SHRIMPONICS is a collaborative, ongoing project by Alex Bernstein and Brandan Griffin. Check this page for periodic updates.
The text of SHRIMPONICS was composed in an email thread over the course of several months. It grew out of video meetings in which we discussed a poetics based on biology, non-human experience, and labor. In our writing, we came to focus on two figures: the shrimp and the mound of sugar. The shrimp was chosen by Griffin because of his interest in arthropod anatomy and the shrimp's traditionally humble relation to humans. The mound of sugar is a particular fascination of Bernstein's due to a passage in Deleuze's Bergonism, which excavates the experience of a mound of sugar.
In turn, this text is in the continuing process of being cultivated into a visually and typographically oriented document, one that is capable of re-formatting the attention of the human reader into shrimp- or sugar-experience. Our only (loose) constraint in developing this document is that it should use the tools and features native to Microsoft Word to create its effects. As a result, anybody (in theory) could produce their own version of a SHRIMPONICS document. Its formalism is to be read as a series of gestures anyone could engage in, as if the doc's movements are as much the reader's as they are the writers'.
SHRIMPONICS is also about finding a way to create something new within the psychologically bludgeoning conditions of labor, if only by inventing more time. We hope others may be inspired to reclaim time in their own ways and with equally speculative ambitions.
The second SHRIMPONICS document acts as a further crystallization of some of the aesthetic ideas explored in our discussions and SHRIMPONICS 1.
Bernstein's writing on the shrimp's gestalt in Tank Temporality condenses a great deal of thinking about non-human cognition into a shrimpified Lacanian text. In a psycho-algorithmic twist, Bernstein also discovered that his phone was constantly feeding him shrimp-related content—it had been listening to him talking effusively about SHRIMPONICS in real life. We must not thank the phone; at the same time, we must not ignore the material realities the world feeds us; Bernstein screencapped the shrimp posts. Overlaid on the shrimp-grid is a short text by Griffin about poetry's function as a model of a world.
This document includes a sequence by Griffin, crystall(histori)ography, in which Griffin assembles various found-perspectives into the molecular structure of sugar. We must reassemble the human as the non-human. What terrible histories had to crystallize to give rise to refined sugar? To the cell? To the shrimp tank?
