Magmatism. Mechanism? Immanentism? Monetism? Systemism? Magnificentism? Maga-ism? Ammunitionism? Anarchism? Nanoplastism? Mathy-Platonism? Dataist dadaism? Big-dada dataism? Big-brother amanuensism?
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 Table by 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.
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