{Valleys of wind}

I propose an engagement with the idea of post-doom as a mode of disrupting power. I will develop a computational poetic text that tells the story of an unusual birth – triplets: a sequoia tree, an earthworm, and a turtle. Partially drawing on language from biology, I seek to craft a magical-surrealist, queer-feminist storyline that revolves around the parthenogenesis or asexual reproduction that first brought into minuscule existence these triplets, followed by their birth through valleys of wind. This project is part of a larger body of work titled Echolocations, in which I develop a series of minor, non-normative narratives of kinships and other delightful queer transformations.

Sînziana Păltineanu / Berlin, Germany — Dez 15, 2020

For this computational poetic text, I will write the code in HTML and CSS, and make it available under a free software license for everyone to build upon and/or redistribute freely. The content will not be designed in any way that would cause seizures (e.g. through flashes) or other physical reactions. Further, this project is meant to be available to the deaf and hard-of-hearing readers as a web-based text, as well as to blind listeners. I will provide an audio version, with a mechanism to start, pause, or stop the reading. Other visual elements than text, such as the header image, will be captioned or referenced in my reading, following the WCAG accessibility guidelines.

Sînziana Păltineanu is an experimental fiction writer and researcher based in Berlin and working at the crossings of fiction and history writing, queer feminism, and librarianship. As an exophonic writer, Păltineanu seeks to craft a deviant use of the English language. The predominant themes of their work have been queer feminism and writing from within and against constructs of nationalism. Their publications include the novel Elephant Chronicles (2015). They are currently working on a short story cycle.