An Interface for a Fractal Landscape straddles a line where digital language artifacts become organism and subjective speaking voice transforms into enhanced machinic utterances. Graphs, images, data, and language are elegantly interwoven into a topographic web, where the indexicality of the material has been rendered ambiguous at best, and completely severed at its most dystopic. Words become floating handlers, while “body" and “head" hovers between an alienated physical body and repetitive technical locations in programing code, handwriting is mocked up to operate "as a symbol of biological livelihood,” and markers such as ; < > make up new syntactical and textual functionalities to denote the more ephemeral characteristics of nature, such as the wind or “NON-ENCODED WATER".

When archival crawlers recover the philosophy and computing language Memorybeam written by an unknown organic lifeform, a system, (seemingly less rigid than the nature based one of Inger Christensen’s It,) with its meta-cognitive charts and surface topographic diagrams propagating through the pages, conjures the growth of a curious fractal landscape. In the first section of the book, “Terrain Generations,” Steck writes “The physical dimension is a memory of distant impressions.” This interface of an object, to hold in ones hands, wildly supersedes this poor dimensional understanding, defiantly providing a sensorially rich and textually gratifying reading experience for the organic user.

An Interface for a Fractal Landscape deftly forges a distinct poetic language for the embodied experience of the technical imaginary. Using the language of code and the rhythm of command, Steck delivers a universe of cyborg tactility and materiality, a digital empire that is lived and sensed. Pulling together innovations in Concrete and visual poetry, Steck explores the relationship between language and visuality through photographic and textual imagery, and asks us to explore language both through typescript and cursive text. Ed Steck has not just written an epic poem that is a miracle of intricacy, but forged a new poetic language concerning the possibility of an embodied response to the techno-cybernetic realm.

em>An Interface for a Fractal Landscape is like if Tarkovsky directed a VR port of Wall-E. It is a thorough survey of form, a love-letter to the page, and a eulogy for the real.

Nature itself is present in Ed Steck's An Interface for a Fractal Landscape in something like the way a piece of actual newspaper shows up in a collage by Juan Gris.

An Interface for a Fractal Landscape is the catalogue of a virtual Genesis, an artifact from the future, a technical manual for the post-organic. Endlessly fascinating, utterly unique.