statement(s) of intent

It now appears incontestable that the natural world has been, and is still, suffering from its centuries old role-reversal, its transfiguration through the industrial age into an instrumentalized resource assemblage, occasionally unpredictable but otherwise subject to the immense and all-encompassing streamlinings of modernism. Modernism being a metastisis of three hundred years of momentum set in motion by the Enlightenment: since then, nature has been framed as something which is heroically overcome.

Scientific discourse, however, is in the midst of shedding machine metaphors in favor of digital-organic models, which has opened to us a space both novel and immemorial: as we are rearticulated through molecular biology as systems quite akin to those found in nature, our perceptions of ourselves and of the natural world are problematized and rendered inextricable; this is not to speak of the imperatives which have arisen as human impact on the earth rapidly renders itself distressingly intelligible. Our habitual and entirely contingent configurations are, ecologically speaking, endangered.

Of course, we have never been truly apart, and this intertwining, both immemorial and urgent, is the nexus of our concern, our curiosities. If poetry has its origin in the body, and the body is bound up in a relationship with the natural world, we are compelled to interrogate the connections between processes of the natural world, as well as body/language parallels.

As poets--utilizing a particularly broad understanding of the term: Poesis: We are interested and invested in an interdisciplinary multitude of making-- we are highly ambivalent towards any sort of Romantic, transcendentalizing discourse which refers to nature, understanding the reference is always an act of instrumentalization. Instead, this is an ongoing, open-source, critical-creative emergence which aims to remain acutely aware of itself and its network of entanglements with biology and ecology. Aware, also, that the connotations of 'eco' & 'poetics' have been depoliticized and widely disseminated and accepted by even those whom would appear most invested in their activity, effectively limiting their possibilities and futures.

We are ambivalent towards confessional accounts, not because we are adverse to the idea of a self, but because the acts of looking outwards and looking inwards are no longer discrete. There is wilderness within and without. This is a double articulation, and humans are no longer the only creative agent, perhaps not even the primary subject: as Bachelard reminded us, "According to the Greeks, trees are alphabets."

We are, as many poets and designers before us, looking and heading towards the natural world, but not with the intent to escape from civilization and its contemporary predicaments, but to gain a perspective on them, to reinvigorate our sense of agency that is rooted in our circulatory system, so that we may engage from new points of vantage. The eco-governmentality of poetics: design as not only the means by which we may relocate ourselves in the natural world (a nomadic indigeneaity), but also as political formations which may act as agents in a globalized ecological-economic context. How might a revaluation of the power relations between biology, poetry, and the natural world inaugurate new forms of action, of governmentality, of resistance? Of art? And what might the nature of power and the power of nature have in common?

Also: we are asking how we may utilize a medium (the internet) whose essential characteristic is speed, to offer modes of thinking, of looking, of making, which are not fully driven by (while fully aware of) contemporary temporalities.

We are attempting to articulate an ethics of creating spaces with a perceptiveness to environment, and are at present investigating unutilized limnal zones (like a game, really. What are games but making room to play), rupturing and activating and co-mingling the territories that have been established between categories including, but not limited to: critical/creative, physiology/psychology, biology/ecology, interior/exterior, form/content, language/poetry, design/utility, body/landscape.

This is not an act of annexing an individual or group apart, but rather a proliferation into neglected or previously-undelineated realms. An infection, a mutation of poetry-biology-ecology, a stimulation of new formations of poetic biodiveristy. Impure ideas. Writing, photography, installation, music, architecture, hybrids yet to come.

For now, this is a blog because we feel our project to be urgent, and because this is an attempt to foster a movement whose effects are lasting through a medium which is ephemeral and often thought to be lacking in physicality. But it is our sincere hope and desire (among thousands of streams of hope and desire) that the spores offered here will be carried through and out of bitstreams and dispersed into realms and disciplines unimagined by ourselves...