Interface for a Fractal Landscape
Author: Ed Steck
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2019)
Interface for a Fractal Landscape is an exploration of potential networking between organic life and digitally recreated nature on a virtual terrain. Taking its cues from a variety of media, including concrete poetry, artists' books, science fiction, nature poetry, and information science, the book follows the experience of an inorganic life form attempting to recreate an organic relationship between organism and landscape on an outmoded server in the era of post-anthropocene collapse. Features: slime molds, cat avatars, organic toads, digital nature, hollow mountains, water textures, archival crawler units, warm baths, interactive maps, inventory management, and poetry.
"An Interface for a Fractal Landscape deftly forges a distinct poetic language for the embodied experience of the technical imaginary. Using the language of code and the rhythm of command, Steck delivers a universe of cyborg tactility and materiality, a digital empire that is lived and sensed. Pulling together innovations in Concrete and visual poetry, Steck explores the relationship between language and visuality through photographic and textual imagery, and asks us to explore language both through typescript and cursive text. Ed Steck has not just written an epic poem that is a miracle of intricacy, but forged a new poetic language concerning the possibility of an embodied response to the techno-cybernetic realm."
–Zanna Gilbert
"An Interface for a Fractal Landscape is like if Tarkovsky directed a VR port of Wall-E. It is a thorough survey of form, a love-letter to the page, and a eulogy for the real."
–Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford
"Nature itself is present in Ed Steck's An Interface for a Fractal Landscape in something like the way a piece of actual newspaper shows up in a collage by Juan Gris."
–Aram Saroyan
"An Interface for a Fractal Landscape is the catalogue of a virtual Genesis, an artifact from the future, a technical manual for the post-organic. Endlessly fascinating, utterly unique."