Blanks

When everything is text, because everything is code, there is no more work, only wrought material, a semi-finished product. Images, films, sounds, words – in the digital world, everything is open to being (re)processed, transcoded and developed. Hannes Bajohr’s volume of poetry proves that astute poems can be created from recycled texts. Inspired by the avantgarde of modernity, he employs 21st-century technique: aided by algorithms, he has fragmented, transcribed and reordered Kafka‘s novels, government protocolls climate reports and much more. In doing so, his poems open up an entirely different perspective on reception and authorship in the age of digitalisation.

»If this poetry were under the patronage of a deity … it would have to be the god Proteus as the God that was able to change his appearance in an instant. … Bajohr’s Protean poetry provides illuminating cross-sections of linguistic milieus and cultures. These verses shine with wit and sophistication« Christian Metz, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»Synesthetic adventures that make you want to try Bajohr’s techniques on other objects.« Hans Hütt, taz. die tageszeitung

»Most fascinating experiments with the digital possibilities of creating literature.« Jonas Engelmann, neues deutschland

»Bajohr … creates atmospheric density and an immediate expressiveness that is conveyed not just by reading the concept, but by reading the text.« Miriam Zeh, Deutschlandfunk

»All average poems are alike. Each outstanding poem, however, is outstanding in its own way. Hannes Bajohr’s Blanks belongs in that group … A philosophical reading adventure that pleasantly stands out from the average.« André Hattig, Deutschlandfunk Kultur

»How to translate the process by which a computer ›hears‹ spoken speech and interprets it into a different language? As what other creaturely forms might Gregor Samsa awaken? These are but a sample of the questions asked by Hannes Bajohr in his new book, Blanks. Collected over ten years, the poems and writing of Blanks demonstrate the breadth of lyricism available to the careful curator of machine-generated/machine-intervened literature. Using a wide variety of machine processes, Bajohr maximizes the discoveries one can make inside other texts – from the canonical Metamorphosis to the more mundane of German literotica and business manuals. More than a book of computer-generated work, this book fascinates the reader through the intimacies of translation – not just from source language to target language, but translation and re-articulation of the composition process, yielding new texts faithful to method if not word-by-word parity. From the sorting and sifting of corpora, from extraction and arrangement, Bajohr's work excites and beautifies the growing realm of computational poetics.« Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

»Blanks is a series of poems generated using various pre-existing source texts including some of Bajohr's own previous work. Each poem concludes by disclosing the various ›programs‹ used to compose it (like Python, search filters, procedures, and algorithms), but some are also additionally edited ›manually‹ and ›selectively‹ (i.e. libidinally) by the poet. This book presents the facility of the poem as a resource for exploring the turbulent, political terrain cleaved open by the dissolution of distinct boundaries between person and machine, writing tool(s) and text, poem and reading tool(s). Written during a historical period that saw haphazardly designed, discriminatory algorithms rapidly and radically redistribute things like labor, global economics and attention itself, Blanks hovers on the moment when invisible tools designed imperfectly reveal themselves to have been operative independent of user agency.« Holly Melgard