Humans

• Ginger Ko (author)
• Elæ Moss (artist)

ISBN

978-1-946031-94-5

LCCN

2021947711

Page count

124

Keywords

Poetry, Prose, Visual Poetry, Technology, Computers, Computing, Tech, Mechanics, Machines, Science, Programming, Automation, Code, Coding, Phone, App, Hybrid, Interactive, Digital, Colonialism, Anti-Colonialism, Racism, Capitalism, Anti-Racism, Anti-Capitalism

Publication date

2022

Language(s)

English

Publication media type

Print Document
Hybrid

Publication series

Unlimited Editions

Power On

POWER ON is written from the perspective of our automated futures, the machines that have been coded with our present imperatives and ethics. If our colonialist interaction with the natural world and each other is presently characterized by racist and capitalist homogenization and amnesia, and if we think of technology as more than tools but as our representatives, then technological entities that carry out our work are the turning on of our ongoing script, never meant to end until forced to by powering off — through an impossibility of continuance, however that will come about.

Connect to POWER ON on your mobile device by interacting with the project’s app, which seeks to explore the ethical implications of technoscience programming by allowing readers/users to collaborate with the manuscript by uploading your own individualized perspectives into the manuscript, creating a collaboration between machine and reader. And be sure to connect to @poweronpoetry on Instagram for updates on events, app details, video and audio content, and more.

“Ginger Ko’s POWER ON feels like a gallery of the most gruesome humanoid sculptures: the desire to persist saddens, deforms, and resurfaces with new extremities of the familiar in each poem. How do we love something so much that has no way of knowing we exist? Is it a dead god? tech? our humanity? Within her poems, Ko’s question becomes: How do we live with ourselves when we are our ‘childrens’ parasites, we mate / with the colonizer / and produce our hosts.’ Here, Ko shows the foreboding glop of motherblood, its devouring passion as it reckons with its parallel conspiracy — to destroy/devour — in these unsettling, and exacting lyric compilations.” — Cynthia Arrieu-King, author of FUTURELESS LANGUAGES and THE BETWEENS

“Ginger Ko’s POWER ON invites/projects us into — and guides/protects us through — the future of poetry, in which the distinction between ourselves and what we’ve created and what has created us and the consequences of creation, are automated, animated, and, on the dark side of that complex mis/fortune, made perilous. And yet I wonder: is a book — an experience — that extrapolates the tension between a future overrun by the most despairing of our ideations and a future as the wondrous proliferation of intercommunal energies, not, in fact, the biography of the beginning of poetry?” — Brandon Shimoda, author of THE GRAVE ON THE WALL and THE DESERT

About the Contributor(s)

Ginger Ko is an Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University’s MFA program in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing. She is the author of Motherlover (Bloof Books) and Inherit (Sidebrow), as well as several chapbooks. Her poetry and essays can be found in The Atlantic, American Poetry Review, The Offing, VIDA Review, and elsewhere. You can find her online at www.gingerko.com.

Elæ Moss is a multimodal artist-researcher, curator, designer, and educator. Seeking Speculative Solidarities, they employ analog and digital media to investigate human, institutional and ecological systems and to iterate open source strategies for ecological and social change. Recent projects have shown at La Mama Galleria, EFA Project Space, STWST/Ars Electronica, Usdan Gallery, Judson Church, the Segal Center, SOHO20, Dixon Place, and the Exponential Festival, among others. Select publications include Big Echo, Tagvverk, Vestiges, Matters of Feminist Practice, The Transgender Narratives Anthology, Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, The Brooklyn Poets Anthology, and Resist Much, Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance. Books include Ground, Blood Altas, Overview Effect, Sweet and Low: Indefinite Singular, Bodies of Work, and The Precarity Bodyhacking Work-Book and Guide. Moss is a Professor at Pratt Institute, and the developer / founder of the Operating System + Liminal Lab. More at: https://onlywhatican.net and https://theoperatingsystem.org.