LABIAL

Its name evokes the lips: breath becoming speech, the articulation of language, the contact between a body and what it expresses. Today, this physical presence meets machines capable of producing sentences, images and code. LABIAL seeks to explore this proximity, the unease it creates and the possibilities it opens up.

What happens to writing when it is composed with a system that calculates the likely continuation of our words? How does a distinctive voice emerge amid borrowed languages, data and models? What relationships can we invent between human intention, automatic generation, chance and the work of composition?

The journal welcomes these questions through the works themselves. A program can be read as a poem; a conversation becomes narrative material; an image extends into the instructions that made it. Each contribution invents its own way of inhabiting the page.

Artificial intelligences may serve as tools, interlocutors, materials or subjects of critical inquiry. Using them is not a condition of participation; a text may instead question the changes they bring about, including through the most radical forms of criticism. The journal welcomes sensory, conceptual, political, playful or unsettling approaches, whose hesitations, accidents and changes of direction form a living archive of contemporary creation.