I was asked about the seed but find myself dreaming of soil. Seeds are many things marvelous. Most of the seeds that yield food and flavors, medicine, and flowers have been cultivated for generations by millions of people. As a material form of collective knowledge, seeds constitute one of the longest-running open-source systems in history. Agricultural diversity is not simply spontaneous but is the product of centuries of attentive cultivation and unregulated exchange. Designed to travel, the seed is a powerfully compact and mobile medium and for this reason is easily fetishized for exchange on the market. The privatization of the ...

Using a network of microphones dispersed throughout a city, ShotSpotter triangulates the location of a gunshot by comparing the distance from its point of origin to the three closest microphones. ShotSpotter installs and maintains these systems themselves, renting access to local police departments. Besides real-time surveillance, the proprietary data which ShotSpotter collects is fed into the company’s machine learning dataset and spun off into predictive policing programs which police departments may also subscribe to. Given the fallibility of the system, the data is regularly retrofit by human analysts to substantiate the claims made by police officers in court. Chekhov’s Gun stars a ...

A book of metadiscourse, Withdrawn: A Discourse consists of 50 letters composed by Thom Donovan to the proper names of living personages which appear in his currently unpublished second book of poems, Withdrawn. In response to his letters and copies of Withdrawn in manuscript, thirty-two addressees offer images, letters, drawings, poems, essays, dream journal entries, art works, documents, and manifestos. Withdrawn: a Discourse also includes Donovan’s correspondence for the project; an essay regarding the “authorless” book; as well as a review of Withdrawn by poet and translator, Ian Dreiblatt.