Memory tells me that the phrase Miasma of Decay is a relic from playing Advent (Will Crowther’s Colossal Cave Adventure) in the 80s. Miasma of Decay gathers writing which uses processes such as erasure, paraphrase, constraints, sampling and cross-fading – akin to an inefficiently human version of ChatGPT – and applies these as a kind of unnature writing.
Two early examples were commissioned by Tim Hutchinson and Alex Cooper’s Im-Pressed: “Orang Aljeh / Mountain Ghost” (2018) subjects reports of colonial and indigenous responses to the eruption of Krakatoa to a diminishing word count, while “Atom Placed the Site (Data is Complete)” (2019) takes Aristotle’s denunciation of atomism and passes it through translation engines using languages as delegates of the orthodoxy of Western science and as representatives of non-Western cosmologies, all the while erasing terms in a way that resembles the parable of the stone cut once, then cut again.
For Simon James’ Electro Smog LP (2021) I speculated about divinatory methods in a world living in the wake of an EMP explosion; “The Smell of Apples” was sampled from nine translations of Ovid’s The Metamorphoses published between 1567 and 2004 and appeared in Vanguard 14 Series 2, Volume 2 (2021) and was performed at the Margate Bookie festival (2022); for Hotel, “TV Moon” (2022) mashed up the raw transcript of the Apollo 11 mission’s Technical Air-To-Ground communications with passages from Ovid selected from sentences which featured words for moon; for Guy Dickinsons’s Anthologia: A Dictionary of Flowers (2022), I wrote “Two Yellow Systems,” connecting to the plethoras of proliferating nouns and proper nouns in The Metamorphoses; for Lines of Flight (2022), edited by Yasaman Tamizkar and published by Kiosk, I produced “Sulmo Roma Tomis,” named for three locations Ovid called home: his place of birth, the stage for his success and subsequent scandal, the site of his enforced exile.
In 2024, “The Smell of Apples” was republished alongside “Fire Spell Against Hate” (another text sampled from many different English Ovid translations) in (C)ovid’s Metamorphoses, a project directed by Bernd Herzogenrath and Lasse-Marc Riek and released in a sumptuous edition with a quite extraordinary list of contributors.