Cybernetics and ghosts: the digital future of writing
This series is a thought experiment inspired by Italo Calvino’s 1967 essay Cybernetics and Ghosts, to reflect on the expansive role technology plays in our lives and in literature today.
Edited by: Michael Salu
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The collective storyteller
Michael Salu
"Who tells our stories in a digital future?"
British-born Nigerian writer, artist and editor Michael Salu introduces the WritersMosaic guest edition Cybernetics and Ghosts.
The list
Tice Cin
"There is an algorithm that starts to spike. The page begins to gain traction. She stops talking, and the bot carries on…"
A story by interdisciplinary artist and DJ Tice Cin, who explores what it means to be human when technology is changing everything.
A hand a door
Vanessa Onwuemezi
"I noticed the greasy handprint of her fangs, feasts, phones, franking, fingers, fingers is what I meant, appeared on all doors and I was unable to follow her."
A short story by Vanessa Onwuemezi, whose debut collection, Dark Neighbourhood, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2021.
Caught
Sara Saab
"The error caught us around the corner from the last pub that spat us out. The story he was telling about his father's racing greyhounds became one long syllable…"
A short story by Beirut-born author Sara Saab, whose fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Shimmer and The White Review.
Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda: Digital spaces as restoration
Irenosen Okojie
"The music becomes a meditation, a molten, silvery vehicle from an Afro-futurist past, an unknown destination requiring your pulse rate during REM."
The Nigerian British author of Butterfly and Curanderby by Irenosen Okojie on Alice Coltrane's 1971 album Journey in Satchidananda.
Human agency in the age of algorithms
Abeba Birhane
"A reductive, simplistic, yet relatively neat mathematical model is offered as a streamlined solution for dealing with messy complex human behaviour."
An essay about AI by cognitive scientist Abeba Birhane, who researches human behaviour, social systems, and responsible and ethical AI.
Ultimate Aloe vera
Iphgenia Baal
"The scan misreads letters as other letters, imagines whole new glyphs. The alphabets that could've been…"
A short story by fiction writer Iphgenia Baal, author of Compliances, Man Hating Psycho, Death & Facebook, Merced Es Benz and Gentle Art.