Published by the School for Poetic Computation in the spring 2022 “Dark Matters” zine linked here.
Image Description:
White ASCII text art on dark gray background that spells out the words to a poem. In spite of the amount of visual information, the lines vary in legibility and in some cases are extremely difficult to read.
The text reads the following:
Disentangle
Everyday in my practice I am accumulating skills
Sisyphus: What is the relationship between accumulation and sustainability?
Meditation, Running, Quitting Weed/Alcohol/Nicotine, Leaving Toxic Ex, Stop Talking to Transphobic Relatives, Find A New Hobby, Try Butt Stuff, Walk Your Dog
Data, Revenue, Debts, Municipalities, Bankruptcy, Discharge, Pension, State, Austerity, Modulate, Neoliberalism, Survey, Punishment, War, Demographic, Rallied, Capital, Mass, Punishment
The affair is always more interesting than the wedding
Word crashed during the writing process
More
Accumulation in the body looks like
Perfection
This zine is a collective project of the critical theory of technology class, “Dark Matters: Blackness, Surveillance and the Whiteness of the Screen,” stewarded by American Artist and Zainab Aliyu. It contains original writing and images from participants from the School for Poetic Computation. Sharing a namesake with Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, our class sought accountability to our mutual histories, studying how one reckons with the contention of their own body in public and in private. Within eight chapters— Ground, Interface, Watching, Being, Calculation, Accumulation and Prediction— we question how to remain critical of legacy power structures that are embedded in the technologies we interface with daily.