And two more new prose-poetry pieces.
By RUPERT M LOYDELL.
Awkwardness that is visible
PAST AND FUTURE merge or are perhaps the same thing. The ghost that’s left is only a blueprint for the unknown, memories get erased or we forget to pass them on.
Our children don’t care, they have their own lives to attend to, and when they want to know our history it will be gone or demolished, main road re-routed around newly-built flats, names erased on local maps, train services revised and stations closed, journeys made impossible.
There are photos online and people insist it’s true, that they were there, and that it wasn’t all that long ago. It was though, I remember: that’s my life frozen onscreen for interested parties to search for and find.
We try to live in the moment but the moment’s gone. Today is already tomorrow and we have forgotten our own trajectory, are breathless and out of sorts.
•
The sum of its parts
Memory functions as a distorted simulation of familiar experience. Stepping inside one of this cluster of beautiful stone grottos reveals that the present sounds like a distant inebriated haze from a record moving in slow motion,
which unfolds into a floating nothingness to appease broken minds so drenched in monstrous language that time and place are but frivolous footnotes in a wider narrative of distorted reality. In the corner is the door you were taught to fear.
Team up with the supernatural in order to escape people you once trusted. It is difficult for those of us living in the modern world to recall the tides of myth, folklore and magic, but darkness comes alive when you start receiving visitors.
The man looks back over his shoulder, mouth open. A permanent fire illuminates creative minds that are mapped out by shared thoughts and visions. He knows the monsters of the night, how and where to find them, is always chasing dreams.
•
Cognitive preferences
‘We turn and turn ourselves
Into the question.’
– Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, ‘Pole| |Sport’
Let’s say we have a single system, involving suspension of belief and multiple frameworks taken for granted until something blows up. Understanding what your bits do when you’re not looking improves the quality of information collected during archaeological excavations across the globe. The project involves a longitudinal study of practices of creation management and making your dream come true.
Modelling requirements preserve information and share it with the public, reusing scientific transparency to guarantee secure access to a messy storage space. The processing engine may safely open a connection to a hidden trove of unpublished data, passion and amazing ideas.
Forget about mind-bending jargon or unrealistic myths, metadata is the nutritional information on the package, helps to describe complex items in simple words. It secretly blends into the background, remains quiet and is taken for granted until something blows up. Things that appear true are never challenged.
We are moving towards a data harmonisation system with a life beyond the individual, where the value and potential of data are ever-changing as technological developments bring new possibilities. Digital immortality raises new ethical and societal issues that have not yet been fully articulated, and we are unprepared to deal with.
The challenges of dealing with large volumes of personal data are increasingly apparent in many fields of practice, although they may manifest in different ways. The bedrock of science is contestability and replicability, a lot of deep thinking about guilty pleasure and trying to get straight answers from those involved in everyday medical and financial traumas.
The software dance aims to stimulate debates about how we might work collaboratively to anticipate, manage and prevent future issues. The security dance will be used to articulate an amazing growth story and streamlime potential failure modes.
Customers can be a mystery. They gleefully carry surveillance machines in their pockets and it’s impossible not to thrill at the scope of gathered material and to marvel at the connective threads. There is no such thing as incognito: no matter how clever or skilled you are, always digest the legal word salad of privacy policies and ingest private experience.
Take a journey into the curious. Taboo subject matter goes from bits and electronics to logic gates and circuits, up into data structures, then into the troublesome zone where language and colour perception overlap. Diagrams and data help you understand even the most collapsed senses although we just don’t have the horsepower to bring it all together.
We apologize for the inconvenience but we are taking a little break to look at the data generated so far and will be back very soon.
♦
RUPERT M. LOYDELL is Senior Lecturer in the School of Writing and Journalism at Falmouth University, the editor of Stride, and a contributing editor to International Times. He has many books of poetry in print, including Dear Mary, The Return of the Man Who Has Everything, Wildlife and Ballads of the Alone, all published by Shearsman, who also produced Encouraging Signs, a book of essays, articles and interviews. He has also authored many collaborative works and edited anthologies for Knives Forks and Spoons Press, Shearsman and Salt. A new poetry collection, The Age of Destruction and Lies, is forthcoming. His Fortnightly archive is here
