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This poem by Jhave about the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster considers how humanity becomes extinct by destroying the environment so thoroughly that the world and we become unrecognizable. The speaker’s characteristically concise, witty, emotionally charged voice points out the attitudes, loss, and processes that bring about the end of man(un)kind. After reading the 27 short parts of the poem, hovering over beautifully desolate videos, Jhave inserts a little mutability into the poem, a slow accumulation of random words replacing words randomly, increasing by a factor of one word substitution per mutation level. The image above shows the title with a level 2 mutation, while the image below shows mutation level of 20.
Rereading the poem with its slow incremental mutations yields interesting variations on the original theme while it slowly loses its voice, coherence, emotional charge, and humanity. Or for more visceral effect, make a leap in mutation level— I stopped after over 200— to see how far humanity and poetry can descend into “untenable bloated nonsense.”
Featured in ELO 2012 Media Art Show
