(A shorter version of this dispatch appeared on Asymptote‘s blog here)
The ninth edition of the European Poetry Festival (London, UK, June-July 2026) involved exactly nine nations this year. Over 150 poets, many visiting from across Europe, presented new works at a series of “Camarade” events featuring poetry from Cyprus, Switzerland, Flanders, Estonia, Austria, Poland, Latvia, Norway, and Romania.
The festival has been founded and directed, and in most respects, single-handedly operated over the past decade by awarded poet, academic, author, and performer SJ Fowler, who also documents the festival on YouTube and at multiple literary venues.
Of the nine main features I only managed to attend the last, the Romanian poetry night at Poetry Society in Covent Garden on July 4th—-an event supported by RCI London and namely by their representative, poet, academic, and critic Gabriela Mocan. I was pleased to witness a prime illustration of Fowler’s trademark “camarade” concept that informs the entire festival. It involves pairing up each poet in the featured literature with one from a different background (British or other) and commissioning the resulting first-time duo to author and present a new collaborative/interactive work specially for the occasion.
Simona Nastac and Livia Franchini kicked off the night by presenting what they (ironically) called a “tutorial” on how to make a peace poem 106 years after Tristan Tzara’s “How to Make a Dadaist Poem.” An impressive paraphernalia of props ranging from DIY tapestry to toy music instruments were deployed—-—including a baby’s guitar amusedly played by Franchini in Jimi Hendrix’s graphic style (to which my 11-year old exclaimed, “Yay, now move on to Jimmy Page’s explicit style”). This facetiously childish plea for peace was strewn with memorable appropriations of literary landmarks, such as, “Thought is made in the mouth” (one of Tzara’s famous dicta), except now stated after tasting a lollipop. Miruna Fulgeanu and Andra Simons tapped into another rich pool of Romanian heritage, fairy tales and folklore rather than Dadaism. Their transnational, posthuman, gender-transcending approach was rather in the spirit of another literary school with Romanian roots, absurdism. The audience was evidently mesmerized when Simons gradually transitioned from reading to singing and finally to a most genuine blues performance. Luminita Amarie and Tony White represented probably the best demonstration of Fowler’s camaraderie in the literal personal-political sense of the term. An intriguing contrast informed the (anti)dialogic reading in which Amarie hummed her introspective, personal lyric brevities while White, in a commanding voice, did a ‘British (fake) translation’ by reading from one of his acclaimed novels. Amarie’s intermittently Romanian fragments were thus juxtaposed with an implicitly scathing excerpt in which street clashes triggered cynical discourse about the safety of riot police cracking down on demonstrators. Lastly, Margento and Nick Murray staged an intervention, tapping into Murray’s work on poetry gamification and tech that was leveraged in “astronomically” interacting with the other performer’s computational poetics and “monstrous moonshine” (i.e., algebraic-cosmological) intermediality.
“Camaraderie” was further enacted by featuring non-Romanian poets/performers that made equally rich and daring contributions to the event. Matt Martin & Albert Pellicer performed an infectiously engaging and farcically erudite critique of Eurocentrism, while Richard Ettiger & Victor Rees did a lyrically merciless indictment of illegal detainment and torture as a Western-culture-packaged not-to-worry-about. Annabel Taylor & Eleanor Wilders contributed a brief and incisive shared stream-of-conscience poem of wandering troubled physicality and erosive-corrosive shoreline unindulgent reverie. Last but not least, Katarína Krupičková & SJ Fowler himself presented a literally acrobatic and erotically charged number while improvising a both mundane and surreal dialogue touching on performance of/as delusion—–a tangibly alienating place or condition—–at times effusive and bonding, though, if risky an encounter.
If the Romanian evening was any indication, the European Poetry Festival continues to prove that its most enduring achievement lies not only in showcasing national poetries, but in creating genuinely new forms of dialogue—-of “camaraderie”—-between them.
Data is… not capta… Instead, we are the ones captured–contained, dissolved, and (re)molded–by its all‑consuming current. We are–and make together–ourselves complex-system data flows. That’s old news, yet blows out of proportion in Johanna Drucker‘s perspective. A vision, rather–literally. From the communication between (and cognition within) cells and tissue, to the vibration and–yes–light emitted by our brains, to the electromagnetism of beings and tech combined, to ubiquitous social media (telepathic) flows and cross-galactic entanglement, everything buzzes, resonates, and then roars in cosmo‑political, Whitmanesque‑paranoid, carnivalesquely erudite, and tragically exhilarating vistas. Salvador Dali’s prophetic yet hallucinatory artistic “method” and tenets, for example, even the whole of art (and literary) history, from Shakespeare to Bernadette Mayer, collapses into “a mere trifle in contrast to the hallucinations of the ever-emergent systems with which we are entangled.” Particularly when the latter are seen through Drucker’s World‑and‑Universe‑scale Webb telescope. The maddeningly panoramic picture of the pervasive “autopoiesis of stochastic systems” our culture consists of could have nvertheless only been captured by the long, meticulously polished mirrors of her own “stochastic poetics.”
Our inability to grasp overwhelming (sublime?) magnitude and systemic emergence (in Drucker’s contribution) also prevents us from making space for the void. Blankness—-literal empty lines or “space”—-does not exist in the writing of computational language models. Large language models (LLMs) need tokens to process and generate any kind of data, and therefore blankness itself becomes just another token. Bruno Ministro, a long-standing practitioner of literary reading and criticism as interactive performance, chose to expose in his Blank Archive the paradoxical “absence of absence” that LLMs exhibit not through a conventional essay but through performance. His analytical-creative approach is thus politically relevant and effective and, since algorithmically sophisticated, also aesthetically intriguing. The misleading brevity of the machinic-poetic output not only ironically points to the models’ profit‑driven productivity and, thus, verbosity, but also inevitably–and intermedially–provides “evidence that algorithmic systems do not merely execute instructions; they stage interpretation through form.”
Between those two scales lies a more intimate level: private reunion, ritual, and empathetic bonding. Emerging from the ongoing multimedia performance project ]sym.posion[, the work Tableby the artist collective PartSuspended features a cross‑disciplinary video piece and a collage that invite both interactive participation and focused reflection. Visual metaphors, modern-oracular verse, and musical soundscapes steer the digital media toward an ethos that blends feminist elemental ecopoetics, a revived ancient communal spirit, understated sophistication, and serene resistance. In this context the “magmatic” quality is not about scale, it is not dynamically sublime (nor negatively so), and it is not computationally—-hence not politically-—pungent or explicit. Instead, it is the calm, welcoming “magma” of shared lived experience and eco‑care (“ecophilia”) that flows through/as postdigital performance.
And then there is also the magma of improvization & defiance, the democracy of the jazz/rock (Gretchen Menn) solo and (Erin Manning’s) minor gesture, the camaraderie in performance and subversiveness at the European Poetry Festival. Thousands of poets have contributed over the years to the ever‑growing momentum for poetic collaboration. As evident–and compelling–in this candid testimonies and exchanges, that impetus has left an indelible imprint on poets and audiences alike and has sparked expansive networks of data-commoning and of ec(h)ophilic, autopoietic connectivity.
The European Poetry Festival is the biggest consistent celebration of continental poetry in the UK. For nine years as a festival, and over fifteen years as an event series, over 1000 European poets have performed new collaborations across the British Isles. The festival celebrates, in the UK and beyond, the grand resurgence in avant-garde and literary poetry that has marked the 21st century across Europe and it aims to not only innovate what a live poetry experience might be, but to inculcate community and engagement between poets across the continent, as well as between new audiences and complex poetries. At the heart of this is our collaborative model, the Camarade events. Here pairs of poets, visiting or based in the UK, create brand new works for each event, free to create as they wish. Each event often features multiple pairings, and so our events become energised, engaging playgrounds for experimentation as well as friendships. https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/
A festival built on collaboration should be considered in collaboration. Here I have asked five poets who represent the spirit of the European Poetry Festival over the last decade to reflect on what community at the European Poetry Festival has meant for them and their work, with derivation and idiosyncrasy inevitably welcome, given the experimental tone of the festival. Each poet has then generously provided me a question to answer. – SJ Fowler, May 2026
David Spittle:
Performing at the European Poetry Festival has become an integral part of my development as a writer in ways that have challenged and expanded my creative practice alongside stoking a burgeoning social network of fellow poets and artists. This network has continued to support and extend the possibilities of my own work, in addition to furthering my poetic education. Areas of the poetry and publishing culture in the UK have suffered from rising trends in anti-intellectualism, aesthetic conservatism, short-sighted and repetitive awards circuits and the sadly alienating knock-on influence of algorithmic cycles of commercial viability. This has roots in many problems and is not unique to the UK, however, in such times, the sincere and innovative spirit of the EPF has become an annual source of great renewal and sustenance. The festival has fostered a vast and diverse community across generations, countries and different practices that, passing through the possibilities of experimental poetry, has built a profound motor for cultural exchange and invention. Through SJ Fowler’s energy, curation and vision, I (and countless friends) have had the privilege to work with and discover many poets I would otherwise never have had the joy of encountering. It is a rare and wonderful experience to find such a genuinely inventive and welcoming space.
My question to Fowler would be: has your sense of what the festival is and can still aspire to be developed or changed over the years that you have been doing it?
SJ Fowler:
It was around the lockdown that I realised the festival had become sustainable because it was interpersonally sustaining. Or rather, my approach of putting collaboration first, rather than translation or singular solo readings, had led to people being put first, as everything was being created for the events, and communities and friendships spiralled out from this model. As such, in the absence of people getting together for one night to share new collaborative performances I realised the festival was sustainable for me for an individual as all extraneously reflective consideration, including goals or even curatorial visions, had drained away and I was just doing it, wanting to do it, to see people and see their work. I wanted to get a few hundred good people together, connect them, and have a lovely few weeks in their company, and all else could flow from that, because of that, often oblivious to me. Since then this has increasingly been the case, that I am able to be in the moment of the events and not mind the admin and effort it takes to build up to these moments, for they are just less nice but neutral moments in the service of me seeing and meeting and working with people.
Krišjānis Zeļģis:
European poetry festivals feel a bit like stepping into a small sports tournament. The first time I went, it seemed like everyone else had been doing this for years—seasoned, calm, already part of some invisible rhythm.
You’re paired with someone you don’t always know well, and sometimes you don’t fully understand each other. But there’s a shared task, and somehow you make it work. Through doubt, through chaos, through last-minute changes. It’s that same quiet tension before a competition begins—the mix of uncertainty and focus—followed by the realization that, despite everything, you’re ready enough.
Question to Steven. How big a role does the occasional failed reading play? For the festival and for those who read.
SJ Fowler:
Failure is wonderfully relative, but it does happen. A joke that isn’t a joke when one is interested in experimental work (that isn’t really experimental but is called such to define itself against that which is expected) is that nothing can fail as awkwardness and negative aesthetics are valuable, or sought. Realistically this is not the case when one wanted it to be good. I think there are times I feel this deeply when it is me, trying to take a risk and having a bad idea and not having the sense to mediate it. This has happened more than once, and it makes me wince, because I am performing at my own festival. When others perceive themselves as failing, it is often not the case, for we aren’t the best judge of ourselves, or what others take from what we do. The only failure which plays a big role is when people do things which seem the result of conceit. Reading twice as long as the allotted timeslot. That destabilises all things on the night. And once someone had bullied their collaborator into interviewing them in their creative collaboration slot. These things play a role in me learning how to curate and who to invite, but otherwise, to answer your question, there are few things at the fest that can be failures of any size because the model and permissiveness holds them tight as successes.
Lavinia Singer:
And the question – a special ‘silly riddle’ that ‘occurred widely throughout Europe’ which I hope captures some of the surprise and delight of the collaborations you so marvellously make happen:
It flew like a bird without feathers;
it sat in a tree without leaves;
a person comes without hands;
set it in motion without feet;
roasted it without fire;
and ate it without a mouth.
What is it?
SJ Fowler:
I’m so bad at riddles, which I’m very happy with, and relates to my feeling that a good piece of creative work – like the live poetry at the festival – is like an unanswered riddle. To fight against the desperate need to have things that suggest answers answered, to relinquish to the ambiguity of what it is actually like to be alive. This maybe one of the purposes of poetry, for me, and if this is so in a laid back and playful way, then that’s my taste. So no answer from me without a mouth.
Julia Rose Lewis:
For me the festival is a rare free opportunity to grow as a writer and observe other writers growing in real time. I attend as many of the events as possible in order to see how the poets work varies with their collaborators. A good collaboration has emergent properties, which means it is not reducible to elements of the work of either poet in the pair. This new complexity is what makes seeing the same poet perform three times in a week feel different. It is the willingness to become something that is not only ourselves that makes collaboration such a beautifully fulfilling challenge.
What can the fans of the festival do to further it?
SJ Fowler:
Be, as Julia has always been, present and supportive or all who also attend and perform, and share with me poets who they think would enjoy it and loose themselves in it, and tell people about it, and share the videos of it, and enjoy it while it lasts, as we should do with all things.
Zuzana Husarova:
connections beyond borders, into fluidity;
artistic experimentation beyond the thinkable and the experiential;
inspiration to clouds and cloth;
language at play: games, gestures, plays, and ludic win-win situations;
an exhaustion we seek to explore;
friendliness and depth;
physical poetry and sonic values;
the air we need to breathe
What is your message to the next poetic generation?
SJ Fowler:
Do your own thing and take the time to find out what that thing is by doing all the things you can and reading all the things you can and don’t put your foot down too early and do all this with other people in real life as much as possible and make loads of things and (this is all my opinion) do not prize the intellectual above the other forms of intelligence in writing, and living.
SJ Fowler is a writer, poet, artist and performer who lives in London. His work explores an expansive idea of poetry and literature in relationship with contemporary art. It explores the textual, visual, asemic, concrete, sonic, collaborative, performative, improvised, curatorial – through 50 publications, 400 performances in over 40 countries, 4 large scale event programs, numerous commissions, collaborations and more. http://www.stevenjfowler.com
Zuzana Husárová is a Slovak poet, performer, and scholar specializing in electronic literature, digital media, and intermedial and poetic performance. She is an Associate Professor of Digital Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, an editor for the gender-focused magazine Glosolália, and a vocalist in the music band Drť. She has published four poetry books — liminal, lucent, amoeba, and Hypomnemata — as well as Výsledky vzniku (laureate of a national poetry prize), a book generated by the neural network Liza Gennart and co-created with Ľubomír Panák, and a bilingual Slovak-German collection Hyper (translated by Martina Lisa). She has co-edited two collective monographs on electronic literature research. Her theoretical book The Culture of Neural Networks, co-authored with Karel Piorecký, received the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism in Electronic Literature. Over the last 15 years, she has also authored sound poetry projects and experimental poetic performances, including those co-created with Steven Fowler, which incorporate poetic, sonic, and physical movement.
Julia Rose Lewis is a teacher and writer. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Biology and Chemistry from Bryn Mawr College, her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Kingston University, and her Doctorate in Creative and Critical Writing from Cardiff University. She has taught at Kingston University, Cardiff University, and Indiana University Northwest. Her research explores collaboration, applied neurobiology, and contemporary experimental British poetry. She is the author of Phenomenology of the Feral (KFS 2017), High Erratic Ecology (KFS 2020), The Hen Wife (Contraband 2020), Misuse (KFS 2024). James Miller and she co-authored Strays (HVTN 2017). She and Nathan Hyland Walker co-authored The Velvet Protocol (KFS 2022). Paul Hawkins and she co-authored the visual poetry collection Postcards From Mental States (Hesterglock Press 2023). She has published ten pamphlets, the most recent of which is Still Life (Storybox Collective 2025). Her poetry collection Traumatism will be published by KFS press in August 2026.
Lavinia Singer is a poet and editor based in London. She is the author of Artifice (Prototype, 2023), Ornaments: a handbook (If a Leaf Falls/Glyph Press, 2020) and co-editor of Try To Be Better (Prototype, 2019), a creative-critical engagement with the poet W. S. Graham.
David Spittle is a poet, filmmaker and essayist. Spittle has published five poetry collections: How Eyes Rest (HVTN, 2025), Decomposing Robert (Black Herald Press, 2023), Rubbles (Broken Sleep Books, 2022), All Particles and Waves (Black Herald Press, 2020) and B O X (HVTN, 2018). Spittle’s films have screened at festivals and been broadcast on the BBC. His debut feature documentary, Gift of the Gab(2026), is a portrait of the poet SJ Fowler. His film criticism has appeared in Sight & Sound and as part of select Blu-ray releases. He continues independent research across film, the occult and poetics.
by Barbara Bridger, Noelia Diaz-Vicedo, Georgia Kalogeropoulou, Hari Marini – PartSuspended Artist Collective
TABLE by PartSuspended Artist Collective, presented in Compoetics inaugural issue, consists of a jointly authored paper, a collage and a video piece. It invites the reader/viewer to be part of a collective experience in which poetry, images, sound, video, performance and discussion combine to further our understanding of unity and collaboration. Every member of our collective contributed to its development, through proposals, discussion and original artwork.
TABLE is part of our the current project ]sym.posion[ (2022-ongoing); a series of multimedia performances that invite the audience to a table where a new subject is presented and explored each time. The project operates at the intersection of performance, installation, and social practice and aims to construct a collective experience. Drawing on the ancient spirit of the symposium, where food, dialogue, and collective reflection were inseparable, the project reinterprets communal gathering as a contemporary performative act.
Since 2022, ]sym.posion[ has had three different manifestations: ]sym.biosis.sym.posion[ (2023)took place in Audiovisual Arts Festival 2023, organised by the Department of Audiovisual Arts at the Ionian University inCorfu, Greece. A table travelled to various locations in the city and ended in an intimate dinner in the performance space. The audience was invited to participate in discussions that included a series of philosophical questions and provocations relating to public life, collective action, gender, diversity, ecophilia, cultural and spatial politics.
]eco.philia.sym.posion[ (2024) was part of the ECOPHILIA NOW International Festival 2024 that took place at Plyfa, Athens (Greece). It created an opportunity for the audience to participate in an intimate ritual of reminiscence, action and sharing and to consider what it means to rebuild their friendship (philia) with nature (home/eco). Through the embodied knowledge built collectively and the value of sharing, ]eco.philia.sym.posion[ constructed a new narrative that opposed the dystopian landscape and invited the audience to imagine a different future.
]dia.logos.sym.posion[ (2025)was part of the ECOPHILIA NOW International Festival 2025 that took place at To Pano Spiti and Lalava Workshop and Social Space in Athens. Around the symposion table we explored ‘dialogue’ not as a tool for agreement but as a fragile, necessary ritual – an open invitation to think, dream, and act together.
In ]sym.posion[, the table becomes a central scenographic device; a shared, immersive environment acting as both stage and commons: a site for a ritual where live music interweaves with gestures, words and projections like the courses in a collective feast. The project addresses urgent themes such as ecology, coexistence, collective action and democratic exchange through a collaborative artistic process.
Why TABLE?
The act of eating and drinking together around a table is a democratic, egalitarian and collaborative event, which has had special significance throughout history. A table surrounded by chairs is a domestic and informal place where we usually feel at home. It is a place familiar to us all, a space that can contain and facilitate intimate moments, where sharing is both possible and necessary.
Traditional theatre performances usually take place in a designated, formal space, where the roles of audience and performer are different and separate. Even those who are familiar with such events can be intimidated by a sense that there are unspoken rules to our conduct as audience members.
In our performance ]sym.posion[ performers and audience mingle. They sit alongside each other, eat and drink together and talk informally. Traditional hierarchies of performance and viewing are transgressed, allowing the possibilities of intervention, chance and improvisation. In this way, the performance which takes place around a table is essentially and inevitably a democratic, egalitarian and collaborative event.
The collaborative strategy and the cross form approach that we have again employed in TABLE for Compoetics is a simulation of our experience of making ]sym.posion[. It invites the reader/viewer to become part of a virtual dinner, where the artwork creates a shared space through words, images and sound – a space where imagination and artistic expression meet, opening possibilities for connection and collective reflection.
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For further information about PartSuspended Artist Collective please visit:
Note: ECOPHILIA NOW International Festival brings together artists, activists, environmentalists and thinkers from across Europe and beyond, and is rooted in the concept of ecophilia – the love and friendship (philia) for our common home (eco). The festival re-examines how feminist and inclusive art practices can reshape our understanding of nature, urban space, equality, and coexistence and can foster deeper connections between humans and the natural world.
For further information about ECOPHILIA NOW International Festival please visit:
PartSuspended Artist Collective works in a variety of art forms and disciplines. The collective uses a range of performance practices to explore the intersection between artistic creation and various aspects of contemporary life. PartSuspended’s work draws on personal and collective experiences, everyday life, social space and architecture in an attempt to imagine new possibilities for feminist action. PartSuspended is particularly interested in feminist work that asks questions and challenges conventional boundaries and forms. Their work is multimedia, multilingual and multidisciplinary.
In 2006, Hari Marini co-founded PartSuspended as a dynamic platform on which to foster performances, live art, video-work, installations, writing, participatory workshops and collaborations with artists from a variety of disciplines. The collective has presented their work to a variety of venues, symposia, conferences, online platforms and international festivals in the UK, USA, Spain, Greece, Serbia, Czech Republic.
Barbara Bridger is a core member of PartSuspended Artist Collective. She taught Theatre and Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts between 1990 and 2010 and is currently an independent writer, director and dramaturg. Her prose, poetry, scripts and critical writing have been widely published, performed and screened. She was Prose Writer of the Year 2002 (Writers Inc.) and has been short- listed for several other awards including Asham and Raymond Carver. At Dartington, Barbara Bridger helped to develop Scripted Media. This explored experimental approaches to script and scripting and her research also focuses on women’s writing and inclusive dramaturgical processes. https://independent.academia.edu/BarbaraBridger
Noèlia Diaz-Vicedo is a core member of PartSuspended Artist Collective. She is a Lecturer of Comparative Literature at the Department of Catalan Language and Culture at the University of Balearic Islands, Spain. She is also a poet and translator. She has published her poetry in various magazines and anthologies in Spain and USA. She has published two collections of poems: ‘Bloody Roots/ ArrelsSagnants’ in bilingual edition (Catalan-English), published by Francis Boutle Publishers, 2017 and ‘Cercels (ex)cèntrics’ published by Edicions Trememdes, 2023. She has performed her poetry around UK, Greece and Spain. She combines teaching with research on contemporary women’s poetry and gender studies at University of Balearic Islands.
Geo Kalogeropoulou (aka Dr Comet) is a core member of PartSuspended Artist Collective. She is a multidisciplinary artist and uses words, images, comics, music and performance in order to tell stories and explore alternative realities and affects. She approaches art in general in a DIY experimental style and her favorite themes revolve around the philosophy of time, space and time travel. In her comics and visual works she creates psychedelic environments using acrylics and collage in order to induce the reader/viewer into a stream of consciousness that becomes a philosophic trip. She is also a multi-instrumentalist (playing piano, synthesizers, electric guitar, saxophone, and traditional Greek instruments) and performs regularly in Athens either solo or in collaboration with other artists. Creating collectively is in the core of her practice, and she is also is part of the Lalava workshop and social space in Athens. https://www.instagram.com/drcomet/
Hari Marini is a performance maker, researcher, founding member and Artistic Director of PartSuspended Artist Collective (www.partsuspended.com), and Associate Professor of Performance and Intermediality, Department of Audio and Visual Arts, Ionian University. Her research focuses on social and material contexts and conditions of performance and their social and political effects. Hari’s research outputs have been published in leading academic journals, such as European Journal of Women’s Studies, Contemporary Theatre Review, Performance Research, Journal of Greek Media and Culture, and in the edited book Dramatic Architectures (CEAA/ESAP). Hari’s artistic practice, writing and practice-based research focus on poetics of spaces, performative architecture and women’s writing. Her creative writing and video-work have been published to journals and poetry collections such as Tears in the Fence, Interim: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics, ]performingborders[, and her bilingual book (Greek-English) entitled 28 Διαδρομές της/28 Paths of Her was published by AΚΑΚΙΑ Publications (https://akakia.net/en/shop/28-diadromes-ths-28-paths-of-her/).
Blank Archive begins with a paradox inherited from the digital versions of printed books: the notice “This page intentionally left blank” appearing on a page that is, evidently, not blank at all. That contradiction has stayed with me since I published the experimental book This page intentionally left blank (Lulu/Candonga, 2018), but here it shifts from the page of the book to the page of the browser, and from editorial convention to computational condition. What once functioned as a statement about layout now becomes a question about how absence is processed when writing, reading, and display are increasingly delegated to artificial intelligence systems.
The project asks what happens when blankness enters a technical environment that cannot easily accommodate it. Large language models are trained on trillions of tokens, yet the truly blank document seems to stand at the edge of that experience, as a limit case, a zero prompt, an empty context window, or a textual condition that resists ingestion while still demanding interpretation. In this sense, Blank Archive treats the blank page as a charged surface where the logics of computation and prediction become visible precisely because they cannot leave the page literally empty.
The work explores the conditions of writing and reading across natural language and programming language in the present landscape of generative AI. Its textual component, a list of 49 sentences, emerged through iterative exchanges in “Thinking mode” between a human (that’s me) and an AI chatbot. At the same time, the code for the webpages was produced almost entirely through vibe coding across multiple models, with only light editing afterward. In other words, the project is about the automated, unstable threshold where text becomes code, code becomes interface, and interface begins to speak back.
For designing the piece, six commercial language models were each asked to produce a micro-webpage from a single prompt. Each page had to prominently feature the sentence “This page intentionally left blank” while also permutating it through related formulations such as “This page intentionally contains no tokens,” “Training example intentionally left blank,” or “This completion intentionally left blank to preserve all possible completions.”
Using Perplexity.AI, each model was also instructed to simulate a historical permutation method, including Heap’s algorithm, Fisher–Yates’ shuffle, Steinhaus–Johnson–Trotter’s algorithm, Knuth’s Algorithm L (lexicographic order), Sattolo’s algorithm, and plain changes (aka change-ringing). Beyond that, the prompt imposed almost no stylistic constraint, allowing each system to reveal its own habits, defaults, excesses, and mannerisms through the page it produced.
ScreenshotScreenshot
Drift
The result is six competing versions of blankness, each carrying the aesthetic and procedural signature of the model that generated it. Some pages are spare and precise, others overdesigned or awkward, some frictionless, others obstructed by buttons, quirks, or unnecessary gestures that remain deliberately in place as part of the work. Rather than correcting these idiosyncrasies, Blank Archive preserves them as evidence that algorithmic systems do not merely execute instructions; they stage interpretation through form. Particularly when given carte blanche.
That instability is extended through an automatic redirection system: the six versions rotate at random every 40 seconds, which, according to recent studies, is the average human attention span. Instead of presenting absence as neutral or static, the work frames blankness as a structured and time-based condition, one that is encoded, interrupted, and continually reformatted by algorithmic procedures and interface decisions. What appears at first as repetition becomes a shifting field of subject positions, where meaning is redistributed through recurrence, variation, and (brute)forced transitions. In that sense, Blank Archive shares an affinity with Johanna Drucker’s argument that algorithmic writing is enunciative because it produces positions of address through iterative execution. The work makes visible that an algorithm does not simply permute tokens and an interface does not simply display them; both alter the position from which meaning is uttered, received, interpreted, and potentially contradicted. Against the fixed statement “This page intentionally left blank,” Blank Archive approaches blankness as an overdetermined structure: never outside language, never outside computation, never outside design, and never outside the systems now trained to continue from whatever is placed before them.
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Bruno Ministro is a professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Beja and a researcher at the University of Coimbra. He is also a poet committed to practice-based research as an alternative mode of knowledge production. His current research focuses on the automation of reading and writing, technological solutionism, and surveillance capitalism. Recent publications examine these topics in relation to experimental writing, digital media, and contemporary culture. His poetry books and digital works include tantascoisasparadizer (2013), quinquilharia (2014), 1_100 (2016), Collected Works (2017), Progress in Work (2021), and The Book of Ours (2025). These and other artistic and scholarly works can be found at hackingthetext.net.
We have seen how the meme streams operate, their ravenous swarms seep into the underground drains of awareness. Termite hungry they drive deep into the inventory of thought forms, their own consumption mad with frenzy as they penetrate the firewalls of once effective indifference. Synchronization occurs in the waveform atmosphere where signals get cross(ed) from the inevitable social pressure.
Does current research in what is known as “general resonance theory” (GRT) explain anything about the machinations of politics?[i] Could making connections from micro to macro levels of cognition and communication shift our understanding of what we understand as “the social medium” and provide a framework for describing how political forces self-organize and replicate? Predictable only within a short time window, these phenomena are non-linear, fundamentally stochastic in their unfolding, and operate outside of deterministic laws. But they are fully present and operational within the sphere of human experience where they are subject (unsuccessfully) to (inadequate) rational analysis. The autopoiesis of affective force fields gives them agency to act on and through the social realm. As for perturbations, they are everywhere. Just look around. How can we understand these phenomena?
An example? Any news story involving current events makes a dramatic case study—-an election cycle, a diplomatic negotiation, ongoing conflict, legal proceedings, celebrity event—-each unfolds in a process with many variables. Did someone look the wrong way? Make a facial expression that turned the tide? Leak a story? Profit from an announcement made late in a day? The “story” has no independent existence. It is an effect of its production, massively massaged by the communicative media, human and technological, as it takes shape through the social sphere.
Individual participation? The ripple of classic “butterfly effects” might have an impact at the cellular level in a single person’s body/brain that within instants changes the course of their immediate actions and impacts their entire history. The connection between communication and cognition unites the frequencies of sound and light with those of neurons and somatic electrical fields. Wearing the tinfoil covered helmet will not prevent this, people. That activity is all happening moment to moment. And do we even know what a moment is? What metric divides the continuum of unfolding events into discrete units such that the branching narrative of possibilities can be leveraged as decision points? My head hurts.
General resonance theory grows out of psychology and brain studies. It is premised on the idea that oscillatory neural activity occurs in living organisms, including human brains, and that these can synchronize to create a shared consciousness. Substantial empirical work has been done to test this theory, and it also correlates with work in microbiology in which electrical signals and electromagnetic waves are determined to play important roles in communication and coordination. The questions of consciousness get raised at every level, with microbiologist Michael Levin proposing his theory of TAME—-the Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere—-and researchers Jonathan Schooler and Tam Hunt suggesting that GRT solves the “Easy Part of the Hard Problem”—-which is, how “micro-conscious entities” combine “into higher-level macro-consciousness.”[ii] The science involved is fundamental physics—-oscillating waves trend towards synchronization. The extension of this work goes to the fringe rather quickly, with spin-off sites about “resonance” characterized by typography with lots of glowing auras…
But the fundamental premise is easy enough to accept. All living things create electromagnetic fields whose wave forms interact. Anyone who has sat in a room listening to multiple conversations can envision how this works, the noise levels rise past all tolerance as the sound waves clash with each other. By contrast, exuded body heat merges across the varied topology of the space. The drive towards equilibrium works differently with sound than with heat. Maxwell’s little demon wanted nothing to do with body odor, thank you. Let it reach an equilibrium state without help.
Back in the noisy room, pull the soundscape into focus with a tap on a water glass bringing attention towards you. The vibe alters and a vague but definite shared awareness arises. You can hear someone shift in their chair three tables away. Someone coughs. A speaker stands. The mood changes. A few people are looking at their phones. Several are messaging. The contents of the meeting spin out into the network in a ripple effect of waveforms. How does this relate to paranoia? How doesn’t it. Everything is available for surveillance and analysis. You are situated within an elaborate network of cross-hairs, points of connection that escalate more rapidly than your pathetic self-centered analytics can grasp. Every intervention in the info field produces another data derivative and the proliferation of connections is exponential. No matter how crazy hyper-obsessive you are, you cannot manufacture a pattern equivalent to the phenomena that are emerging faster than hot-footed nano flea circus circuits of transactional events. Just that.
New osmotic pollution distorts the very energy fields that emerge spontaneous from the conflict between journalistic rivals. Vortices of cognition, visible from space, swell and shrink in rapid cycles of waxing and waning formations.
Think about those messages. Where are they going and through what systems, filters, and surveillance channels do they pass? Every communication leaves a trace, a trail of data as it is transferred from screen to signal to packet and onward. But it also has a content profile and if the automated systems snag on an inflammatory word or passage, another record is generated, and another series of upload steps push your information into a process of review. No one much cares. We send our messages anyway, knowing our entire online/offline lives are subject to constant passive surveillance. Data analytics is just another way of saying connections are constant and pervasive. No way to stop that without simply disconnecting, and then the absence would register, date stamped, and a follow up through the restructuring of social patterns would occur. Credit card transactions, geo-positioning systems, the gasoline station stops, bank withdrawals/deposits. Not only is everything tracked, it’s all connected to elaborate analytic systems with safeguards but no guardrails. The sheer scale of data derivatives generated on a constant basis is sufficient to induce concern. Ripple effects indeed, and the proliferation of target points in the elaborate nodal network whose coordinate points exist at a nearly infinite number of scales.
Surveillance mechanisms in the overt technical sense are just the obvious part of the multiple systems into which we are integrated. The field of electromagnetic signals generated by living things is much more complicated than any examination focused on our communications technology would suggest, and that is already plenty fraught with frequencies, as we have just seen. The sum total of social energy far exceeds the simple physics of engineered systems. The larger field of communicative frequencies encompasses a massively manifold and multifarious universe of oscillations. I am only one tiny source of resonance within this complex field, even in my confessional mode. As already noted, the microbiologists are onto this as are the brain wave researchers. So are the folks who conjure all sorts of theories from the science. But the implications for paranoia are legion, and not yet fully articulated. Continue.
News feed frenzy primes the hive mind with illusions and phantasmatic inflation follows. More is swallowed whole than should be but the seepage into shared belief sways the opinion polls out of balance. No global maximum is determined before it is reached. Everything tilts and recalibrates at the cost of the control which it is out of… Scale blinds us to our impotence, tiny unit through which affect is transacted.
When William Belcher published Intellectual Electricity in 1798 he drew on the work of Sir Isaac Newton, whom he characterized as a “vibratist,” in order to justify his own theories of the vibratory nature of the universe.[iii] The poetics of Belcher’s text are striking, and anticipate much of the aesthetically tinged vocabulary that shows up in string theory where “magnetic moments” and “perturbation” appear. Earlier, Werner Heisenberg produced a description of “extended objects” to satisfy the need to account for the behavior of some unruly subatomic particles. Such language may or may not tickle your whiskers, depending on your disposition… No matter.
But for certain, Belcher could not have imagined that the “electricity” which exerted so strong a fascination on him would, two and a half centuries later, run as constant current through wires and networks all over the surface of the earth. Or that it would be used for telecommunications of all kinds in addition to providing energy to drive, spin, run, generate, propel, move, activate and process every sort of everything. Nor would he have been likely to conceptualize the workings of electric motors and their relation to the magnetic field of the earth, their dependence on the polarity of the planet.[iv] Every magnet has positive/negative poles that align with the magnetism of the earth. Fundamental. Motors spin because their rotors and stators have opposite charges that repel each other when charged. That is so basic that I never knew it until recently. (What happens to magnets in outer space? Is that where we are free from the bonds of attraction?)
Back to living things, consider this quotation from a 2025 publication in Science Direct: “it is becoming evident that electrical signaling is not limited to the animal kingdom but may be a universal form of cell-cell communication.”[v] The team of authors reporting on their research are microbiologists examining electrical activity at “subcellular, single-cell, and network-level” communication. Pause here just for a moment and recognize that this communication is ubiquitous. To reiterate, electrical fields are generated by every living organism. Going a step further, consider the research that measures EMF (electromagnetic fields) as they extend beyond the physical boundaries of the organism. In humans, the EMF can be measured several millimeters beyond the skull. For those in the aura reading business, this is justification of their practice. For those of use in the speculative theory realm, this is just the first piece in the larger concept of “resonance” as a pervasive feature of social and physical environments.
Enough on the basics. After all, this is fairly intuitive and doesn’t require elaborate detail with regard to the biochemistry/physics of chargers and where/how they are generated. Leave that for the laboratory research where they have the competence to carry it out. My project is to pursue the thesis that the current conditions of global politics are emergent at the level of a complex, non-homogenous, highly volatile, deeply perturbed autopoietic system produced by stochastic-chaotic forces working through the collective/aggregate psychic field of unprecedented energy activity. You know, just that. Consider the truism that never before in the history of humankind have we been so intimately and immediately connected through communication systems that extend us through electrical and electromagnetic fields. These combine the fields produced by the technological instruments we use as well as those we produced in/as ourselves at every level of brain, body, organs, systems, cells, and outward.
The power lines emit their own esoteric discharges creating a non-equilibrium plasma from which streamers of information snake into the surrounding air. Acceleration creates an electron avalanche, a surfeit of releases and responses, but the bright corona recognizes its contributing partners long enough to affirm affiliations. The stars do not align, but we do, comforted by the hum of ions singing in the spaces between us.
In 1845, Baron Carl von Reichenbach, came up with the term “Odic force,” to describe what he believed was the fundamental life force.[vi] Related to electricity and magnetism, as well as heat, the force, he believed, permeated all living things. He didn’t get around to crowd theory, but could have. The science of electromagnetism was sufficiently sophisticated by this point in the 19th century for its principles to be taken seriously, and the idea of bioelectromagnetism merely extended physics into the discussion of life forms, though not swarms. That came later. Reichenbach was discredited. His research was deemed quackery as he could not produce proof of his theories. Reichenbach has been redeemed, at least the basics of his notion of bioelectromagnetic fields has been picked up, independently, by current researchers. (As Belcher’s “vibrations” have been validated by the string theorists.) True, he was more attracted to darkened rooms and individuals with the empathic capacity to read auras than to scientific labs with their neatly calibrated instruments for measuring magnetic fields. Who can blame him? Now the work in biomagnetism and electrical energy, including release of photons by living organisms, has shifted to solid empirical footing. Ultraweak photon emissions can be detected and measured. Corona discharge. Electrified air molecules gain and lose electrons. We all give off small amount of light.[vii]
Radiance intensifies in the supercharged field of high stakes news. Trouble is an aftershock reaction to the anticipation of possibilities that shatter the comfort zone. Nothing imaginable is impossible, and the corruption of the body politic seeps into the individual spirit with pernicious delight, consuming energy, building momentum towards its own dark goals.
In the 1930s, Salvador Dali devised what he called a paranoiac-critical method as part of his artistic practice. This involved voluntarily inducing a paranoid state (fear, irrationality, persecution/surveillance/mind control) and then allowing all possible associations and interpretations to drive production–-and eventually reception–-of the work. The most important feature of the method was that it prompted hallucinatory production through imagery with multiple suggestive qualities, inexhaustible by a single reading, irreducible to a unified meaning. This was meant to produce a delirium of irrational linking.[viii] (Too bad he was also a fascist sympathizer. Maybe that is more than an incidental aspect of his method.) Dali also dallied with quantum mysticism, many tenets of which don’t seem particularly mystical these days.[ix] Statements like “No observer separate from reality […]” or “The body is only perceived as solid matter, in essence, made of energy and information” or “Time is a human perception not a reality” feel commonplace in our century, familiar as it is with quantum physics. The new-age tone of “There is a fundamental consciousness or intelligence that connects everyone” closely resembles Michael Levin’s “mind everywhere” concept.[x]
But Dali’s hyperbolic emphasis on associative excess presents a small scale version of the extreme condition of connections generated in the current technological imagination where paranoia, as already noted, will remain insufficient to the larger scale of the activity. Dali’s desire to hallucinate is a mere trifle in contrast to the hallucinations of the ever-emergent systems with which we are entangled, literally, in an unbounded condition of nonlocality infinitely increasing in density of connections. These are not general or generic, not a everything-to-everything replete condition, but rather, directed vectors that follow intention or its absence, affectively driven, like sniffers in a race towards a kill.
Deepfake schemes harvest fear and express it as vivid nightmare realizations that fulfill the collective anticipation of the worst thing that could happen. Individual propriety is inadequate to resist the shattering effects on what was once proprietary dignity which spirals out in response to the signals purporting to report a fact of being. All wrong and so potent.
What does it mean to invoke the autopoiesis of stochastic systems in contemporary political culture and connect that to paranoia? In Stochastic Poetics (2014), I attempted to lay out a theory of the non-linear development of cultural forms with poetry as the case study.[xi] Do we imagine that the forms of poetic expression emerge over time in a deterministic way? Was Ezra Pound inevitable within the lineage and legacy of William Shakespeare? Was Bernadette Mayer always to be anticipated once Hildegard of Bingen existed? Or was Marcel Proust or even Samuel Pepys the mechanism through which Mayer arrived at Midwinter Day?[xii] Or are the developments through which cultural forms emerge subject to variables that are not predictable? That seems to be the case, even though some transformations feel less predictable than others, and we can track, for instance, the history of Language Poetry through the education of its practitioners or of Postmodern architecture through the tradition of overthrowing precedent and citing historical motifs for new purposes. But what makes these come about? What makes any cultural or social phenomenon emerge? Poetics is a tiny laboratory example of the indeterminism of forms that become highly specific as they are instantiated. How to connect this to current political systems?
The difference between politics and poetics is, first of all, a matter of scale. Poets may exist in abundance, but politics makes many more people feel like stakeholders directly affected by decisions made at every level of public life. What makes people think as they do? Or, more importantly, what makes them not think? Rational discussions of these matters go nowhere because they do not engage with affect and its influence. The pretense of rational thought is the legacy of Enlightenment mythology. Give it up. The models of behavior within the social sphere should be based on the same level of volatility as weather whose fluid dynamics are the most complex system we analyze.[xiii] Subjective meteorology, psychic weather, can be analyzed at every scale. The rates of change vary with location, conditions, circumstances. All components are participatory. Fascism is alignment working through the social medium. Think iron filings on a surface and the force of a magnetic pole. That simple.
A terrifying power resides in the aggregation of systems, the emergence of self-organizing and dis-organizing influences moving through the social medium. The perturbances register unease as well as uplift excitement that generates its own extra forces. The actual conditions far exceed the capacity of our imaginary understanding. We are the medium through which these energies move, have their way. We serve as connecting tissue as well as being oscillators resonating with thought forms not our own. Through how many other minds, mouths, brains have those words passed before going through your own? We are only the pale shadow of the evolving complexity, conjured into being as an afterthought of those dynamic configurations. Connections faster than the speed of synapses, better than light, unfettered by space and time, functioning in fully non-local modes, all occur simultaneously and without end. Where is the record of all this, written in what light, what holographic information space, what field of participatory action, all inclusive?
A cautionary note: The adoption of language from quantum physics tends to go metaphoric very quickly, losing rigor and grounding in actual science. But certain terms supply concepts essential for social analysis—-superposition, entanglement/non-locality, and nondeterminism–-because social situations are complex systems, driven by more variables than can be predicted. Why it matters? Politics are the persuasion and torque zones of the social, the place where drives and distortions twist the rhetorical forces along lines of motivation and self-interest. Emergent phenomena? How could they be otherwise. Who benefits? Ideology 101. The more something appears to be natural, the more it is cultural. The question to ask—-in whose interests is it for something to appear to be “just what is”? Not enough to unmask. The task is as fluid as it is elusive, given the shape-shifting conditions of social life as a massive mutable emergent thought form.
Observing systems permeate the atmosphere they create. The mechanisms of uptake and transmission are the merest trifle in relation to the communication transfers that move through air, earth, mind, and matter. The connections made overtly, even covertly, barely begin to track the scale of exchange generated in each instant across the social spacetime.
To understand such alignments, recall magnetic fields and electromagnetic induction. These take us back again in a quick flyover to the 19th century figures Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. Just picture the handsome young Faraday, wrapping an iron bar with a wire coil and sending a current through it. Even the electrons were seduced into lining up. The swarm behavior of the particles is nothing to the effects at a larger scale. The concept of stigmergy invokes a connection between behaviors and agency, with the belief that actions leave a trace in the environment that they help guide further actions. This could be described as the reciprocity of experience and agency within a distributed system. Insect swarms will respond to light perturbations that disturb the group.[xiv] If political events are not a disruption of the social equilibrium, what is? The stochasm is a spastic pulse in the non-linear sequence of events shared by a social network. The pulse travels with the intensity of a wave form but each nodal point it moves through becomes another source from which the signal radiates outward. The signal does not remain intact as it is in play, but gets replaced at a variable refresh rate. But the flood through the system rushes the social mind into collective thought—-not as some weird telepathic merger, but as an ongoing process of aggregation (organizing and disorganizing simultaneously) of individual responses. If the specificity of such thoughtforms gets diluted as they emerge, the affective force intensifies. Back to the heat map image, not as an analogy, but as a model of what is occurring as force fields rise and fall. Psychic weather, again, the dynamics of the social atmosphere. The politics of perturbation and the perturbances of political formations are fully integrated. In some instances, even entangled, so intimately co-dependent (deep-end-ed) they cannot be imagined independently let alone act as autonomous agents. Once the concept of autonomy is off the table the political volatility of the whole assumes a new form.
Magnetic seduction emanates. Charisma wafts through air as if the very light were charged by the enigma of influence. Charms induce a reaction formation and the hesitant others fall into alignment, peas rolling into a trough. Resistance fades as the face mesmerizes the viewership in the wake of a breaking wave of consumption. Some configurations dissipate more rapidly than others as their imprint on the molecular structure of opinion fades.
Another note on our case study: A news briefing from the administration at which the Chief Executive speaks, reporters are present, as are security, staff, communications technicians, assistants through every level of hierarchy, and all of the many attendees as well as the extended networks of audience in their various degrees and temporalities of delay and distance. A common occurrence, we barely stop to consider it as a phenomenon and to reflect on the multiple dimensions of its actualization and infrastructures on which it depends. Rather than take the event apart with a simple description of its many interlocking pieces, let’s reimagine it as a signal field, an accumulation of electrical and electromagnetic actions and interactions. In other words, reduce the whole cultural and social situation to its physical essence and see what happens, watch as the story is not transmitted but transmutated through the mediating systems.
New research in the collective intelligence of cell groups maps onto behaviors of human groups. We aggregate and disaggregate. This work also demonstrates the capacities of single cells to “learn” and anticipate events.[xv] The cell groups “become more coherent in their causal structure after learning.” The suggestion that arises is that agency and cognition are scale free properties of sufficiently organized complex systems—-systems that can integrate information, store learned state, and exert coherent causal control over their future behavior. Again, Levin’s concept of “TAME—-Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere” includes a notion that information is retained through quantum field dynamics. Whatever that means. He points to biological memory systems that be believes are not “generating information ex nihilo, but rather accessing and interfacing with information already encoded in the quantum structure of space itself.” Okay, sure. With this in mind, he suggests that cognition is the scale free property of organized matter. A group in Australia at the Cortical Labs (CL1), claims that a biological computer of living human neural tissue they built has learned to play Doom (programmed in Python).[xvi] Earlier the same group experimented with an electro-active jelly, a polymer, with no biological parts, and interfaced it with a game of Pong. The substance improved performance accuracy in about 20 minutes (ion migration and distribution become a memory mechanism and connect with sensory-motor feedback loops). If ion migration can encode information through/in spatial distribution patterns then…. “space itself, at quantum scales, might possess intrinsic memory properties.”[xvii] This new theoretical framework of “spacememory” is relevant for describing the processes of stochastic formations that arise in the political sphere where self-reinforcing patterns give rise to forces of persuasion. What takes over takes us over.
Rogue thoughts create a ripple effect in the public atmosphere. The nodes and edges collapse into a system of rapid-fire exchange. The nightmare lights up. The skies are not immune to their attack and the cloud formations scramble messages to preserve their moisture in hope they can produce a cleansing rain. Still, the signals proliferate, gone viral in the headlights of attention on which they feed, sucking energy from its biosources.
Paranoia again. Think about it. No amount of imagining how connections are being made in every instant is sufficient to track where information is made, circulated, stored, distorted, reused, and multiplied. Go back to the “live” newscast of that press briefing. Start with what “live” means and the five to ten second delay that is standard practice and its relation to the femto-seconds of computational processing. The window of possibilities within which the chance to alter content exists is crammed with fact-checking and adherence to regulations. The combination of human scanners and AI monitors buzzes in the newsroom where the number of searches creates a network of moment to moment connections looking for overt and hidden meanings and language with unintended or insidious consequences. Every word might be a clue to some encoded discourse, some heinous semiotics in which thought forms appear just long enough to erase their footprint even as the memes create their own configurations in the aetheric mass of data synapses sparking through the atmosphere. Where do they go, these configured communications? In what universe does the pattern of electrical exchange remain inscribed in the history of electromagnetic waves released from the surface of the earth? Who reads this legend later? Now? In the earth-bound universe those fact-check searches generated by keystroke commands or voice prompts–-where do they go? Data expands exponentially and the networks of connection outstrip production as possibilities proliferate. The truck leaving from CERN with its small canister of antimatter might not reach its destination intact. Will thought remain in its formations long enough to reach anywhere?
The zero point field is where everything happens, Erwin Laszlo asserted, decades ago, thinking holographically. Merging into a hierarchical cognitive system, I alter my state of consciousness through distortion of the electromagnetic field. Slippery as an eel in oil my mind glides into the lowest possible slowest shared resonance state. Jelly brain.
The mechanics of Isaac Newton’s physics and mind-body dualism of René Descartes have long been superseded, useful as they may be in certain applied circumstances. For making a pulley, lifting a load, or building a bridge, or plotting a position on a coordinate graph their methods work. But for understanding space, time, or the psyche? Or, more to the point of the current crises, politics? Straitjacketed within empirical paradigms, the social “scientists” of our times continue their bleak bland analyses of the chaos spreading with the force of black mold into the global psycho-system and wonder at its force. The self-(dis)organizing systems of the autopoietic political sphere feed on meme streams whose viral potency replicates through every transaction. Wake up people. Demographics don’t explain the forces at work, only the substrate through which they operate.
From radiance to oscillation, from electromagnetism to communication fields, and from the mechanics of transmission to the dynamics of social atmospheres. Politics? The pole of alignment at any given point, location, moment, state. Affective forces drive the emerging alignments. We know the power of pheromones. Now, address the potency of pheromemes, those strategic carriers of meaning and affect. We are not doomed, just dynamically dissipative. The circumstantial situatedness of our condition cancels the myth of autonomy even if it does not obliterate the capacity for individual agency. We are locations in a field, activating our constrained dynamic within its sphere of influence. Or confluence. Induction is seduction, an alignment of specific particulars into a pattern of behavior. Do the systems replicate through us? Can they feed themselves and sustain their existence from an ongoing metabolic exchange? How could it be otherwise. Autopoietic, indeterminate in their behavior, constrained by the constitutive conditions of intra-active codependence the contemporary systems, the phenomena are in constant dynamic flux, unable to be contained in any easy analysis premised on deterministic mechanics. Psycho dynamics are fueled by paranoiac energies that function as a flywheel to the generative system. No end in sight. No insight ends. The charge proliferates. Maxwell’s happy demon gleefully abandons his post, leaving the sorting decisions to random generators of the social atmosphere.
Johanna Drucker is Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor Emerita in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, contemporary art, and digital humanities. Her recent book publications include Visualization and Interpretation (MIT Press, 2020), Iliazd: Meta-biography of a Modernist (Hopkins, 2022), Inventing the Alphabet (University of Chicago Press, 2022) and Affluvia: The toxic off-gassing of affluent culture (The Bridge, 2025). In addition to her scholarly work, Drucker is known for her creative artist’s book publications which are widely represented in museum and library collections and were the subject of a travelling retrospective, Druckworks: 40 years of books and projects, in 2012-2014. She had a retrospective exhibit of her visual work, Graphic Animism, in Los Angeles in early 2025. She has recently completed a full-length manuscript, Social Physics, on the topics covered in this article. For more information: www.johannadrucker.net and https://johannadrucker.substack.com/
[i] Tam Hunt and Jonathan Schooler, “The Easy Part of the Hard Problem: A Resonance Theory of Consciousness,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 2019 Oct 31:13:378. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31736728/
[ii] Michael Levin, “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds.” Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. 2022 Mar 24:16:768201 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8988303/
[iii] William Belcher, Intellectual Electricity: Novum Organum of vision, and grand mystic secret: Being an experimental and practical system of the passions, metaphysics, and religion, really genuine: with appropriate extracts from Sir Isaac Newton. (London: 1798)
[iv]Monolithic Power Systems, Basic Principles of Motor Operation, https://www.monolithicpower.com/en/learning/mpscholar/electric-motors/introduction-to-motors/basic-principles-of-motor-operation
[v] Shivani Shukla, Colin J. Comerci, Gürol M. Süel, and Zeinab Jahed. “Bioelectronic tools for understanding the universal language of electrical signaling across species and kingdoms.”
[vi] Baron Karl von Reichenback, Researches on Magnetism, Electricity, Heat, Light, Crystallization, and Chemical Attraction, Tr. William Gregory, London: Taylor, Walton, and Maberly, 1850. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044018742130&view=1up&seq=9
[vii] Mike McCrae, 7 January 2026, Health; https://www.sciencealert.com/we-emit-a-visible-light-that-vanishes-when-we-die-surprising-study-says
[viii] Salvador Dali, ”Paranoia Critical Method.” https://www.salvadordali.com/art-2/ and https://mma.pages.tufts.edu/fah188/clifford/Subsections/Paranoid%20Critical/paranoidcriticalmethod.html
[x] Levin, 2022 op.cit. and also, Michael Levin, “More Mind Everywhere.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13752-025-00524-5
[xi] Johanna Drucker, Stochastic Poetics (Los Angeles and NY: Druckwerk and Granary, 2012-2014).
[xii] Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day (NY: New Directions, 1982).
[xiii] My work Subjective Meteorology (2004) presents a systematic approach to personal/psychic weather based on a template from traditional meteorology, instrumentalizing the metaphors of scientific language towards a different end. Johanna Drucker, Subjective Meteorology (Charlottesville, VA: Druckwerk, 2004)
[xiv] Michael Sinhuber, Kasper van der Vaart, Nicholas T. Ouellett, “Response of insect swarms to dynamic illumination perturbations.” J.R. Soc. Interface. 2019. Jan 9. 16(150):20180739. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6364661/
[xvi] Cortical Labs, https://corticallabs.com/cl1.html see also, Andrew Paul, “Computer run on human brain cells learned to play “Doom.” March 2, 2026, Popular Science. https://www.popsci.com/technology/human-brain-cell-computer-plays-doom/
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