Letter #2

There is something wild about this issue. Both the 
  work of Fran and Camille reaches out to different
  beings. Camille's approximation to the Ruff bird in 
  Finland and Fran's feral hyena. 
  
  Poets are trained to observe and feel but the Internet 
  obviously conditions the way we do this.
  As we switch between tabs we also switch between 
  different registers and materialities of knowledge 
  about the body. We switch between centuries too 
  searching for affinities across time and across gender 
  and species boundaries.

  The project of imagining our own reproductive politics 
  is perhaps facilitated by this Internet 
  re/searching. We can perhaps move against, as Camille Auer 
  says, 'the instrumentalisation of nature for a 
  reproductive futurism'. But before I make the mistake of 
  saying that by writing about an animal we become like 
  them I want to share a Deleuze quote. And as Fran Lock 
  says in a recent blog post entitled Vulgar Errors 
  and Ferral Subjects 'not to keep banging on about 
  Deleuze but...', and so the philosopher said: 'mimickery 
  is a bad concept. The crocodile does not reproduce a tree 
  trunk any more than a camealeon reproduces the colours 
  of its surroundings....The pink panther imitates nothing 
  it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its colour pink 
  on pink.'

  And what could be pinker than throwing your voice inside
  your computer and writing a love letter from there. In 
  Mara Karagianni's piece they use the bash shell scripting 
  language to instruct their terminal to replace words like 
  'administrator' with 'lovers'. I love this piece. 
  Mara introduces it by saying 'this code poem is inspired 
  by endless hours of working as a system administrator with 
  the terminal and at the same time the need to make art.'
  How many of us are making work from this experience of 
  simultaneous exhaustion and desire?

  This week I was talking with my partner about the 
  intersections of this project. It's very niche they said. 
  And it's true I didn't expect to get to the intersection 
  of code, poetry and reproductive politics so quickly. 

  The works in this issue all in some way materialise at 
  the level of the word, sentence, page, interface or 
  command line a struggle between a dominant reproductive 
  politics and their own reproductive imaginaries; between 
  work and labour; administration and love; maintenence and 
  pleasure.    
  
  this is work that imitates nothing.