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 rather like monolithic Rothko paintings from a distance, but up close reveal themselves as lines of the tiniest gel ink handwriting.

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The project started coming together in 2011, triggered by a nonsensical spam email from “Super Max, gentleman, Max, gentleman enlargement pills.” That led Gilles to take a deep dive into random generated text and Large Language Models. 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. A “super vox.”

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With the concentration of a monk illuminating a manuscript by candlelight, he then painstakingly copied out an ocean of words into minute but perfectly legible letters – a rippling stream in pencil, again in monolithic form. The text is magical, dreamlike, disorienting, sometimes funny, and often uncanny in its seeming wisdom. Clusters of sense and nonsense crest and fade away in a seemingly infinite flow. Centuries of human literary production reconfigures itself according to mysterious algorithmic formulae. Whose voice is it anyway, that Gilles is curating and transcribing?

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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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The massive Random Generated Text Project is a labour of pure love and deep philosophical wonder, and I believe it’s destined to be one of the most important artistic responses to our time. It requires no expertise or special knowledge, only an openness to a new experience of reading – and to a new experience of meaning itself. It’s like discovering you can breathe under water.