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Cybernetics & Ghosts

On the digital future of writing

2023—
A guest edition by Michael Salu, for Writer's Mosaic, a new literary platform supported by the Royal Literary Fund. Inspired by an essay by Italo Calvino, this guest edition, with a host of writers and thinkers bring fiction, essay, and art together to think about authorship, computation, and the continuation and evolution of myth and story.

In Italo Calvino's 1967 essay Cybernetics and Ghosts, he riffs on the origin and evolution of language and offers us the speculative provocation that writing and human authorship might, one day, become a computationally reducible process.

This edition, edited and curated by Michael Salu, features four works of fiction, three essays, and some exploratory artworks, with wonderfully erudite contributions from Iphgenia Baal, Abeba Birhane, Tice Cin, Irenosen Okojie, Vanessa Onwuemezi, and Sara Saab which transport us through the angst-ridden tunnels of "cognitive capitalism", introduced by Salu's essay: The Collective Storyteller, on engaging new syntheses of memory.

This edition will be followed by a full anthology. More soon.

The Collective Storyteller, by Michael Salu

"Maybe this collective storyteller has already usurped the solo storyteller, in ways neither collective nor solo storytellers are yet aware of."
This guest edition opens with Salu's introductory essay 'The Collective Storyteller'. Salu thinks through the work of Italo Calvino, Stanislaw Lem, Yuk Hui and Douglas Hofstadter, to explore how best to engage expanded syntheses of memory through algorithmic development, led largely by probabalistic methodology.

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Human agency in the age of algorithms, by Abeba Birhane

"A reductive, simplistic, yet relatively neat mathematical model is offered as a streamlined solution for dealing with messy complex human behaviour."
"Metaphors are an important tool for understanding complex concepts. However, the problem arises when we forget metaphors are just that: metaphors."

Human Agency in the Age of Algorithms is an essay by cognitive scientist Abeba Birhane. She makes clear where we currently are with probabilistic machine learning and "AI" and reminds us of history's metaphors for human cognition.

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Abeba Birhane is a cognitive scientist researching human behaviour, social systems, and responsible and ethical Artificial Intelligence (AI). Her interdisciplinary research sits at the intersections of embodied cognitive science, machine learning, complexity science, and decoloniality theories. Her work includes audits of computational models and large scale datasets. Birhane is a Senior Fellow in Trustworthy AI at Mozilla Foundation and an Adjunct Assistant professor at the school of computer science and statistics at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

Ultimate Aloe vera, by Iphgenia Baal

"The scan misreads letters as other letters, imagines whole new glyphs. The alphabets that could've been…"
"Black Scholes requires black skulls for operation. Literary publishing iz dead, deaf, dead, on the defensive. Thank you very much Sophie, Laura et al…"

A short sharp dose of dismantled semantics from Iphgenia Baal.

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Iphgenia Baal is the author of multiple fiction titles including: Compliances w/Ben Graville (Toothgrinder, 2022) Man Hating Psycho (Influx Press, 2021); Death & Facebook (WHYLB, USA, 2018)/Merced Es Benz (Book Works, UK, 2016); Gentle Art (Trolley, 2012) and The Hardy Tree (Trolley Books, 2011). She has contributed to a wide range of countercultural titles including Nervemeter, Schizm, International Times and The White Review, as well as self-publishing assorted print and audio ephemera. She is also co-founder of the annual short film festival Santa Cruz Short.

The list, by Tice Cin

"There is an algorithm that starts to spike. The page begins to gain traction. She stops talking, and the bot carries on…"
"Everything about her is shadow banned, made invisible. She used to be a thinker. Now she feels predictive, with stories that won't stick, won't shatter."

Read how Tice Cin glides through a whisper network in her excellent slippery story/sound work.

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Tice Cin is an interdisciplinary artist from north London. She has an MA in English: Issues in Modern Culture from UCL. Tice has acted and performed at venues such as Battersea Arts Centre and the Barbican's Pit Theatre, and has been commissioned by organisations including St. Paul's Cathedral and Edinburgh International Book Festival. She was named one of Complex magazine's best music journalists of 2021, and has written for places such as DJ Mag and Mixmag. Her debut novel, Keeping the House (And Other Stories, 2021) was named one of the Guardian's Best Books of 2021, and has been featured in The Scotsman, The New York Times and The Washington Post. A DJ and music producer, Tice is preparing to release an accompanying album for Keeping the House with a host of talented features. A filmmaker, she is currently writing and co-directing three short films. With her collective Design Yourself, she explores what it means to be human when technology is changing everything

A hand a door, by Vanessa Onwuemezi

"I noticed the greasy handprint of her fangs, feasts, phones, franking, fingers, fingers is what I meant, appeared on all doors and I was unable to follow her."
"Something smooth in the roll of her pupils the curl of her mouth and the quickness of her head had said 'follow' and then she said the words 'follow me' I was already moving but still too slow, I'd fallen two or more doors behind her"

A short, twitchy unsettling journey with some other, or maybe, other self by Vanessa Onwuemezi

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Vanessa Onwuemezi is a writer and poet living in London. She is the winner of The White Review short story prize 2019 and her work has appeared in literary and art magazines, including Granta, frieze and Prototype. Her debut short story collection, Dark Neighbourhood, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2021 and was named one of The Guardian's best books of 2021. It was shortlisted for both the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the Edge Hill Prize in 2022. Her short story 'Green Afternoon' was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2022.

Caught, by Sara Saab

"The error caught us around the corner from the last pub that spat us out. The story he was telling about his father's racing greyhounds became one long syllable…"
"And you know the human ability to just plaster over error and remain. But then, we all do it."

See how Sara Saab extrapolates error in "Caught"

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Sara Saab was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and now lives in north London. Her fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Shimmer, The White Review, and elsewhere.

Alice Coltrane's Journey in Satchidananda: Digital spaces as restoration, by Irenosen Okojie

"The music becomes a meditation, a molten, silvery vehicle from an Afro-futurist past, an unknown destination requiring your pulse rate during REM."
"Alice's harp digital footprints keep rambling.

Alice's harp digital footprints are marauding.

Interconnected archives making room for

personal translations.

Permutations possessing.


Frequencies sitting within the body waiting to be unleashed."

Irenosen Okojie so gracefully reminds us how the virtual can open portals to restoration, sharing her first encounter with the work of Alice Coltrane, and what Alice's work signified in owning creative freedom beyond societal impositions.

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Irenosen Okojie is a Nigerian British author whose work combines the surreal and the mundane to create vivid narratives that play with form and language. Her short stories have been published internationally. Her writing has been featured in the New York Times, The Observer, The Guardian, the BBC and the Huffington Post. Her debut novel, Butterfly Fish and short story collection Speak Gigantular have won and been shortlisted for multiple awards. Her new collection, Nudibranch is published by Dialogue Books. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Selected Projects

Both complete works and experiments, thinking never breaks stride.
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