An Interface For a Fractal Landscape

Ed Steck

POETRY  |  $18 $16.20

April 2019
Read an excerpt

I never experienced natural darkness before—only the compounded darkness of closed slumber receptacle boarding rooms: the slow hum of mechanic shutters, the horizontal droning clasp of a windowless panel door, and the nightlong tick of day’s coming alarm.

I am agitated by the unexpected arrival of natural darkness and its new sensations: a rhythm-separating silence that bleeds my senses into the ecosystem’s surroundings, erasing the dependency of procedural generation, and sequencing my perceptions into a meshed landscape.

I am in a clear space.

Graphs, images, data, and language are elegantly interwoven into a topographic web.

Fia Backström

An Interface for a Fractal Landscape is an exploration of potential networking between organic life and digitally recreated nature on a virtual terrain. Taking its cues from a variety of media, including concrete poetry, artists’ books, science fiction, nature poetry, and information science, the book follows the experience of an inorganic life form attempting to recreate an organic relationship between organism and landscape on an outmoded server in the era of post-anthropocene collapse. Features: slime molds, cat avatars, organic toads, digital nature, hollow mountains, water textures, archival crawler units, warm baths, interactive maps, inventory management, and poetry.

Available together with a limited-edition print, letterpress on blotter paper, 5.5″ x 8.75″, signed and numbered (only 75 copies) for a total of $40.

About the Author

Ed Steck is the author of An Interface for a Fractal Landscape (Ugly Duckling Presse), The Garden: Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulation (Ugly Duckling Presse), The Rose (with Adam Marnie, Hassla), sleep as information/the fountain is a water feature (COR&P), Far Rainbow (Make Now Books), DoorGraphicDataRecovery (orworse press), A Time Stream in Spaces: The Cultic Parody of Time-Induced Capital (West), and The Necro-Luminescence of Pink Mist (Skeleton Man Press). His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. He is a recipient of two Fund for Poetry Grants, the Artist Opportunity Grant from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, and an Investing in Professional Artists Grant from the Pittsburgh Foundation. He lives in Massachusetts.

Praise

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.

Fia Backström

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.

Zanna Gilbert

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.

Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford

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.

Aram Saroyan

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.

Tom Sweterlitsch

In the News

Links

Other UDP titles by Ed Steck here

A conversation between Ed Steck and Robert Fitterman

Barrett White reviewing The Necro-Luminescence of Pink Mist

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946433-01-5
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 192 pp, 6 x 9 in
Publication Date: April 01 2019
Distribution: Asterism Books (US), Coach House Books via Publishers Group Canada (Canada), Inpress Books (UK)