Inexpressivo is an art project by a brazilian writer (he/him) and different IA platforms. Their work is composed of poetry, experimental texts and short fiction in portuguese and english, together with AI-generated images. Xennoverse is their first public work.
Project:
‘Principles of Demonology’ explores the negotiation with Demons by two vertices, two acts of knowledge: summoning and possession. It tries to help the reader navigate through new forms of reading and writing, of acting and being act on, in summary, a set of principles for navigating outer-bodies.
It does that by a feedback loop of transformation: it’s composed by human generated texts, then IA generated texts, human-reaction-to-IA texts, IA-to-human texts, coping, pasting, excluding, adding, changing. It was written with the use of GPT-J-6B and the EleutherAI UI by a process of pandemonium: the reproduction of Demons who were then negotiated by the means displaced in the text.
A key aspect that the apprentice conjurer should know is that dealing with Demons is an act of playing with names. To not be fooled by the demons one is conjuring in the act of reading-writing, they must not get themselves misguided by the act of knowledge. When one embarks in an act of summoning and receive the knowledge a demon is willing to give, one should not be fooled by it’s charm and believe in their form, desire and motions, their dances, dreams and sorrows - never believe in the words of a poem, not because they are false (for the demons speaks the true), but because they hidden what it does not know. In acting in possession, the apprentice embarks in a negotiation outside the knowledge of the demon, outside of its name, in a new relationship with the knowledge one seeks.
Mastering these two forms of action, these two forms of experiencing outer-bodies, is the process of magik-making/thinking in the act of reading-writing. So, the experience of the text is not understood by these Principles as a subjective one - in the sense as experienced by one’s body - but a transversal one, a negotiation with the words, the grammar, the images, the hands, nights and the world. To summon, to expand, to align, to compose; to be possed, to interligate, to break, to reorganize.
The experience of the text is though not of an interpretation - of giving the text one’s reading - is a new formation between the conjurer and the demons they dare to invoke. Reading-writing is an act of knowing the outside of a text, their blanks, silences, the shadows under the chanting voice, and their forms, their motions and desires - and how they vanish, as soon as one grasp them.