Emerge by Kalen Iwamoto

Emerge is a poetic fork of Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”. It merges the lines of this seminal document and from it, extracts 32 words, 2 from each of the 16 paragraphs, to create a meaning-making node. It is an instance of our perpetual attempt to stake our claim to words that we can only ever borrow from the shared signifying system that is language. As both an experimentation with procedural forms, both visual and literary, and a conceptual iteration of the original declaration, Emerge draws attention to the way in which all new forms of artistic, cultural and technological production draws on its antecedents for its raw material.