House of ShAkE announces the launch of Super Vox on October 3, 2026, at Gilles Goyette’s Celebration of Life in Cabbagetown, Toronto
Super Vox
Volume 1 of the Random Generated Text Project (RGTP)
Designed, Generated & Curated by Gilles Goyette
With an Afterword by Michael R Caplan, “For the Time-Being in God-Country”
A collaboration between the human hand & technology, soul & machine intelligence
“It’s bringing language and randomization together, to produce it a new style, a new type of voice for poetry, which is more the voice of language itself. Because the randomization process scatters your own prejudice to the four winds …” – Gilles Goyette
1966: Gilles Goyette was born on a Canadian Forces base in Marville, France, just an hour from the 1854 birthplace of Arthur Rimbaud, bad boy of modern poetry and one of Gilles’ great inspirations (along with Ashbery, Dickinson, Plath and Milton). In the same year, the first Large Language Model, Eliza, comes online at MIT.
1984: Super Vox is first conceived when Gilles transcribes his stream-of-consciousness writing experiments into tight rectangular blocks on his mother’s Hermes 3000 typewriter.
2001: “The Documents” are the next stage in development: two 40" x 30" works on paper that resemble Rothko paintings from a distance, but on closer inspection reveal lines of tiny gel-ink handwriting, with text taken from his personal journals.
2011: The Random Generated Text Project becomes Gilles’ life’s work when he gets a spam email with the heading “Super Max, gentleman, Max, gentleman enlargement pills” – setting off a 15-year immersion in random placeholder text and LLMs.
He begins producing oceans of words, which he generates by prompts and then “curates”. And then, with the concentration of a monk illuminating a medieval manuscript, he transcribed them into monoliths of tiny but perfectly legible handwriting in one of his many notebooks. (One of them is called “Workbook for Acids on the Lam”).
Meaning flows like a river, each cluster like a localized turbulence. Where am “I”? SUPER VOX is disorienting, dreamlike, and surprisingly funny, with flashes of uncanny wisdom. And whose voice is this, anyway?
Meanwhile, Gilles was also working on the material that would become Volumes 2 and 3 of the RGTP, Althea Frutex and Sproutings from the Garden of Kallikantzaros. He kept honing his “alembics” – apps he created with AI to produce just the right sort of randomness. Centuries of human literary output was reconfiguring itself in his virtual alchemical vessels, according to mysterious algorithmic formulae …
2026: On February 25, Gilles passed away after a brave battle with throat cancer. On October 3, Super Vox is born – Gilles’ epic prayer to language.
Both a poem and a work of art, it is a celebration of the possibilities of technology as well as a tribute to the work of the human hand – “a drawing of language”, as he called it.
Gilles was telling his palliative care nurse about the publication of Super Vox until his last day.
“But if you read enough of it, you'll start to get into it, it'll start to be meaningful on a different level for you. Just not on the narrative storytelling level.” – Gilles
After months of working to realize the book according to his vision, a first run of 50 numbered hardcover copies will be available for sale both at Gilles' Celebration of Life and online.
This project was made possible thanks to the many generous donations we received from friends, family and anonymous supporters, and to the determination of our friend Sara Aharon, who realized the work and shepherded it to completion as soon as she realized how unique Gilles was and significant the project.
The book includes a 160-page colour facsimile of the artwork/poem, Super Vox, and a more easily readable typeset transcription. There’s also an Afterword by Michael based on our many years of conversations, with Gilles’ words as the title: “For the Time-Being in God-Country”.
Gilles’ Goyette’s Celebration of Life will take place on Saturday, October 3rd from 4 to approx. 8pm in Cabbagetown, Toronto. If you’d like to attend, please contact info@houseofshake.com