Poetry Reading & Lecture with Christian Filips

The tragic transport of poems, a deadbot perhaps: a voice from the realm of the dead recorded during life and then made virtual. Is there something in common between poems and bots that are supposed to simulate close relatives or even historically distant poets in order to help overcome grief and to simulate a closeness that no longer exists? The promise of the new deadbots could be: A new digital immortality, as competition to the immortality through making beautiful things. This immortality is simulated in the form of AI chatbots and digital avatars, which the personal language code based on the so-called digital footprint of the deceased. A technology-hostile humanoid speaks up and propagates the following assumptions: The code of the AI lacks space-world experience through time. Since its program consists of number codes and only simulates the ability to speak, it has no language, no body in the strict sense, no grief. Which condemns it to a bad infinity. As an instrument of power, it follows the synchronous, metrically controlled rules of a number-led power, which would have to be perforated by a language-led one. This reading and lecture is looking for a way out of the simple binaries and therefore asks: How to get into the wormholes of a diachronic dimension that connects parallel language universes beyond rigid concepts such as analogy and virtuality?

Christian Filips, Berlin-based poet, works as a stage director, translator, curator. His staging, publishing and teaching is based on poetry as a translingual practice, focusing on lingual voids of representation and the concept of a choral self. Publications include translations of James Baldwin, Logan February and Pier Pasolini. Stage works – often including choirs - have been shown at Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. In 2023 he curated "poetica 8", a festival for world literature in Cologne (with Patti Smith, Kim de l’Horizon i.a.) and received the Literary Award for Poetry as translation by the city of Erlangen. He taught internationally (Brown University, Universität Hildesheim, Mozarteum Salzburg).