TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

We were selected for the Cosmic Consciousness Literary Artist residency of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute with our project Exoplanetary Poetry, an experiment in communication with speculative extraterrestrial beings. The project is supported by the AI Stipendium in der Kunst of the Austrian Ministry of Arts and Culture. We would be excited to present our creative process to the TTT community, to spark reflections on interspecies communications and the alien umwelt.

We aim to co-author a collection of poems with a speculative extraterrestrial being in the form of an AI and present it as a multi-sensory experience. In the process, we hope to transcend linguistic and sensory boundaries to make the co-created poems accessible to a multitude of human and other-than-human bodies.

Inspired by Sara Walker’s research on the origin of life, and SETI’s research on the chemical composition of exoplanetary atmospheres as indicators of potential extraterrestrial life, we propose chemistry as a poetic language to communicate with a speculative alien being. We want to train a language model using chemical data by mapping atmospheric structures onto natural (human) language, reimagining chains of molecules as sentences, molecules as words, atoms as letters/syllables, and subatomic particles as haptics and sounds.

With this language model, we will co-author the poetry in English, then translate the result back to chemistry creating a multi-sensory atmospheric performance of "chemical life poems" — controlled environments where chemical reactions produce visual, olfactory, and tactile experiences. This approach speculates how alien beings might perceive and create poetry, aligning with Walker’s notion of the vast and diverse possibilities of life shaped by chemistry.

Presenting our creative process as part of this conference would allow us to open a dialogue about chemistry as an interspecies linguistic mode of communication and enable discussions about poetic gestures beyond the human.