FIELD NOTES :: Tech Pending Revolution :: POWER ON, Part 1
Editor’s Note — This special 5-part, bi-weekly Field Notes mini-series from Ginger Ko invites our community / audience / future readers & users of the POWER ON book and app into the framework, influences, and socio-cultural context that inspired the poet to go on this particular journey into a project marrying speculative world building, poetics, and technology. Entries will be offered here on the OS’s online platform leading up to the project’s release — in the meantime, discounted preorders of the POWER ON book are available directly through our website, here. Stay tuned for more information about the book, app release dates (for both iPhone and Android), and event announcements! — Elæ Moss
POWER ON is concerned with intergenerational unhappiness, but less so in familial and interpersonal relationships than common cultural approaches to each other and the natural world. I see the current flourishing of our automated tools and agents to be a continuation of injustice, a kind of intergenerational assurance that we will continue to exert trauma on each other and other species. In writing the manuscript, I wondered why industrial assembly machines are often conflated with human laborers such as those at Foxconn, or even raised above the status of humans, since machinery is often an expensive investment, whereas human labor is plentiful and accommodating. I also wanted to project a near-future in which automation is taken to its logical conclusion, in which the corrupt, colonizing, racist and sexist motivations of technological development are allowed to continue, assumed to be unproblematic and proliferating towards an objective good. POWER ON is written from the perspective of our automated futures, the machines that have been coded with our present imperatives and ethics. If we think of technology as more than tools but as our representatives, then technological entities that carry out our work are the turning on of our ongoing script, never meant to end until forced to by powering off — through an impossibility of continuance, however that will come about.
Along with a poetry manuscript that explores the result of our ethical coding into our automated representatives, the POWER ON project also features an interactive poetry app that will allow readers/users to upload their own media into the manuscript. The project explores the ethical implications of technoscience programming by also allowing readers/users to collaborate with the manuscript by uploading their own individualized perspectives into the manuscript, creating a collaboration between machine and reader. With this collaboration, I would like to provoke more than just a fun form of interactivity with poetry. Along with promoting accessibility features in poetry publication, what I attempt to highlight with the project is my own belief in readerly agency and the fact that each reader/user brings their own highly contextual perspective to a book of poetry; readerly immersion in a text is counterbalanced by a reader’s identity, and I do not desire that readers/users conform themselves to the identity of the text. What makes reading poetry and writing so gratifying and dialogic, however, are our capacities for empathy and bearing witness. Though reader/user collaborative text is an exciting form of artistry, I am preserving the poem text in POWER ON as I have written it — in the spirit of the project’s philosophy on the immutability of each person’s perspective, and a belief in collaborative work that is a melding of perspectives rather than a takeover. POWER ON, in its manuscript and app form, asserts that collaboration of perspectives provides the workspace that can facilitate the disruption of unjust patterns of behavior, and the project demonstrates this by inviting reader/user collaboration with a text that interrogates the limits of empathy.
Facilitating collaboration of perspectives in POWER ON is an activist act inspired by the Claire Jean Kim’s concept of multi-optic vision. In Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age, Kim describes the political activist atmosphere as one defined by “single-optic vision, a way of seeing that foregrounds a particular form of injustice while backgrounding others.” Single-optic vision results in parties adopting a “posture of mutual disavowal — an explicit dismissal of and denial of connection with the other form of injustice being raised.” As in the case of advocating against “cruelty to animals, ecological harm, racism, or something else — these parties see but they also do not see.” Kim, instead, advocates for the practice of “multi-optic vision, a way of seeing that takes disparate justice claims seriously without privileging any one presumptively.” This method
entails seeing from within various perspectives, moving from one vantage point to another, inhabiting them in turn, holding them in the mind’s eye at once. By decentering all claims, at least initially, this method of seeing encourages us to move beyond the seductive simplicity of a single-optic storyline…Multi-optic vision encourages a reorientation toward an ethics of mutual avowal, or open and active acknowledgment of connection with other struggles (“This matters to me and relates to me” instead of “That has nothing to do with me.”). If disavowal is a closing off, a repudiation, a turning away from, avowal is an opening, a recognition, a turning toward.
With the multi-optic method comes the implication that “positionality is a very complicated thing indeed,” determined by a “dense web of relationships structured by multiple forms of difference…better imagined as fractured, contingent, and continually disputed”. If, however, multi-optic vision is necessary for effective and equitable social change, then how do we first get ourselves to the practice of multi-optic vision? I assert that we can get there through accommodated empowerment, which provides the working space, the breathing room, to arrive at the empathic social justice borne from multi-optic vision.
Ginger Ko is an Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University’s MFA program in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing. She recently released POWER ON as both a book and interactive poetry app, produced with The Operating System. She is also the author of Motherlover (Bloof Books) and Inherit (Sidebrow), as well as several chapbooks. Her poetry and essays can be found in The Atlantic, American Poetry Review, The Offing, VIDA Review, and elsewhere. You can find her online at www.gingerko.com Follow @poweronpoetry at Instagram for updates and other media.
