Parapoetics - A Literature Beyond the Human is an investigation into the array of possibilities and problems for a transspecies semiotics in various aesthetic modulations. Parapoetics exorcises the all-too-human quest for monopoly over voice, inscription, worlding. Parapoetics revises grammatical categories, pronominal demarcations, and experiments with alternative modes of (re)presentation within a 'we' of planetary proportions. Parapoetics insists on multispecies storytellings. Parapoetics asks: Who speaks, and on behalf of whom? How do nonhumans, ahumans, inhumans articulate thenselves, and how can 'we' avoid the anthropocentric error of always measuring these articulations against the arbitrariness of human linguistic signs in order to find but an alleged absence or silence? As Wittgenstein pointed out, as long as our language remains the same, it will seduce us into asking the same questions over and over again. Parapoetics asks what other semiotic possibilities can be afforded to us. It asks how to speculate and engage in parallel vocabularies in unknown sign systems. Parapoetics challenges the ideas of what it means to signify, in what manner significations can manifest themselves, and what promises for our relations to Others a poetry in an expanded, transhuman field might hold.
Works included in the project:
About Trees: Katie Holten
Suture: Morten Søndergaard
Amoeda: A digital art project developed with CADA, FACT and workshop participants, coming 2016
The Parapoetic Series is an ongoing exploration of the im/possibilities of multispecies storytellings and transhuman means of articulation. It is co-published by Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, and the cover designs are created by André Fuchs (Fuchs Borst), who works conceptually with patterns and translates geometries found in nature that follow fractal, aleatory and aperiodic structures.
The two first titles in the series are:
Protean Poetics, Aaron M. Moe
The Great White North, a rawlings
More titles to follow shortly