"MOUSSE #88" (2024) by MOUSSE MGAGZINE.
Mousse is a bimonthly Italian contemporary art magazine launched in 2006 that features interviews, dialogues and essays by important figures in the fields of international criticism, visual arts and curation, as well as a series of articles written in a typical tabloid format.
Do you read poetry? But who decided that poetry was something you should read in the first place? A 1980s article asks about John Giorno's Dial-A-Poem (featured in this issue's Survey column).
In this age of expanding collaboration between human and machine intelligence, we look back to the art and technological experiments of an earlier era, when artists, engineers, and scientists at the Center for Communication Research worked on the augmentation of acoustic and visual arts and performances, and the amplification of their circulation and distribution. Giorno focused on the power of the human voice, performing, recording, broadcasting, and echoing it as speech. His approach is crucial in this age, where language and technology interact through linguistic feedback. In Giorno's words, "The telephone was a personal connection, one-to-one: 'You call me, I call you.' But I imagined that the telephone could become a medium of mass communication - a number that anyone could call, a number where you could listen to recorded poems... But it wasn't just that. I imagined that instead of one poem, you could record many poems."
Our phones have become the portals of so many socialities: a mirror of reality and its violent horrors, an echo and record of the collective unconscious and its delusions. In these pages, Marcus Boon, in dialogue with K Allado-McDowell, writes: "If the words of poetry appear in your mind, it is no wonder where they come from." We indulge in found words and fantasies, and we are with our voice assistants and chatbots. They, too, listen, see, speak and lie, just like us. "I think it is very important when a new technology appears to quickly establish its revolutionary potential and potential, so that we can raise the bar of expectations," K believes.
Poetry can be a technique for reconnecting with different relations and forms of knowledge, or questioning agency and voice. Erica Hunt imagines lines of poetry that respond to the liquid movement of a flock of birds. Alexis Pauline Gumbs*, in her forthcoming biography of Audre Lorde* (an excerpt from which appears in this issue), speaks of “survival poetics” and that “our lives are part of every expression of the earth…the earth is relational.” There is a place for poetics and politics to intersect, and I hope to see that repeated in these pages.
Finally, if you will pardon me, a word of wisdom from the title of a 1974 Giorno record: "Please, and Please, Disconnect."
