The question is not whether we were supposed to know so much— we do. As a function of our machines, we see, we hear, we know. We train simulations that we might pre-witness the future. We entertain ourselves by supplying databanks with our aesthetics (Dress To Impress), our environments (Pokemon Go), and our preferences (Social Media). We train machine vision models for the purposes of, as of old, navigating, exploring, locating, exploiting. We program machines to make scenes and simulacrum (Baudrillard, Eco). Yes, we,wittingly, for a salary or for social position, to inform our politics or to numb ourselves— we leverage [machinewitness] to our own ends, too. Where the tendrils of empires touch you, they do not just take resources, labor, and attention— they establish lines of communication by which information, via surveillance, subversion, or sabotage, is gathered and sent. But, as much as [Machinewitness] threatens, captures, [Machinewitness] also records, holds accountable. In this situation, from our positions, how might poetry, fiction, essay, image-text, program, and demo turn our machines’ visions to purposes that run skew?
[Machinewitness] invites language — poetic, coded, critical, fictional, visual — that captures capture, that witnesses witness.
[Machinewitness]
- seeks work that overwrites, that knows it’s being wiretapped.
- wants you to cook with locally-foraged language you identified with an app.
- invites pieces that take care to construct, take work to chew and ingest.
- knows that the image-to-text feature will scramble translations, but were you ever under the impression that a word-machine could comply perfectly 100% of the time when you and your language won’t either?
- calls for critical hallucinations; invites the glitch; is open to drone; seeks the scoop; needs raised consciousness.
- wants you to stand your ground.
Re•mediate seeks work in the following formats:
- Computer-assisted writing + critical experiments with AI
- Prose <4000 words (fiction, nonfiction, interviews, criticism)
- Poems <150 lines (+ Concrete & visual poetry)
- Image-text, experimental, video, + code works
- Interactive, Animated, + Multimedia work
