Vol. 1 | Super Vox

The prehistory of Super Vox goes back to 1984, when Gilles, using his mother’s Hermes 3000 and stream-of-consciousness sketches, produced monoliths of typewritten text. In 2001, his adult journals became “The Documents,” two works on paper that look like Rothko paintings from a distance, but up close reveal themselves as lines of tiny gel ink handwriting.

 

In 2011, a spam email with the heading “Super Max, gentleman, Max, gentleman en­largement pills” inspired him to begin a 15-year dive into random placeholder text (“Lorem ipsum”) and Large Language Models.

He started generating what turned into an ocean of words. Centuries of human literary production reconfigures itself according to mysterious algorithmic formulae. He found himself searching for a post-identity poetic voice, one not limited by his own prejudices or ego and that allowed meaning to dance with itself in freedom.

 

With the concentration of a monk illum­inating a medieval manu­script, he copied them out into some 160 monoliths of tiny but perfectly legible handwriting. The poem is disorienting, funny and dreamlike, with flashes of uncanny wisdom. Where am “I”? And whose voice is this, anyway?

The book will include a facsimile of the artwork, a typeset of the text, and an afterword essay based on our many years of conversations, his words serving as the title: “For the Time-Being in God-Country” (that’s us, now.)

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Gilles was talking to his palliative care nurse about the publication of Super Vox until his last day.