining corporation headed by CEO Budd Dimples, purchases a field behind Boris and Beeba’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Tavern, a cult concert venue and meeting place of an eclectic collection of feckless artists, in order to undertake a remarkable experiment: drilling a geopunctural borehole to heal the Earth. Budd has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and taken a sudden turn toward esoteric wisdom, much encouraged by his healer and sex therapist Ashtara Wolf. Bogomyr Yadvig, one of the more outré of the regulars, lives in a tent nearby with Rex the tavern hound – his idea of communing with Greek Cynics in preparation for an upcoming performance piece. He has cause to lose sleep and accumulate suspicion that the corporation has nefarious unstated ends in mind, particularly when he has his Roswell moment, if that is indeed what it is. The corporate endeavour comes to a sudden halt when their drill runs into an impenetrable barrier, leading to mutually unfortunate and potentially combustible discoveries, along with stunning truths about parallel evolution and devolution. Yes, the world of the techno-information age has gone mad and survival may very well depend on the whims of a pendulum pet. Please note that this novel is adult, poignant satire. As such it contains explicit language, sex scenes, politically incorrect depictions, and may be offensive to the more irritable readers. Even though the work is part of a series, the story is self-contained and can be read independently of the other Cynicism Management Series novels. It also includes links to free music by the fictional musicians appearing in the story - to the actual soundtrack for this literary work.

Bori Praper is a Slovenian musician, writer and translator, living in the Canary Islands. Currently he focuses predominantly on his slightly belated literary efforts (Bori published his first novel in English at the tender age of 36) as well as on "Cynicism Management", his progressive / alternative rock band; "Ray Kosmick", his psychedelic rock / indietronica / soundtracks alter ego; and a few shorter-term side projects.

Bori's debut novel "Cynicism Management", a satire with elements of sci-fi/cyberpunk, was published in 2013 by a small U.K. e-book publisher. In 2015, Bori decided to hop on the indie author train, so he published the updated 2nd edition of "Cynicism Management". In March 2016, he published "Pendulum Pet", his second novel. In 2019, the publisher River Boat Books saw fit to include Bori's debut novel Cynicism Management: A Rock & Roll Fable in its list of new releases for the summer/autumn of 2019.

Bori is currently collaborating with Rick Harsch on his "communal" novel titled The Assassination of Olof Palme. He is also writing Dog Days, the third book in the Cynicism Management series, as well as composing music for it.

Klabund - This hectic, creepy autobiographical story about a young man who suffers a hemorrhage in Berlin and is haunted by bizarre figures and delusions in his twilight state can be seen as both a late entry into the Decadent pantheon and a striking example of Expressionist fiction

 

Klabund, Spook. Trans. by Jonah Lubin.

Snuggly Books, 2023

“Klabund” was the pseudonym employed by Alfred Henschke (1890-1928), who wrote, from January to April 1921, “during the fever of an illness,” the novel Spook, which is here presented for the first time in ­English, in a translation by Jonah Lubin.

This hectic, creepy autobiographical story about a young man who suffers a hemorrhage in Berlin and is haunted by bizarre figures and delusions in his twilight state can be seen as both a late entry into the Decadent pantheon and a striking example of Expressionist fiction. A haunting and harrowing tale, which seems to have been composed at least in part under the effects of morphine, Spook is, in its own troubled way, a glorious book, and a gorgeous poem of madness.

Alfred Henschke (1890-1928). Born in Crossen, Poland, he studied in Germany and Switzerland, before abandoning these activities, in 1912, to become a poet. He published numerous volumes of fiction, poetry, and plays, including Moreau (1916), Der Neger (1920), and Die Nachtwandler (1920). He died in Davos of pneumonia exacerbated by tuberculosis, which he had had since he was sixteen.

Natalie Clifford Barney - one of the great classics of modernism, this highly experimental tour de force, in which Barney reinterprets the stream of consciousness techniques James Joyce had used in Ulysses in her own highly original style, is a strange story of possession and fourth-dimensional materialism-and is, in fact, a glorious labyrinth of visions and emotions.

 

Natalie Clifford Barney, The One Who is Legion.

Snuggly Books, 2023

https://www.nataliecliffordbarney.com/

"For years I have been haunted by the idea that I should orchestrate those inner voices which sometimes speak to us in unison, and so compose a novel, not so much with the people about us, as with those within ourselves, for have we not several selves and cannot a story arise from their conflicts and harmonies?"

Thus wrote Natalie Clifford Barney in her author's note to The One Who Is Legion, a novel which she published privately in London in 1930 in an edition of only 560 copies.

The book, which received scant notice at the time of its publication and has since been all but forgotten, is at once an occult work of genius and an early example of androgynous literature. Here brought forth in a new edition that should secure its place as one of the great classics of modernism, this highly experimental tour de force, in which Barney reinterprets the stream of consciousness techniques James Joyce had used in Ulysses in her own highly original style, is a strange story of possession and fourth-dimensional materialism-and is, in fact, a glorious labyrinth of visions and emotions.

Natalie Clifford Barney, who was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1876 and who died in Paris in 1972 at the age of 95, was a legendary figure in France but almost unknown in her native land. She is the Amazone to whom Remy de Gourmont addressed his Lettres à l’Amazone, she appears as a character in half a dozen works of fiction, and her name turns up in scores of memoirs. For over sixty years her house in Paris provided the setting for an international salon frequented by many of the leading writers, artists, diplomats and intellectuals of the century, including Gertrude Stein, Sacha Guitry, Paul Valéry, Baron de Rothschild, Harold Acton, Janet Flanner, Bernard Berenson, Romaine Brooks, Colette, Gide, Cocteau, Eugène Jolas and Ezra Pound. She herself was a writer, but her notoriety stems even more from her being unquestionably the leading lesbian of her time.

I had first heard about Natalie Barney when I was writing a book about the Americans in Paris. At that time the magazine Adam devoted an issue to Natalie Barney containing selections from her work and commentaries by me members of her circle. But what impressed me more was the remark made by Janet Flanner in declining to contribute to Adam: “Miss Barney is a perfect example of an enchanting person not to write about.” I am still puzzling over that remark, wondering if I may have taken it in the wrong sense. At the time I took it as a warning that this enchanting person wanted to be left in peace. As it turned out, Natalie Barney did not take this view at all. Eight years after, when I finally met her, she kept exclaiming, “Oh, why didn’t you come before?” and “Why have you waited so long to come?”

There she was, this extraordinary survival from another era, this fabled creature, once a legendary beauty who defied convention, now ancient and shrunken, wrapped in a pale blue dressing gown to match her pale blue eyes and very fine white hair. She looked like a carefully wrapped doll in that expensive hotel drawing room (she had been living in the Hotel Meurice as an invalid for the past two years, though her faithful housekeeper Berthe still lived at her old home at 20 rue Jacob) with its vases of tall expensive flowers—not at all the setting in which she had lived her life—but there was still a spark of animation behind the vague look in her eyes.

She was not very good at answering questions but quite lucid in asking them and particularly acute in questioning me about my private life. When she learned that I was married and had children she exclaimed, “Why, then your career is finished!”

She didn’t say much about the crucial period in her life, about what made her decide to live in Paris and to live the way she did. But she did say several times, “It was very dangerous then.” Of her intimates she mentioned only Romaine Brooks who had died in Nice the previous December. Romaine was her oldest friend, and she felt her death most keenly.

She repeated several little anecdotes or remarks about Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and George Antheil. Disconcertingly she kept asking me if I knew them, if I’d been in Paris then, what had happened to them and others, most of them dead. Her mind wandered, repeating itself like a broken record.

She said she went for walks around the quartier every night with Gertrude Stein and her dog. This must have been after 1937, when Gertrude Stein moved to the rue Christine, quite close to the rue Jacob. They used to talk about family quarrels, and Gertrude always said, Never mind, families always quarreled, that was what consanguinity was all about. Evidently Alice Toklas didn’t accompany them on these walks, for her memories of Miss Toklas were vague (“What’s her name? What’s become of her?”), while she clearly remembered walking the dog and spoke of Gertrude as a good friend. When the dog died, it didn’t seem to bother Gertrude. She simply got a new one and gave it the same name.

Ezra Pound she remembered in the company of Olga Rudge—his protegée, she explained, a violinist. She remembered playing tennis with Pound, so this must have been in the early twenties when he lived in Paris. Pound brought other poets to call. She kept trying to recall a remark, with three adjectives in crescendo, something like: “Ezra Pound was arrogant, outrageous and unspeakable.” But she couldn’t get the adjectives straight. I gathered that her intention was not to criticize Pound, whom she liked, but to fix him in a phrase.

George Antheil she remembered as a tiny little man, like a monkey, with a tiny little wife; she wondered if they had ever had any children. She also remembered Virgil Thomson and the man who lived with him, though she couldn’t remember his name. Thornton Wilder continued to come and call on her. Julien Green she did not like, finding him too strait-laced and puritanical.

Most of the time she preferred to speak English, but she kept testing my French. I had the impression that she expressed herself most deftly in French, though she was totally bilingual. Her English had a nineteenth century flavor about it, reminding me of the way my grandmother spoke.

After two and a half hours Natalie Barney was still going strong, and I had to excuse myself, for I was overdue for a dinner invitation, never having expected the interview to last more than a half hour. That was the last I saw of Natalie Barney, for I left Paris two days later, and the following winter she died. - George Wickes

https://www.theparisreview.org/letters-essays/3870/a-natalie-barney-garland-george-wickes

Kelly Krumrie - Girls go blind, do math, wage hunger strikes, weigh themselves, take field trips, do more math, eat or don’t eat, crochet, sprawl, swim, imagine electricity, wink, fail to understand the meaning of a wink, take photos of each other, and think

 

Kelly Krumrie, Math Class. Calamari Archive,

2022

"Somewhere in the gap between correct answers and questions that can’t be formulated, girls are learning math. They aspire to seeing without taking notes. Girls go blind, do math, wage hunger strikes, weigh themselves, take field trips, do more math, eat or don’t eat, crochet, sprawl, swim, imagine electricity, wink, fail to understand the meaning of a wink, take photos of each other, and think. Everything is being measured and tracked, yet something mysterious remains, flickering, at the edge of what can be analyzed, known, or even registered in symbol systems. It isn’t yet clear what’s been lost. Math Class is meditative, fascinating, unnerving, a precisely rendered dream of a book, a wondrous gem reflecting mysteries and meanings wherever it goes." —Stephen Beachy

"Kelly Krumrie's Math Class makes mathematical thinking tender, charming, full of longing, and strange. This book reminded me of things I love—Georges Perec's writing, Amina Cain's, Guillevic's Geometries—but reading it was also something fresh and new."—Danielle Dutton

"If I didn't know Kelly Krumrie wrote Math Class, I would guess it was a phenomenological reduction of Madeline fan fiction co-authored by Raymond Queneau and Judy Blume in a parallel universe. Or an elaborate story problem from a geometry textbook détourning Lives of the Saints. What are the girls learning in Math Class? That the body is unsolvable. That God and Euclid never answer their questions. That adolescence has happened and is about to happen but is never that which is happening. Krumrie's language proceeds via precise abstractions and marvelous mundanities, creating infinite new locations for the experience of anything at all." —Joanna Ruocco

"Math Class is a taut imbrication of storytelling and philosophical investigation thronged with a cohabiting sisterhood, at a place called St. Agatha’s, where they are engaged in reflections on perception; bodily dissolutions and repairs; and the poiesis of logical operations of mind. Nothing abstract is alien to them. The institution is no passive setting of study, but instead a kind of aporia. How are you, a counselor asks a student. "I’m— basically hollow, or a plane on which to graph something, the sound of a shell on the beach (your own blood), a machine, a piston, my arms oars, my mouth a nest, my chest a drum for turning concrete." Interleaved throughout this elegant speculative fiction are drawings that recall the recessive and delicate geometrics of Paul Klee. These subtle sketches chart a course for the story’s alterity, glimmering with conjecture and truth-seeking." —Miranda Mellis

"The teenage girls in Kelly Krumrie's Math Class could well be aspiring saints or geometers, with their transfigurative arcs and extremities, keen diagramming skills, shared visions, and acute bodily suffering. Can one chart an intricate web of friendships or unravel the track of a catastrophe? Adolescence is a vexed condition fraught with metamorphoses both terrible and holy, but these girls know how to plot the coordinates of their finite struggles and watch over one another with a sagacity that's as intimate and precise as the hand-drawn grid of a note passed secretly at the back of a crowded classroom."—Pamela Lu

More than two decades ago, in an issue of the popular magazine Science, American writer David Foster Wallace published an influential essay entitled “Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama.” While the essay ostensibly functioned as a review of two novels,[1] the writer leveraged the opportunity to engage in a more profound critique of several math-related issues. After outlining mathematics’ seemingly recent surge in popularity in book, film, and theatrical form, Wallace essentially asked: What (if any) is the relationship between mathematics and narrative prose? He also wondered how densely abstract but aesthetically beautiful mathematical ideas can be rendered understandable, engaging, and perhaps inspiring to the non-mathematician.

The problem, as Wallace saw it, was that a plethora of narratives have about as much to do with mathematics as parsley has to do with a restaurant meal: essentially decorative and ultimately not very satisfying. (In this model, mathematical insight is reduced to a character writing furiously on the chalkboard or inventing fictional pseudo-mathematical ideas that don’t actually make much sense.) On the other end, there are any number—no pun intended—of beautiful mathematical concepts: transfinite numbers, the Riemann Hypothesis, the poetry inherent in Euclid’s Elements—and mathematically-framed formal literary constraints can produce remarkable results (here’s looking at you, Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes). What Wallace sketched out was, in some respects, a two-dimensional problem. But somewhere between mathematics as melodramatic caricature and migraine-inducing combinatorial, what about a third way? Mathematics as epistemological, somatic, an affective site. It is precisely in this gap that Kelly Krumrie’s poignant debut, Math Class, enters and proliferates.

Math Class operates as a series of twenty-six interlocking vignettes or speculative fictions. Think Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street crossed with Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star (the work of Amina Cain and Kristin Keane also come to mind). There’s a quantum or even fractal layering between the vignettes, toggling between a micro-scale where you can practically smell the dust bunnies in the school library and a wider, occasionally oneiric, perspectivism of the characters or environs. Added to that are various mathematical sketches interspersed throughout the book: coordinate grids, matrices, topology, physics problems. It’s almost as if, at times, reading can be fused with wandering through an art gallery.

The book centers on a group of precocious teenage girls at St. Agatha’s, a Catholic school—we meet characters such as Tessa, Carolina, Ana, Lucy, and Thea—but the emotional and formal vortex of that group is Jo. Ten of the twenty-six vignettes in the book feature Jo in the title and her significance is evident from the very start with the opening piece, “Jo as a circuit.” In the character of Jo, Krumrie deftly gives the book a focal point with a character who, in a myriad of ways, collapses any distinctions between mind and body (and time and place), where thought is embodied and the body is imbued with “mechanical ghosts”:

What is this current, what is it. Its course through her body is selective and thorough. It’s electric and careful. The current is light—electricity—and its bones are her bones. Her hairs stand on end.

We learn that “Jo is a machine”—in some sense a cyborg as the result of a serious injury—as she’s being fitted for “new limbs [that] are a fleshy gray and suction onto her old limbs’ tapered ends,” but Jo herself chooses to reflect upon the nature of electricity, why she might have become a human instead of an insect, and how an engineer would calculate blood circulation for maximum efficiency. Rather than offering the reader an opening narrative trafficking in sentimentality or self-pity, Krumrie shrewdly takes the reader into the layered future-past immanence of Jo’s perspective, one in which Jo “assumes she is—or is not—a substance, or that she is—or is not—a form of energy.”

If the book opens by situating the reader within the immanence of Jo, the next vignette “Outside,” immediately pans back to a detailed description of St. Agatha’s exterior and the immediate environs. “Physical” then shifts back to the body—in this case, the physical examination the girls are about to undergo at the hands of the school nurse: “Their guessing is either to start a conversation about perceptions of their bodies or to keep themselves busy while they wait in line.” Thus, just in the first three pieces in the book, Krumrie presents reading as a kind of physics: Given three points in space, calculate a body’s (or narrative’s) true position. Whether we’re enveloped in Jo’s perspective, hovering drone-like above and around St. Agatha’s grounds, or flitting amongst idle chatter in an act of waiting, we are narrative particles on the move. This shifting of narrative grounds is a strategy deployed throughout the book.

One of the longer pieces in the book, “Jo in the Frame of Formal Opens,” orbits around Tessa describing her synesthesia—seeing shapes and objects when people speak—to Jo having visions of light transformed into a man who spoke in another frequency akin to “a transmission pouring in and out of rows of satellites; later “two women materialized” in front of Jo and were enveloped in particles followed with “a hum of insects.” The narrative continues to oscillate, and pivot into a new trajectory off of a detail. No sooner does Jo ponder the concept of circularity—“If she were a circle, her movements would be pure, infinitely symmetrical”—than she is reminded that “[n]othing in nature is perfectly circular,” and the earlier “hum of insects” springboards into the derailing of a train: “it’s not the sound of crickets she hears but the clicking of gears, or the ticking of a clock, something mechanical, metal against metal.”

The powerful dream-like strata and substrata of “Jo in the Frame of Formal Opens” is contrasted with the flatly descriptive style of “Story Problem,” the subsequent vignette, which is written like a mathematical word problem. The tension aggregates as it explains the derailing of a train. We expect with the word-problem format to find a question and solve for something, and it appears—somewhat obliquely—near the end: “The one she’d been in?” The implied answer to the question—was this the train that excised portions of two of Jo’s limbs?—ends up buried, literally and metaphorically, by the form.

Two short pieces, “Attendance” and “Hallway,” showcase Krumrie’s talent for varying registers and work almost like tracking shots. In “Attendance,” we follow Caroline collecting attendance slips à la the opening of Good Fellas’ famed “Copa Shot.” We learn Jo’s been absent for weeks since her injury—and Jo is similarly absent in a spate of the vignettes that follow. Caroline’s ambition is on display as she hopes for a letter of recommendation from Sister Clare and observes that “Today there’s a percentage of students absent that’s easy to calculate—an even portion of the student body.” “Hallway” shifts perspective downward as we follow a wheel along the hallway of the school.

“Jo considers water’s fractions” ripples out from within the narrative, a kind of parabolic crest. Jo hears voices and crickets chirping, and registers them as “an echo, a vessel for o.” And while Jo might be having a Thoreau-esque Walden moment, her poetics are more cyborg than pure ecology:

If the hands are an echo, what calls them first? Or one hand is and the other its mirrored match? Two shells, infinite waves, this place.

Slink forward. Copper wire under water. Jo the animal, Jo an extraterrestrial. Eye fiber. Mirror water. Faces lean over closed eyes.

Two other pieces titled with Jo were particularly touching for me. First, “Jo’s pencil is the extremity of a line,” which extends from Euclid’s famous definition for points and reminded me of Big Thief’s song “Not,” which gains momentum through negation and psychological after-image:

With her head on her shoulder, her arm’s the line, or the invisible thought in it, or the information from the teacher she’s supposed to record—not her neighbor’s rustling paper, not the rain sounds (though they’re there), not the sounds in the hall either. Don’t think about the windows or the desk’s material, but this material, a circle and its parts.

Secondly, “Jo is in above her exterior” has a powerful economy to it, like H.D. or William Carlos Williams at their best: “Voices on her. Voices on the frame and in it. . . . An echo lets her know she’s intact.”

A pair of vignettes bear the eponymous “Math Class”: one approximately a third of the way into the book, and the other acts as the conclusion. Both of them concern the transformation of the body. In the first “Math Class,” Tessa is taking notes on dilation and reflection symmetry and imagines the girls “as if they’re trapped in Maria’s diagram: in a math problem of their own creation,” as if a kind of calculus-as-frame-tale. In the second iteration of “Math Class,” the narrator conceives of the transfinite as indefinite replication and wonders: “How can they imagine the abstraction process that yields them? In the abstraction, what is retained as the content of the concept, and what is that from which the abstraction is made?” In a sense, this echoes the question David Foster Wallace posed more than two decades ago. The narrator’s answer, however, is equal parts poetry and mystery: “On the board I draw a fraction whose denominator is a cipher . . . The seat next to me is vacant, a pure being without measure.”

This, in turn, echoes an early segment from the vignette, “Seeing:”

What does it mean to be in the world? Is it having a body? Using it? Is it about response or engagement, leaving evidence of yourself? . . . But she meant something else—to have no location, to have no containing body at all.

And that is a key issue in the book––the epistemological and somatic act of being. Mathematical considerations, references, and revelations are abundant in the book, but readers can be equally at home in references to Giordano Bruno or Gertrude Stein. You don’t need to be a mathematician to access the narratives or be affected by the characters—anymore than you don’t need to be a composer to enjoy music. Krumrie’s absorbing debut, Math Class, is to some degree a bildungsroman, though the characters are already extraordinarily intelligent and self-aware; growth tends to take the form of addition through subtraction—the loss of limbs, eyesight, weight, certainty; and time is multi-dimensional and nonlinear, perhaps even circular or circuitous. Characters like Lucy, Tessa, Ana, and others are certainly not lacking, but Jo is the centrifugal force of the book, which may account for why her character made the strongest and deepest impression on me. Jo’s thinking may be causal, but the connections are not obvious and in the sections where Jo is absent, much like her friends, I found myself waiting for her return. When she does return to school, she faces new—and entirely practical—difficulties, like learning how to navigate space with prosthetics. Her proposed solutions, much like Krumrie’s book as a whole, are singular and distinctive: “Her locker combination is out of reach. What if she transformed into the mechanism itself?”

Mark Tardi is a writer, translator, and lecturer on faculty at the University of Łódź. He is a recipient of a 2022 Fellowship in Literary Translation from the National Endowment for the Arts and author of three books, most recently, The Circus of Trust (Dalkey Archive, 2017). Recent work and translations have appeared in Czas Kultury, LIT, Interim, Text Matters, The Scores, Denver Quarterly, The Millions, Circumference, La Piccioletta Barca, Berlin Quarterly, Notre Dame Review and in Italian translation, Rossocorpolingua. His translations of The Squatters’ Gift by Robert Rybicki (Dalkey Archive) and Faith in Strangers by Katarzyna Szaulińska (Toad Press/Veliz Books) were published in 2021.

[1] Those two novels were The Wild Numbers by Philibert Schogt, and Uncle Petros & Goldbach’s Conjecture by Aposotolos Doxiadis. Wallace didn’t have anything complimentary to say about either of them, and Doxiadis apparently neither forgave nor forgot Wallace’s largely negative review of his novel. With Ben Mazur, Doxiadis co-edited a Wallace-esque doorstopper of a collection of essays on the relationship between mathematics narrative called Circles Disturbed, and in the nearly 600 pages of essays, there is not so much as a single reference to one David Foster Wallace. Given the subject matter, it’s surprising, to say the least. Jonathan Franzen is mentioned, however. - Mark Tardi

https://www.full-stop.net/2022/09/21/reviews/marktardi/math-class-kelly-krumrie/

Excerpts and reviews:

—interview w/ Mark Mayer in Full Stop: part i + part ii

—in conversation w/ Jeff Alessandrelli in The Adroit Journal

—review by Mark Tardi in Full Stop

—"Jo considers water’s fractions," in Sleepingfish 2020+

—"Interview / Hydroelectric," in Blazing Stadium 8

—"Physical," in Your Impossible Voice 23

—"The Frame of Formal Opens," in Entropy

—"Circuit," in Sleepingfish 13

Michael Salu - Conversing with Dante, Yoruba metaphysics and probabilistic computation, Red Earth is an expansive text and the source material for Michael Salu’s broader interdisciplinary artistic study, where machine learning is central to various processes to ask whether computational translation can be used to engage alternative cosmologies

 

Michael Salu, Red Earth. Calamari Archive, 2023

https://theredearthproject.org/

https://michaelsalu.com/

Conversing with Dante, Yoruba metaphysics and probabilistic computation, Red Earth is an expansive text and the source material for Michael Salu’s broader interdisciplinary artistic study, where machine learning is central to various processes to ask whether computational translation can be used to engage alternative cosmologies.

As a rhythmic, ever-shifting experience where the protagonist questions notions of selfhood and where grief and loss mesh with candor towards nonhuman perspectives, different cultural interpretations of time and morality enable exploration of a diasporic vestibule between cosmologies of thought, cultures and languages. Red Earth invites readers to see beyond an increasingly statistical societal gaze and instead meditate on life and death and what the virtual realm means for memory, particularly memories unacknowledged by the dichotomous ‘universal’ language of code.

"The emergency we've made for ourselves as a species begs for books like Michael Salu's haunting and beautiful Red Earth. At once vast and intimate, galactic and rooted in the earth, this book reads like a genre unto itself. Here are the sonics of poetry and the choral qualities of theatre. Voices swirl and speak, then are lost to the wind. Memories appear and dissolve before nostalgia can snatch them into tidy orbits. To enter this book is to enter a cosmic reckoning with finitude, a record, a warning, and a psalm of our time." —John Freeman, author of Wind, Trees

"In Michael Salu’s Red Earth, writing becomes a virtuosic act of listening. Salu listens to history’s castoffs—slaves thrown overboard, soil used up and abandoned—so that the relationship between historical hierarchies of power and contemporary crises of ecology gently becomes obvious as if of its own accord. This amidst the strange and irresistible ether of Salu’s polychronic forms and tones, as echoes of the Divine Comedy leak into the Orphic narrator’s radio talk show. As in the classic novels of Daniela Hodrová and Ahmet Altan, Salu’s floating polyrhythms seem almost to weave themselves, crossing historical eras, terrestrial deserts, ocean depths, and metaphysical thresholds—a polyphony of voices from all the dimensions of the world."—Mandy-Suzanne Wong, author of The Box

"Red Earth is a radio show on low frequency. Like a ghost walk at the crack of dawn it writes a different grounding and earth into being. Attuned to the quiet frequencies of colonial afterlives, our guides Manto and the narrator, descend into Hades like Orpheus, taking their listeners on a journey to hear the voices unheard in the earth—bony voices in the half light, raw with grief and petrified accounts of deep earth wounds. The methodological brief is to listen intently and hear in the earth different stories. In Red Earth, Michael Salu brings a warm and uncompromising look at pain, Christianity, the arts economy of ‘black as bling’, AI, virtual worldings, hardened realities and all the psychic contradictions of late-night colonial earth. Rather than the didactic pronouncements of terrible violence and its on-going presence, the writing bids us to come with, in an elegiac remonstration of the intimacies of encounters…Red Earth is a literary journey fellow with Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to my Native Land and Franz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks, and Salu’s autoethnography is equally as impressive and unique in the tremor of its language and urgency of its questions. Stay tuned, a major talent has just launched a show that everyone should listen to."—Kathryn Yusoff, Author of A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

"In Michael Salu’s Red Earth, writing becomes a virtuosic act of listening. Salu listens to history’s castoffs—slaves thrown overboard, soil used up and abandoned—so that the relationship between historical hierarchies of power and contemporary crises of ecology gently becomes obvious as if of its own accord. This amidst the strange and irresistible ether of Salu’s polychronic forms and tones, as echoes of the Divine Comedy leak into the Orphic narrator’s radio talk show. As in the classic novels of Daniela Hodrová and Ahmet Altan, Salu’s floating polyrhythms seem almost to weave themselves, crossing historical eras, terrestrial deserts, ocean depths, and metaphysical thresholds—a polyphony of voices from all the dimensions of the world."—Mandy-Suzanne Wong, author of The Box

"The emergency we've made for ourselves as a species begs for books like Michael Salu's haunting and beautiful Red Earth. At once vast and intimate, galactic and rooted in the earth, this book reads like a genre unto itself. Here are the sonics of poetry and the choral qualities of theatre. Voices swirl and speak, then are lost to the wind. Memories appear and dissolve before nostalgia can snatch them into tidy orbits. To enter this book is to enter a cosmic reckoning with finitude, a record, a warning, and a psalm of our time."—John Freeman, author of Wind, Trees

"Red Earth is a radio show on low frequency. Like a ghost walk at the crack of dawn it writes a different grounding and earth into being. Attuned to the quiet frequencies of colonial afterlives, our guides Manto and the narrator, descend into Hades like Orpheus, taking their listeners on a journey to hear the voices unheard in the earth—bony voices in the half light, raw with grief and petrified accounts of deep earth wounds. The methodological brief is to listen intently and hear in the earth different stories. In Red Earth, Michael Salu brings a warm and uncompromising look at pain, Christianity, the arts economy of ‘black as bling’, AI, virtual worldings, hardened realities and all the psychic contradictions of late-night colonial earth. Rather than the didactic pronouncements of terrible violence and its on-going presence, the writing bids us to come with, in an elegiac remonstration of the intimacies of encounters…Red Earth is a literary journey fellow with Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to my Native Land and Franz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks, and Salu’s autoethnography is equally as impressive and unique in the tremor of its language and urgency of its questions. Stay tuned, a major talent has just launched a show that everyone should listen to."—Kathryn Yusoff, Author of A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

Where do the resources sustaining and developing AI and virtual futures come from?

Which cultures and languages will be preserved in a virtual afterlife?

Who gets to live forever?

Red Earth is an ongoing artistic, interdisciplinary study by Michael Salu, which is centred on prose reflections and machine translation, drawing attention to the precarious status of non-western cultural heritage, knowledge systems and practices in the increasingly dominant Western systems of data, virtual architectures and AI technologies.

This research asks how alternative cosmologies can be better represented within virtual architectures powered by AI innovation.

Transhumanist ideologies of a singular ontological history imply a determined ‘post-human’ future. Colonial legacy is bound up in the etymology of programming languages and statistical and probabilistic methodologies facilitating this development. With a universal ‘morality’ built from this ontological history, there is no room for indigenous cosmologies in a virtual “post-humanity” built from selective data, while extraction of natural resources from the African continent, from rare metals to human data and cheap labour, powers the future of increasingly energy-intensive computer hardware.

This evolving art project, takes inspiration from non-linear time within the Yoruba tradition, resisting defined edges, beginnings or endings and renders the link between the monotheistic intentions behind early statistical methods, which inform today’s AI aspirations, and the use of Christian morality as a method of colonisation across Africa for resource access. Red Earth asks how can other knowledge systems be visible within virtual architectures powered by AI innovation.

Red Earth, a primarily theoretical study, appropriates machine learning methodologies to synthesise relational objects that could indicate potential new pathways between divergent cosmologies, with the focus of this particular study on the origins of West African language and thought.

Red Earth is art led by original narrative prose written by the artist, which will be published as a book in October by Calamari Press NYC. This prose delves into different cultural understandings of time and morality, to help understand the relationship between natural resources and virtual time. This project employs machine learning methodologies to synthesise relational objects to imply new pathways between divergent cosmologies, currently focusing on the origins of West African language and thought.

Exploring Western morality in an original work of prose written by Michael Salu, language translation models are used to translate the work into a data topography. Inspired by Yoruba oratorical thought and manifestations of language within physical objects, this data is then used as raw material to sculpt a series of virtual totems, sculptures for a codex imbued with aggregated thought, distilling the exchange between text and data, colonial and inherent language.

Machine translation combines with intuitive, cognitive translations of ideas between artistic forms to explore whether syntheses of memory, beyond object and material, can suggest ways we might develop alternative cultural heritages or whether computational methodologies based on statistical analyses can ever be in dialogue with other metaphysical origins and ‘uncertainties’.

Machine learning is used to translate the prose into data topographies. Inspired by Yoruba oratorical thought and manifestations of language within physical objects, this data is used as raw material to sculpt a series of totems, for a codex imbued with aggregated thought, distilling the exchange between text and data, colonial and inherent language, physical and digital worlds.

Rather than definitive artworks, Red Earth is process-based, creating a series of ‘translations,’ both computational and poetic, between art forms and languages, intermittmenttly providing a series of outputs, as interconnected works combine photography, prose, sculpture, installation, video and machine learning models. Red Earth aims to draw attention to intricate cross-cultural realities and creative practices neglected by technological advancement from a singular knowledge system.

Computer translation combines with intuitive, cognitive translation of ideas between artistic forms to explore whether syntheses of memory, beyond object and material, can suggest ways we might progress alternative cultural heritages, or whether computational methodologies based on statistical analyses can ever be in dialogue with other metaphysical origins and ‘uncertainties’. Blurring distinction between physical and digital—increasingly demanding, and straddling spatiality across physical and digital divides.

Red Earth suggests the beginnings of alternative virtual archives of culture for the emerging digital future of Africa.

The African continent has a young, tech-literate population for which Google is building a subsea data cabling route from Portugal to South Africa. In Red Earth, converting the red clay of West Africa into soil nutritious enough to nurture and grow life serves as a metaphor for shaping the process-based, linguistic, visual and computational ‘translations’ used to reflect on Africa’s digital future.

The project interrogates how colonial legacies and practices are bound up in the knowledge architecture of programming languages. Equally, extraction of natural resources from the African continent, from rare metals to human data and cheap labour, powers the future of increasingly energy intensive computer hardware.

With a focus on the new scramble for Africa, key to current geo-political wrangling over the economic world order, this project focuses on cultural visibility of a sizeable percentage of the Global Ethnic Majority.

This project aims at increasing awareness of the disparities nd power dynamics implicit within the technologies integral to living, working and learning today. Red Earth aims to contribute to a crucial dialogue between the computer sciences and the humanities, as we try to understand how to live in a socially and environmentally changing world, with growing disparities.

What Lies Beyond the Red Earth?

By Michael Salu October 17, 2023

A few years ago, I read a lecture by Chinua Achebe given in 1975, later published as an essay entitled “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” While I greatly respect Achebe’s novels, his essays have often left me wanting. His voice reminded me of my grandfather’s, the intonations of a proud Nigerian man, rightly aggrieved at the dysfunctional state of his country, his continent, and its indefatigable life in the face of rampant, extractive exploitation by imperial powers. I feel that Achebe’s frustration can leave blind spots in his arguments, and the lecture in question—an outright denouncement of Conrad’s famed novel and its canonized status as “permanent literature”—was, I thought, an example of this. Achebe considered Conrad’s novel explicitly racist in its themes, in its depictions of the “natives,” and in the gaze of Marlow, Conrad’s primary protagonist, who Achebe believed wasn’t much removed from Conrad’s disposition.

Achebe questions the meaning of writing to our society, or the meaning of any art for that matter, when it can be so explicitly racist and go mostly unremarked upon by fans and critics alike, regardless of how beautiful the turns of phrase or evocative the depictions of the lush, sweltering alien landscape. I have a complex relationship with Conrad’s novel and agree with some of what Achebe put forth, but his argument felt incomplete. Achebe’s disgust is understandable, but I think one can see Conrad was also getting at a lack of vocabulary for this rich, intricate world, of atmospheres and new sensory and metaphysical experiences, at times in his prose defaulting to beautifully phrased but reductive tropes, which are still embedded in the unconscious of Western society today. As Achebe railed at Conrad’s reduction of complex cultures, knowledge systems, and languages, down to a dark, flat backdrop for Marlow’s descent into the pit of despair, and lamented Conrad’s objectification of West African bodies, I became hooked on an important and maybe even existential question—who was Achebe’s lamentation aimed at? Who was the primary audience for his words, written in English? And was there a moral authority to hear his appeal, and if so, what then?

I envision this moral authority: a shining round table, a collective ethereal body. I can picture where this body receives education, and what information and legacy bestow upon this body to uphold such cosmic authority. I peer at this body’s ancestral responsibility and how intricately woven its cultural history is with morality, technology, and progress—through religion, reason, language, war, and subsequent laws. I wonder, wouldn’t this same moral authority Achebe speaks to be the same that has canonized Conrad’s novel, lauding it as one Western literature’s great works?

Roughly around the time of Conrad’s birth, Anglican and Baptist missionaries from Britain began spreading the Christian word across Nigeria alongside armed colonial powers, and systemically implemented a proposed order and moral structure, offering bondage under the benevolent cloak of Christianity. They found innovative ways to suppress and diminish ancient local knowledge systems whilst leveraging the locals’ deeply inherent spiritual devotion. Tribal factions with differing religious and philosophical dispositions were difficult to control without the concerted imposition of particular moral principles through Christianity. Coordinating labor and governing over resource-rich lands was made easier by exploiting the tenets of local knowledge and sowing discord between tribes. Christianity has been significant to psychological governance, by imposing a moral condition and constraining culture, dissenting thought, or ways of seeing and being alien to the new “explorers” of this productive continent of vast cultural and environmental diversity.

Christianity existed in Africa before the arrival of missionaries. However, their spectral presence served a particular economic purpose, the legacy of which I witness today on the continent and across its diaspora. We can see this coercion and its resulting conservative legacy of docile communities as part of a colonial extraction strategy.

Many early contributions to foundational mathematics originated in Asia and Africa, and roughly a century before these missionary expeditions, the origins of European statistical mathematics and probabilistic methodologies were forming. These methods are now pivotal to computational methods like machine learning , vital to the pursuit of AI. Bayes’ Theorem, for example, a formula founded by the reverend and early statistician Thomas Bayes, is a significant driver of machine learning and originates in what appears to be shaky, metaphysical, and even monotheistic beginnings, as Justin Joque explains in his book Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics and the Logic of Capitalism.

Bayes’ Theorem is a mathematical formula for determining conditional probability: the likelihood of an outcome occurring based on a previous outcome having occurred in similar circumstances. One might establish a belief, and later update said belief with newly acquired information supporting one’s argument or intention. Bayesian influence is significant to quantum mechanics (which is key to AI research and development) and its attempts to understand the physics of nature and the uncertainty of the universe.

As Joque says, the metaphysical origins of Western statistics have been well-documented by mathematicians and historians alike, many of whom have strongly resisted the Bayesian method, particularly in the twentieth century. Still, intriguingly, this method has recently resurged and is now very popular in algorithmic computing, developing “truths” (the outcome of this subjective method), principally for capital from numerous subjective origins (including social origins) that, over time, we have established for primarily economic purposes. This subjective Bayesian method—beginning with a guess or an assumption and adding data to solidify one’s guess or assumption—inevitably puts us in a slippery metaphysical dimension, not too dissimilar to where we might have been in years gone by, particularly in Europe, where society leaned on monotheistic reasoning to make sense of the world. Therefore, one might speculate that the logical endpoint of computation based on this statistical model, implemented by engineers and venture capitalists educated under a singular ontological framework, might aim at a convergent “truth,” whatever that may be, if we understand the (even unconscious) influence of monotheism on these protagonists implementing their dominant beliefs and morality, through the accumulation of vast amounts of information, with origins already hazy.

So then, a moral authority? If we use—and I consider this pronoun necessary here, for several reasons, as our involvement purports to be passive, but is not—algorithmic models to determine who has access to a loan or whether someone is guilty of a crime or not (to be then placed in for-profit prison systems), does morality, or a moral authority, as we understand it, ultimately serve only the acquisition, maintenance, and accumulation of capital? If so, then to who is the moral vanguard Achebe appeals to?

Achebe’s appeal, deep into the latter half of the twentieth century, is to an English-speaking, educated authority, of a dominant economic and educational system, with culture prominently in its service. Hundreds of years of Christian influence and legacy intersect with the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason and individualism, which allies with violent methods of implementing extraction in distant lands in ways increasingly invisible to us as technology surges, all which combine to form today’s Western world, where race, class, and gender make for active feedback loops to further accumulate capital by manipulating datasets, which entrench and dictate our respective fates within this socially constructed economic system.

The same system of imbalances and inbuilt gaslighting narratives provide much of the patronage of art and culture. Patronage that attempts to uphold a moral center, guiding us to how we might exist alongside each other. “Culture” defines society’s artistic and intellectual refinements. We needn’t disregard the etymological origins of the word in this instance: of cultivating and tilling earth until it is fruitful and beneficial enough to sustain life. Or the biological meaning: an environment suitable for the growth of bacteria to spread indiscriminately. Culture maintains primacy for this economic system, affirming a dominant language and knowledge and suppressing other influences and dissent. Culture’s power and intentions are even crystalline in how few works of literature from across the world are translated into English until they’re deemed worthy of translation by an authority, the same authority, ultimately, that canonizes Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I remain, for example, astounded by how many contemporary novels from the United States I read with a complete lack of a “nonwhite” person written into their pages as if none exist. An observation I make with some understanding of the history of segregation, yet, even so, when I imagine the scale of such autonomous formulations within society, it is enough to take one’s breath.

Transhumanism, a new ideological formation that appears to be just a loose cluster of ideas, aims at an optimized human condition, which transhumanists might argue can only occur in a state beyond the fallibility of the corpus, where we find empowerment in new deified technologies, which construct a mirror of increasing sophistication. As Narcissus gazes down at his rippling reflection, it begs the question of who stands visible in the mirror. Transhumanism, the technological ascension of the human condition, an ideological aspiration, appears incapable of imagining ascendancy without the ballast of wealth enabling further advancement, inevitably in the hands of a few then tasked with designing the human through a lens that cannot be anything but eugenic by its very foundations. Peer from their vantage point to a tier just below, where our modern saints, namely celebrities, serve as prototypes through feedback loops of continuous visibility and modification, guiding the surface-level aesthetic ideal of the human.

The fervor for AI’s ascension to a plane beyond us is a quasi-spiritual desire, echoing the past’s metaphysical anxieties and our need to see something, possibly something monotheistic, beyond ourselves. It seems now, through probabilistic methods, the hallowed saint forms in our image as we shape greater systems of knowledge to further a delusion, synthesizing the spectacle of an impressionistic, all-seeing and all-doing deity and, yes, a moral authority to whom we’ll perform worship through mimetic ritual. This supposed moral authority remains a primary weapon for today’s technological and economic shackling of and extraction from the human condition. Social media companies, for example, from the same moral lineage discussed here, provide us with ways to see more of the world than ever before but attempt to control what aspects of humanity we should see, how we see them, and to which we should aspire. Utilizing long-established economic imbalances, these companies maintain what we might call cognitive call centers, across Africa and Asia, paying employees a pittance to screen harmful content before it reaches us, the comparably wealthy consumers, and making it clear, if ever we choose to avert our gaze from the gleaming totem, whose welfare is regarded as valuable and profitable. It has been widely reported that social media has worsened our collective mental and emotional welfare as a society, so the comparably wealthy consumers, also find themselves an extractive resource. Then there is our evolving echo, language learning models, and the moral limitations they apply to what we may ask of them. We remain docile to technology, and lack the vocabulary to really speak about it, as Heidegger once noted, therefore we do not or cannot resist.

So I wonder what these universal claims to a moral authority are. How do we determine objective truths about humanity that we lean on to maintain and evolve society—truths that glean and reconstitute subjectivity, that increasingly inform and guide our day-to-day—when these truths are developed, in part, through aggregating and reconstituting data, deploying subjective methodologies, which neglect the thought, methods, and experiences of large swathes of the human and nonhuman world, whilst simultaneously finding those realms materially valuable.

I am not saying anything new, but the conditions of diaspora, existing in the vestibule as it were, offer unique perspective and experience, enabling one to see what remains outside “progress,” leaving one room to ruminate on what idealized progress can only mean. Look at the uncanny horror of a slick image export from a language learning model, and see our collective pursuit of an ideal self-representation. This representation of the human, with lines and scars smoothened, feelings transcended, through our loop of dreams and desires, told and untold, live and evolve in billions of datasets, some of which (like porn) tell more truth about what we covet (or think we covet).

The vast processing power and conducting qualities of rare metals required for increasingly energy-intensive computers, from GPUs for gaming and 3D rendering, to the violently wasteful, yet invisible, energy-sapping crypto-mining, ignorantly shilled by celebrities, become a painful metaphor for our wasteful annihilation of the planet. These resources include human data and labor, and despite many obstacles, the African continent gains increasing attention from swarming venture capitalists for its young, growing middle-class, tech-literate population and technological innovations.

Diverse languages, as with diverse tribes, existed beyond and across the dividing lines of nationhood engraved throughout the continent by colonialism, but language control has since been one of the most effective ways to control land for access to resources. One can hear lamentations at the reluctance of African teachers to teach in native languages and who even reprimand students for speaking them. When we comprehend what else language suppresses, such as cultures, knowledge systems, and distinct moral principles, which may differ from the standard fed to us, we might think differently about the accelerated consolidation of languages, meanings, and intentions, output by our digital deities, a homogenization echoed by reduced agricultural biodiversity.

As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o says, to be divorced from one’s mother tongue is a form of slavery, and language is more than a simple ordering and patterning of words or signs, but it runs deeper, through the body, through the soil and a continuous lineage of ancestry in dialogue with the earth. Many former colonized countries grapple with the in-between—the metaphysical struggle between imposed and inherent cultures and the disingenuous contradictions of a top-down moral design. How do we consider how “native” English speakers of formerly colonized countries use the language differently from what we might consider the standard?

So we reach the bubbling core of my book Red Earth and the interdisciplinary art project it is central to, which is no lament—quite the contrary, it is a meditation from a particular vantage point, even if I am partly divorced from my mother tongue. I am a fluent “Listener,” but I cannot confidently be a “Caller”—which, for me, is a strange vestibuled condition, an incomplete relationship to a native cosmology, swirling only at its fringes, one’s body feeling and intuiting, but rarely articulating this innate knowledge, even though I hear it, and feel it, like the red earth between my toes, and in how the sounds of palm leaves rustlings say so much more. I ask what this kind of in-between means for a world of precise statistical perspectives and binary ordering. I can see and feel what posthumanity has existed in this culture and what lies beyond the soul-sapping postcolonial discourses, where many wail and others nod along as if listening, but not really. What lies beyond? With my feet firmly planted on the ground, I try to touch this possibility, however faintly.

I grab this vestibule, an open secret, as a unique place of my own. Born to Nigerian parents and raised in the United Kingdom, I submit to the perpetual translation of my identity—a constant feedback loop, charging back and forth from one cosmos to the other. Growing up, this became a distinct private space removed from many other people in my immediate environment. Rather like the way I have existed between cultures, languages, and knowledge systems, I have wondered if there is any possibility of creating a dialogue between probabilistic computation based on the origins mentioned earlier and the metaphysical foundations of alternative origins, such as Yoruba culture. Or is the idea entirely paradoxical and pointless? The diasporic existence, a meshing of worlds across time and space, traversing coordinates, existing in motion, non-place, and uncertainty (a realm also concerning quantum mechanics), is an interesting point at which to consider where and how knowledge systems and language might meet, or to consider at least any impressionistic or metaphysical entanglement with these knowledge systems—mathematics in dialogue with ritual and tradition.

Famed Nobel laureate playwright and novelist Wole Soyinka addresses such parallels in his book Myth, Literature and the African World, when he posits the many similarities one could draw between Yoruba deities and the “universal relevance” of Greek gods significant to the origins of Western thought. One of the temporal concepts Soyinka addresses is the nonlinear conception of time beyond the human, a key concept in Yoruba thought and philosophy and a key driver to my Red Earth project. Soyinka suggests Yoruba is comparable with Greek mythology, or Judeo-Christian theology, in richness and depth, and how, for Yoruba, the degree of acceptance of something like nonchronological time is implicit, innate, and given reverence and understanding. Within such thought, one can also find moral dispositions, actions, and practice differing from those in the Judeo-Christian or Greek mythological definition of the term, where, for instance, the Greek gods, as Soyinka explains, are beholden to little or no consequence for their depravity. The only time they may bear consequence is when they infringe upon another deity, unlike the Yoruba deities, who commit transgressions, but must somehow acknowledge their actions. Soyinka suggests the existence of an alternative morality to the European, which may, to a large extent, be unconscious in Yoruba society. Yet, when I consider my diasporic vestibule, I consider these unconscious realms and how these subtleties, which are part of me, and others in our behavior and language, disappear in universalizing computational concepts.

I want to draw attention to the need for new archives of the future and new ways to think about a computational existence. The Red Earth Project is a speculative exercise about language, translation and data, and whose language, history, authority, and morality are now encoded into our digital realities. I am asking if our current trajectory will only entrench the negation covered here in feedback loops much faster and more granular than we can comprehend, and whether there is any room at all for provenance with this data or is it inherently flawed. Is computation, by its foundational principles, anathema to other metaphysical dimensions than the one from whence it came? Is this simply the underwhelming and even violent trajectory for the autonomy of alternate cultures, moral ideas, and outlooks as their lands of origin shudder and succumb to climate damage? As words drive my creative practice, with this book I eke out a metaphysical realm of my own, from which I can begin a process of experimentation on what equitable exchange between culture and computation could become, an interdisciplinary practice echoing my reality.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/10/17/what-lies-beyond-the-red-earth/

Excerpts, reviews + other links:

—Beyond the Zero

—Archive of Forgetfulness

—Berfrois

—Queen Mob's Teahouse

—Flat Journal

—Exhibition at Studio Hannibal, Berlin

Michael Salu is a British-born Nigerian writer, artist, scholar, editor and creative strategist with a strongly interdisciplinary practice. His written work has appeared in literary journals, magazines, art and academic publications, and as an artist, he has exhibited internationally. He runs House of Thought, an artistic research practice and consultancy focusing on bridging creative, critical thinking and technology and is part of Planetary Portals, a research collective. Red Earth is his first book.

Ed Atkins & Steven Zultanski - The characters find contentment in each other’s company, conversing in the placid, eerie rhythms of a sitcom in which conflict never arises. Unease is exported to furniture, gadgets, and bodily movements. The result is a counterintuitive kind of realism, lying somewhere between the procedural and the miraculous. There’s levitation.

 

Ed Atkins & Steven Zultanski, Sorcerer.

Prototype, 2023

Three friends hang out and share a long and unremarkable conversation about getting dressed, headaches, ticks, compression fantasies, surgery, and personal aspirations, among other things. When two of the friends go home for the night, the remaining one watches TV, dances, and takes apart his face in front of a giant mirror.

Originally a play, Sorcerer is a book about the pleasures of being together and being alone. The characters find contentment in each other’s company, conversing in the placid, eerie rhythms of a sitcom in which conflict never arises. Unease is exported to furniture, gadgets, and bodily movements. The result is a counterintuitive kind of realism, lying somewhere between the procedural and the miraculous. There’s levitation.

Part script, part novel, part manual, Sorcerer (Prototype) is the latest unclassifiable book written in collaboration between the artist and writer Ed Atkins and the poet and critic Steven Zultanski – a gentle, contemplative work about the pleasures of conversation, being with others, and being alone. ‘Unlike many narratives, Sorcerer does not put crisis and conflict at the centre of the story’, write Atkins and Zultanski, describing their theme as ‘the intractability of reality – both its resistance to clear meaning and its sweetness, weirdness.’ Atkins and Zultanski were in conversation with the art writer and journalist Emily LaBarge.

‘I once compared Sorcerer to a Harold Pinter play. But Pinter never instructed you on how to dismantle your face, amplify your house plumbing, levitate your computer, dance with your sofa, or place a penknife on a bed so that it appears as if no one put it there. Atkins and Zultanski’s play redesigns the contemporary home as a machine for comedy, sadness, and anxiety. Sorcerer is a unique work of theatre and literature, beautiful and unsettling. I can only relate it to the words of the late, great Angela Lansbury: “My family always said I’d travel anywhere to put on a false nose.”’ – Dan Fox

‘Sorcerer is the emphatic magic of lived-time actions. Those innocuous motions, felt and repeated, held in the muscular memory of our bodies and eyes and viscerally present. That we cannot see, but here, for a slowed minute, might feel in the familiarity of an action so often performed as to be invisible as an action at all. This is a dialogue between the object body and other objects, so distended and loud as to be near silent. Where each action held might also begin to corrupt, or stain, pulling too hard, tuning in and tearing out. A politics of who we are in how we are, learnt, programmed, actioned, and acted, felt and not always forlorn.’ – Ghislaine Leung

‘In this ingenious work, Zultanski and Atkins innovatively deploy both material and human gesture to paint a sad yet almost comic scenario of contemporaneity. While a group of friends conduct inane conversation about subjects like how to take off your pants, the material objects in the apartment bump and grind as if Satie’s Musique d’ameublement has come to life. The interminable redundancy of radios, kettles, radiators, squeaking, hissing, etc., finally dominate the set in a way that is as flat and nondescript as the friends’ conversation. Yet these people raise serious compassion in us, for they are us. Atkins and Zultanski’s brand of drolly underwrought utterance shows us once more that innovative device is the sine qua non of really good art.’ – Gail Scott

‘Vivid on the page, Sorcerer is a surprising and compelling hallucinatory theatre text for a cast of three. In it a set of hyper-naturalistic micro-conversations are laid out in an unblinking deadpan; crisp dialogues that focus in on the body, mapping the detail of daily actions and experiences from the removal of clothing, to the acquisition of new skills, and the precise interior feeling of headaches. Meanwhile, in a dynamic counterpoint to all the talk, a series of playful and increasingly strange physical transformations of the performers and the space they inhabit are proposed. Atkins and Zultanski have made the score for a complex, haunting event.’ – Tim Etchells

‘With Sorcerer, Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski invite us ’round for an evening of conversational bricolage, word games, and mild social debarment (with grapes). As guests, we are welcomed to an inanimate space, every bit as active as the gathering held within it, and duly reminded of the potential infallibility of a mixed company setting. We are privy to the trivial crosscut with the vital; we submit to compression fetish and sulphuric mythology; we ruminate on the merits of facial deconstruction, and most crucially of all, we are reminded once again about the awful sad joy of humanness and what it means to be alone.’ – Graham Lambkin

Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski on their Daring New Play

The artist and poet speak to frieze about staging the domestic intimacies of the pandemic and post-pandemic worlds

Andrew Durbin: How did you meet and when did your collaboration begin? Ed Atkins: We both moved to Copenhagen at about the same time and we quickly became friends. When Rikke Hedeager, the chief dramaturg at the city’s Revolver theatre, approached me about mounting a production there, the thought of inviting Steve was very quick and very easy. I was anxious not to superimpose some sort of contemporary art project onto a theatre setting but, rather, to take the invitation and the specific context at face value, and to approach it as an opportunity to do something new: to write, design and direct a play. Steven Zultanski: We wrote the script (Sorcerer, 2022) in the form of a novel and, at some point, we’ll probably publish it as such. It’s full of digressions, confusing formal shifts and descriptions of actions that don’t happen in the play. We see the project as moving across media – theatre, dance, literature. AD: Sorcerer is divided into halves, both of which you describe – in the play’s treatment – as ‘quiet, intimate and slightly awkward’. I’m curious about that awkwardness, something traditional theatre often wants to avoid. We hate it when an actor stumbles, misses a line, does something off-script – it’s worrying, anxiety-producing. Why make an awkward play?

SZ: We wrote Sorcerer over the last two years. For much of that time, due to the pandemic, we weren’t seeing anyone except for close friends. We hung out all the time and, even though nothing new was happening, we kept talking; that’s how we kept each other afloat. We recorded some of those evenings and used them to build the dialogue in the play. The transcriptions are awkward and meandering, but also completely comfortable, placid. Part of the awkwardness stems from its likeness to life itself, but it’s also an aesthetic preference that comes out of our interest in art film and documentary. We both tend to enjoy extreme virtuosity as well as things that are uncrafted, unedited or deliberately spoiled. To that end, we wanted the play to move between fidelities, between naturalistic action and floundering artifice. EA: It’s something I’ve been transposing to other media for a long time: the awkwardness that stems from the basic volatility of a body being there – or, in my case, in the heretical faking of that volatility. My work tries to repurpose the awkwardness endemic to live theatre, in order to draw attention to other kinds of failing performance and representation. I had a show at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt a few years ago titled Corpsing, and the specific rupture that term connotes – an actor breaking character – is pretty much the effect that governs most of the formal decisions in my videos and my writing. Relatedly, everything onstage in Sorcerer will be mic’d. Every creak and blurt will be excessively audible; those auditory coincidences of performative action will be rendered conspicuous. One of the things I learned from using animation is the outsize role sound has in materializing stuff – of corpsing things.

AD: What were some of the theatrical – or filmic or literary – precedents for you? EA: There are so many. Steve and I talk incessantly about our work and the things that inspire us. Our shared affinities allow us to speak a common language: they enable us to work with a certain presumed understanding, and without the need to explain too much. SZ: Chantal Akerman, Pina Bausch, John Cassavetes, Cornholio [from Beavis and Butt-Head, 1993–2011], Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Jacques Tati, Apichatpong Weerasethakul ...

EA: … and Robert Bresson. In that vein, we also really love a lot of young composers and musicians who are working with domestic sounds and everyday field recordings, such as Derek Baron, who makes a lot of pieces that sound like friends hanging out and playing music. They have a YouTube channel where you can watch them sight-read 18th-century chorales by Johann Sebastian Bach; something about the combination of Bach’s insuperable compositional virtuosity and the meticulous, yet slow and broken, nature of Derek’s sight-reading makes for a terrific example of what we’re talking about – of what we’re really drawn to. SZ: We’re also interested in and inspired by the social effects of intimacy – how it actually feels to be intimate. How the comfort of one’s closest friends can also be a kind of automation. When you really love other people, and you see them often, you act like automata together. You don’t need to be clever, and conversation can be a bit blank. There’s a nice paradox between extreme intimacy and nearly empty talking. EA: I think this is related but the opposite of awkwardness. The anxiety about an actor stumbling or a performance collapsing is about as far from this vacated intimacy among friends as I can imagine. Though they’re brought into proximity by the transposing of such intimacy to the stage. AD: How did the actors change – and develop – that intimacy? SZ: The actors – Lotte Andersen, Peter Christoffersen and Ida Cæcilie Rasmussen – quickly found their way to a warm, naturalistic interaction, as if they’re not even acting. The rehearsals mostly involved the detail-work of establishing the tone, and then figuring out where it could be broken or exaggerated. In the second half, Peter is on stage alone, in kind of a solo dance performance, so, for him, there’s the extra challenge of finding that intimacy with himself. He’s been working closely with the choreographer Nønne Svalholm to both remember and forget his body. EA: The stage convenes and sort of models the intimacy. It’s a small, naturalistic apartment interior, but with several conspicuous effects that serve as psychological and sensorial surrogates: just off-stage stands a bed, the covers of which writhe unceasingly; and there’s a huge mirror-screen at the back of the set, poised to vastly magnify whatever is placed before it. Transposing intimacy to the stage for Sorcerer has meant, in part, employing theatrical technologies to metaphorize it. - ANDREW DURBIN

https://www.frieze.com/article/ed-atkins-steven-zultanksi-sorcerer-2022-interview

Ed Atkins’s earlier work brought joy in the act of comparing our eczemas rather than our mythologies. In the 2010s, he appropriated 3-D characters from prosumer platforms to animate imperfect skins in micro-narratives of soft melancholia. The appeal lay in the fact that his computer-generated imagery never took the form of dystopian platitudes. Instead, he made use of CGI with the intentions of a playful and reclusive performance artist.

In William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (1977), four men ride through Colombian badlands in modded GMC M211 U.S. military cargo trucks loaded with sticks of dynamite, “sweating” nitroglycerin. One of these M211s bears the name Sorcerer, allegedly a symbol for the wizardry of fate. In retrospect, the title is enough for the film to share the aura of Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971) or, to push the thriller axis further into the supernatural, of John Carpenter’s Christine (1983). These cultural landmarks make the title of Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski’s own Sorcerer (2022) a strong modifier of its reception, setting a horizon of expectation for the emergence of horror within otherwise uneventful material.

The dialogue of the filmed play is based on the recording of a banal conversation between three friends. On stage, the protagonists are casually sipping beers around a coffee table. In this setting akin to that of a bizarro sitcom, they behave like über-stoic toons, as if they were secretly monitored by an unseen Judge Doom. As the main protagonist was left alone on stage, I thought of Goodbye to Language (2014), in which Godard quotes his younger self: "The difficulty is not in showing the forest, but in showing a room where one knows that the forest is a few paces away." In Sorcerer, Atkins and Zultanski effortlessly show a room from which you know a Spar convenience store is a long, cold half-mile away. All it takes is Peter Christoffersen rummaging through the bottom of a low fridge for leftovers. To see him sucking up soggy spaghetti late at night is to witness a drab triumph over inert tentacles. Sorcerer is also a game of gestural primers, in which one sees cold pasta become form in the way Wallace Stevens’s Necessary Angel sees a pineapple on a tabletop turn into an owl sitting humped (“it has a hundred eyes”).

Intervening on historical film material often feels like an act of defacement. Atkins’s Voilà la vérité (2022) is an enhancement of a short sequence from Dimitri Kirsanoff’s silent Ménilmontant (1926). The sequence stages the encounter between an old man (a bougnat, probably) and a young grisette in Paris’s northeastern district. In Kirsanoff’s original, the story begins with a ruthless axe murder, but Atkins selects one of its softer moments. While the destitute girl daydreams of the comforts of bourgeois interiors from a park bench, with her baby on her lap, the man hands her a piece of bread and a slice of dry sausage without a word.

Atkins pushes a whole array of digital tools powered by AI beyond mere restoration purposes, to a point that allows him to populate Kirsanoff’s images with vivid colors and teeming details. The video stands as a virtuosic play on the excesses of realist technique, as in the early colorizations of postcards, with their sometimes outrageous sentimentality. On the soundtrack—heavy breath, running tap water, bread crunching—Atkins and David Kamp make overexpressive use of Foley, without deference to the original images.

The sound of breathing plays a stronger role in Pianowork 2 (2023), in which Atkins’s hyperrealistic CGI alter ego interprets Jürg Frey’s 2001 piano composition Klavierstück 2. Atkins’s virtual performance evinces a signature attention to the minute movements and expressions rendered by the modeling software: seemingly unassured, briefly contemplative, quasi-simian at times. In this journey in and out of 468 soundings of a perfect fourth, they imbue our perception of Frey’s conceptual piece with the allure of a private struggle with the instrument, punctuated by moments of epiphanic relief.

In their exploration of the delicate balance between technological under- and overinvestment and through a commitment to uncanny realism, Atkins and his collaborators skillfully depict the inherently alien nature of intimacy. - OLI SUREL

https://www.screenslate.com/articles/ed-atkins-steven-zultanski-sorcerer

Gladstone is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by British artist Ed Atkins. The dual-venue installation is mounted in our 21st and 64th Street locations and marks the artist's first New York show with the gallery. Known for creating videos in which computer-animated proxies reflect on themes of loss, intimacy, abjection and melancholy, the artist's multidisciplinary approach to artmaking examines the increasingly permeable boundaries that separate life from its digital simulations. Addressing contemporary culture's fetish for media that painstakingly mimics the aesthetic contours of reality but fails to accommodate the burden of its subject, Atkins mines performance, theater, cinema, literature, and himself to examine the alive/dead dichotomy that ricochets between all bodies and their cybernated doppelgangers. A new booklet featuring an excerpt of the artist's recent writings accompanies the exhibition.

Premiering at 21st street is Pianowork 2, a new computer-generated animation that depicts the artist playing Jürg Frey's piano composition, Klavierstuck 2. Realized via a motion capture process that translated Atkins' real-time performance into a hyper-realistic 3D digital model, the video is charged with the task of maintaining its self-aware artificiality while also remaining faithful to the event it resuscitates. Eschewing his typical preference for generic digital surrogates and choosing instead to animate a model with his own likeness, the artist unmasks himself under the skin of a new avatar that edges incrementally closer to 'Ed Atkins,' but inevitably misses its mark. Captured in a single 20-minute performance, the film is a recursive compendium of duff chords, anxious grimaces, and phobic uncertainty. Though each failure is rendered in high-definition detail that suffuses Atkins' digital effigy with something familiarly human, the figure consistently exposes its own artifice. Running parallel to the insufficiencies of Atkins' performance are the video's own intentional technological shortcomings; here the real and the virtual shadow one another, becoming twinned models of inadequacy that unfold in alternate dimensions. Like the ventriloquist's dummy, the artist's double is fraught with the disorienting contradictions inherent to the uncanny; imbued with a surplus of artificial life, it cannot help but indicate death.

Shown in concert with Pianowork 2 is Sorcerer, the cinematic adaptation of a play written and produced in collaboration with writer Steven Zultanski. Documenting an uneventful evening at home among friends, Sorcerer examines the casual horror that often undergirds banality. Written, staged, and filmed to exploit our understanding of the structural tropes that drive sit-coms and teleplays, Sorcerer teases what Atkins and Zultanski refer to as a 'counterintuitive realism.' Though the script is constructed from transcripts of real conversations between a group of friends, the production remains formally bound to both dramaturgical strategy and televisual sleights of hand. Just as we slip in and out of believing the figure in Pianowork 2 is a representation of the artist himself, we encounter Sorcerer with a series of narrative expectations that remain dissatisfied when the first act collapses into the last without climax. The film's closing scene dramatizes this intentional failure; alone at the end of the evening, one of the players sits calmly down and disassembles his face, revealing himself as a double agent who straddles the parallel constructed realities unfolding both on the stage, and in the audience.

A pair of mechanized beds conceived by Zultanski and Atkins as props for Sorcerer dominate the artist's 64th street exhibition. Undulating as though occupied by some nebulous unknown, the sculptures function as both trespassers and referents, material indexes of the intractable distance between performance and life. Further activating the connection between the works in both galleries is a group of ten self-portraits rendered in colored pencil on paper. Executed in excruciating detail, these drawings formally present themselves as documentation of material reality, but like the artist's self-referential avatar, they are simply another series of Ed Atkins masks. Drawn from a perspective so close that the artist's face appears almost magnified, these works intentionally over identify with what Atkins refers to as a 'slavish fidelity' to the image. Recalling the unheimlich qualities inherent to his computer-authored virtual body, these portraits probe at issues of time, aging, and the possibilities for objective truth within the realm of representation.

Also included at 64th street is Voilà la verité, a short video in which Atkins reworks a single scene from Dimitri Kirasnoff's 1926 silent film Ménilmontant. The sequence depicts a distressed young woman who seems to be recalling the downward slope of her life while sitting on a park bench, locked in a reverie of trauma until an elderly man sits next to her and wordlessly begins to share his lunch. After Atkins digitized, colorized, and re-rendered the scene with the assistance of artificial intelligence software, he added a Foley soundtrack of naturalistic ambient sounds. Reanimated by technology, the video rejects its status as projection and gestures towards something more akin to the haunted house. The past has returned to the future, but it doesn't look quite the same. The title of the video is taken from the only discernible text in the film: the fragment of a headline visible on the newspaper in which the food is wrapped. 'Voilà la vérité' — 'This is the truth.' In Atkins' world, we know that what we're seeing is never exactly the truth, but perhaps it's something even closer.

Press release courtesy Gladstone Gallery.

https://ocula.com/art-galleries/gladstone-gallery/exhibitions/ed-atkins-with-steven-zultanski/

At Eden Eden, Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski present a feature-length film adaptation of their play, Sorcerer. The film is accompanied by a motorised bed that faintly writhes. Sorcerer is a film about the pleasures of being with others and of being alone. Three friends hang out and share a long and unremarkable conversation about getting dressed, headaches, ticks, compression fantasies, surgery, and their aspirations, among other things. When two of the friends go home for the night, the remaining one watches TV, dances, and takes apart their face in front of a giant mirror. The characters find contentment in each other’s company, conversing in the placid, eerie rhythms of a sitcom in which conflict never arises. Unease is mechanically exported to the set and to the camera: the stage is demarcated by unnecessarily hot, working radiators; the sound is relentlessly hissy, the result of dozens of microphones hidden in the furniture and under the floor; and many of the shots are claustrophobically tight, cutting off attention to the expansive space of the theatre and directing it toward insular, inscrutably private gestures. The dialogue for Sorcerer was built from transcriptions of Ed and Steven hanging out together with their friends. Sorcerer’s is a counterintuitive kind of realism, lying somewhere between the procedural and the miraculous. Magnifying a face or amplifying a couch brings the face or the couch into wild proximity via technological process. Gadgets (radiators, lighting, microphones, a mechanical squirming bed, etc.) are a way to access otherwise unavailable compassion. Or to facilitate voyeurism. Choreography is used to heighten or defamiliarise the banal in the bodies of the actors, in the same way as amplifying the couch pulls it nearer and pushes it further away at the same time. There’s the intractability of reality — both its resistance to clear meaning and its hyperbolic closeness. There’s levitation.

https://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/project/ed-atkins-steven-zultanski-at-eden-eden-berlin-25005