Sean Bonney - "poisons, their antidotes"
Before I started cataloging the items in my suitcase, I’d previously resolved this year to read more poetry- starting with the handful of poetry volumes and chapbooks in my collection. Frankly, I feel like I need to take a class or something to get in the mindset of poetry appreciation – from 1000 feet up poetry shares many of the attributes that make photography so interesting to me (particularly the scale of individual works and the history of artists publishing), but it’s difficult for me to orient myself, to get in the mindset a poem requires of the reader. Tonight’s zine du jour, Sean Bonney’s “poisons, their antidotes,” is the rare work of poetry I think I really get, at least in the sense that it’s been tumbling around in my brain, acting like a Katamari for disparate ideas and shards of ideas, a lightning rod for hard feelings that extend past its pages.
This is another publication I picked up at Grey Matter in Hadley Massachusetts. At the time I thought of it as a linguistic counter to the photographer Antony Cairns work (both Londoner’s), a kind of fractured sensibility of urbanity, the anomie of modern metropolis living. I also associated this work with concrete/visual poetry, as well as typewriter art, like the works of Ian Hamilton Finlay/Sylvester Houedard, and the cutups of writers like William Burroughs and Ann Quin. It sat in a weird spot for me, these strange little nonsense poems presented with an anarchic whimsy of overlaid and hand scrawled text, struck out lines shooting out in intersecting tangents. So I had some context for work like this, but mostly I puzzled over it for a bit and into the big blue suitcase it went.
I picked this up and reassessed it in January, about a year on from having purged the mainline social media platforms from my life. This was pretty tough for me, since Instagram had been the prime outlet for my photography, and even with the algorithmic changes made to encourage influencer product hocking de-listing my work, it was how I got my zines and photobooks and prints out into the world and kept abreast of my friends works after moving out to the west coast. The public kowtowing to reactionary politics in the wake of the presidential election was the prime mover for me to make my exit, but I was just also in a sensitive period of my life and didn't want to put my image out there, or to have my image frozen in amber. With how the algorithm punishes creators for skipping your daily posts, I felt like I was being forced to turn a wheel for the most awful people, and I'd rather not have any part of my work fueling the engine of their wealth. I'd rather use platforms run by people whose motives I can understand and whose politics are in line with mine and risk my work not being seen than have it be a part of something foul.
I deleted my accounts before the firehose of AI generated content really ratcheted up to where it's at now, and the present state of its roll-out into every facet of public life is the context in which this chapbook has taken on a great deal of significance for me. I don't want to go to in to a full on Luddite screed here, just suffice it to say that I hate it, I hate it and I think Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are trying to build the devil. I don't think inventing the cotton gin of the mind is a good thing, and I don't think we should be enriching them just because they think they've found an escape hatch from the specter of the trend to falling rate of profit. I remember last spring walking around by the beach and noticing that among someone's cute lawn decorations there was an AI generated banner of a squirrel and feeling revulsed. It's a year later now and I'm barraged by AI generated text, agent originating sales pitches are cluttering up my inbox at work and the owners of our company insisted on AI generated headshots for the new website. I drive under several AI generated billboards on my short commute to the office. I've retreated to Flickr to post my work, where follower-farmers feed my images into ChatGPT to extrude "feedback" on my photographs, and the sites owners promote their stupid in person festival with slop. The punishment for not paying for pro is seeing advertisements, which recognize your image content, categorize it, and display a grid of similar images available via iStock.
It feels like the world is being drowned in grey goo, and that it's not enough to refuse to use these tools or to use the platforms where they proliferate. You have to interact with the flattened products it produces, and just by being online, by participating, you're providing material to be scraped to grow a new world eating machine, or someone will stuff it with your image or your work and reduce you to the final decision of an LLM's analysis. It makes me sick!! Every time I am subjected to an LLM's vision of myself I feel a great indignity!! And in this landscape, it can feel like the only act of resistance is to not participate at all, to withdraw into hermeticism.
The poems in "poisons, their antidotes," might seem synthetic, the product of a broken stuttering robot, but chew on them a while and you'll see the human in them. The scattered quality of thought that refuses to issue forth, line by line, in perfect sequence. The way you might hear a phrase and tumble it over in your mind, with no referent at all, just to savor the way it feels and sounds. The Dionysian typographical strategies Bonney employs reflect these qualities of fragmentary consciousness, picking up shards of sounds and sights, narration and action from the unfolding environment, but they also stand as an example for a method of resistance to the endlessly indexing machines trawling the web, which was only given a name for me recently - "Dirty Data." -> https://error417.expectation.fail/13scoresagainsttechfascism/
"poisons, their antidotes" points to an application of these principles to the written word. Orienting your creative output towards something comprehensible to hands that can can approach a work of art from more than one angle, that can hold a book and turn it every which way. An alternative to the sleek, refined aesthetics of a million billion squarespace portfolios and instagram accounts which might have viewers bouncing off of it, but which resists the tide of regression to the mean like grand glacial remnants sitting in a flat field. To get messy and weird with it!!
xoxo
