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Superconversations Day 18: Amy Ireland and Raphaël Gadot respond to Karl Holmqvist, "GORILLAZ GRRLZ"

Day 18 /// RESPONDING TO KARL HOLMQVIST – GORILLAZ GRRLZ, by AMY IRELAND & RAPHAËL GADOT

Artwork: from “poemfield3” by Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford

‘We gave no thought to any such things… It had been this way for tens, thousands, millions, billions of what were later defined as years. If we had thought about it, we would have said it would go on forever, this fluent, fluid world.

And then something occurred to us. The climate changed. We couldn’t breathe. It grew terribly cold. Far too cold for us. Everything we touched was poisonous. Noxious gasses and thin toxic airs flooded out oceanic zone… There were rumours of betrayal and sabotage, whisperings of alien invasion and mutant beings from another ship.

We mutated to such an extent that we were unrecognisable to ourselves, banding together in units of a kind, which, like everything had been unthinkable before. We found ourselves working as slave components of a system whose scales and complexities we could not comprehend. Were we their parasites? Were they ours? Either way we become components of our imprisonment. To all intents and purposes, we disappeared.’

Sadie Plant

G++ WARFARE

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Amy Ireland is an experimental poet based in Sydney, Australia. She is co-convenor of the philosophy and aesthetics research cluster Aesthetics After Finitude, and a member of the technomaterialist transfeminist collective Laboria Cuboniks.

Raphaël Gadot is a visual effects technical director. His recent work on feature films includes Interstellar, Prometheus, Iron Man 3, Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the LEGO Movie and focuses on procedural computer graphics.

2 Likes

In response to Holmqvist’s whimsical interweaving of hyperpop culture with subpop activist intervention, (Amy Ireland and Raphael Gadot) you appear to be leavening the texture of his lightweight ironic with the technical language of control. Contractual language that is transparently volitional- yet compulsively necessary to even access whatever information delivery institution demands it- has evolved its own meter, its own poetics. If Holmqvist is simply apposing the Spice and Guerilla Girls your response actively critiques the “free” platform on which he plays. The new meter you’ve established is more like a parking meter than free verse.

4 Likes

Thanks, Amy, Raphael, Tom for your strategic business decisions.

coins, nickels, roughly the same size… put in the canadian nickel and you get 3 minutes… vandals beware… a better view of the lock mechanism… next he inserts the lock into a sonic welding machine… the sound melts the plastic, welding the top and bottom pieces together… now these coins will be really tough to get out…

4 Likes

Let’s write poetic responses to these poems
poems reflecting poems reflecting poems
making the mathematic substrate of poetry visible is not
paving the paradise of for putting up a parking lot

if I was the president I would appoint Siri as the Poet laureate

3 Likes

My question is ~ Who/what is the ‘real’ agent of guerrilla warfare here?

@Ada I think we are talking about two kinds of warfare, the short game and the long game. i think the original poem engages in the former and the Amy’s in the latter.