about machine poetry. a manifesto for the destruction of poets.

"who can possibly think about art, when there is a possibility for happiness?", asks a contemporary writer. and if art is actually today's sleeping pill, wouldn't it be better to destroy that false refuge in order to face our unhappiness directly, and overcome it?

1. the transformation of subversion into spectacle has left the poet (whose mission is to subvert language) without a possibility for escape. today, the poet is a rat trembling against the wall, under the dark shadow of the spectacular powers.

2. humanism has no place in a world that is quickly being destroyed by humans. the "human" charge that poetry used to bear is not morally sustainable anymore.

3. the meaning-generating connection between symbol (word) and signal (reality) has been broken beyond repair, thanks to the linguistic abuses in areas such as politics, mass communication, marketing and the savage and excessive consumerism of our societies. meaning has become a banal commodity, and is subjected to the dynamics of fashion.

4. it is no longer possible to "make sense", everything has been emptied from its meaning. this is an age of empty shells. the notions of "truth" or "lie", for example, have lost all of their specific weight because of the proliferation of "bullshit" as a normalized mode of communication.

5. electronic calculating machines, the capitalist tools / media par excellence, haven't been used to liberate man from work, mediocrity and unhappiness, in spite of the promises made by multiple voices. instead, they have been used to further enslave man, making him increasingly dependent, isolated and unhappy. their pervasivity has spread this dependency as a virus, infiltrating even into life's most intimate areas.

6. nevertheless, such machines can still be used to liberate man from his own chains. this seems to be the ultimate frontier, and also our last resource.

7. a great deal of what man destroys every time he "creates" can be saved, if that creative work is trusted to machines.

8. very little energy and spirit is left for man after the act of "creation", after having experienced the sensation of formally expressing the very depths of his soul. both in literature and in art, creations acquire significance only when they are published or exhibited. This leads the "creator" to exhausting efforts, and humiliating extremes. the crisis of language and the overabundance of stimuli turn the published creations into mere cartoons of the sought-after depths, and condemn them to an immediate and miserable death, unless they are kept artificially alive by a necrophilic market.

9. poetic machines, or poem-generating algorithms, open up the last possible way towards liberation: overcoming art in order to find the fullness of life. let the machines do poetry, so we can dedicate ourselves to living our lifes.

10. machine poetry does not seek to represent, to express, to reflect, or to capture experience; it does not seek to heighten or degrade, it's not a vehicle for anything or anyone; it simply is. machine poetry is chemically pure, since it comes from calculus, from the execution of a program.

11. machine poetry is imperfect from many linguistic viewpoints, but it is precisely in this imperfection where its richness lies. the suppression of grammar leads to the suppression of god, someone said. machine poetry, dismantled and fragmented, seeks to be built within the mind and the soul of each reader. if the world is now unintelligible, machine poetry is, at first, a user's manual for re-reading the world. however, machine poetry aspires to be read exclusively by machines in an urgently near future. liberation will come also for the human reader.

12. machine poetry will fill humanity's last years with broken but beautiful words.

girona, 2006.

eugenio tisselli
alberto peralta de legarreta
raül lacabanya de buenos aïres
Natacha de nadie
Pabluster
Lloyd Woodstock de Letters In Order
JB Wock
xochimiztli sosa
Le Bavarde
Guy Debord
oçko fiao
alejandro tarrab
afra-Nite
pardovandai
Istan Die
douglas fugazi
Cupido Quimico
Ricardo trigo
Arturo Sendi

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