Abstract

Can we ever fully dislocate ideas of human-machine relations from either the anthropomorphized robot or the depersonalized computer console? Spool takes the form of a direct address, charting the devolution and ultimate breakdown of a relationship, delivered in initially regular packets of prose text which become increasingly afflicted by formal “malfunctions.” Its speaker is a living archive, leveraging a capacious bank of natural and unnatural images, scrambled into uncanniness by a machinic logic. Suffering the pangs of heartbreak, simulated or not, the speaker desperately weaves flailing links of non-meaning, seeking to shock, to seduce, to remonstrate, to implicate, to repay with pure strangeness the abuses of the reader. Though the speaker’s logic is absurd from the first poem, as though the cultivation of strangeness was encoded, accidentally or purposefully, as their primary function, there is a conscious movement from attempts at bridging a positive, if awkward, relationship between artificiality and the natural world, toward an emphasizing of their disparity, their incompatibility. At the same time, the speaker’s particular bank of images informs their machine nature; their references to anatomy, architecture, culture, all betray an unfamiliarity with embodied existence, and with a life which reaches beyond the confines of the digital. My principal task in working on this project was to invoke and curate a machinic voice, not by tinkering with software, but by calling attention to the paradoxically computer-like patterning of the unfiltered human thought process, exploring the boundaries of sanity and the mess of the interpersonal.