New Skin Recipe | Interview with Kenji Siratori
Kenji Siratori is a cult writer from Hokkaido in Japan. "His is a writing style that not only breaks with tradition, it severs all cords" - we read on Sinatori's Goodreads profile. Following description drawing comparisons with likes such William Burroughs and Antonin Artaud, we move to read that "Embracing the image mayhem of the digital age, his relentless prose is nonsensical and extreme, avant-garde and confused, with precedence given to twisted imagery, pace, and experimentation over linear narrative and character development.” Dilla (Zura Jishkariani) recently spoke with an author whose Blood Electric, published by Creation Books, was praised by Dennis Copper and David Bowie.
Dilla: John C. Lilly says: "All human beings, all persons who reach adulthood in the world today are programmed biocomputers. None of us can escape our own nature as programmable entities. Literally, each of us may be our programs, nothing more, nothing less. Despite the great varieties of programs available, most of us have a limited set of programs."
What kind of biorobot is Kenji Siratori, and what are his main programs?
Kenji Siratori: In that respect, I'm a reader app and a writer app, but it's always overwritten. In recent years I have considered it to be a living spirit capture module in online organ trading. And the corpse struggle with the undead places a further extension of this module in the interplanetary protocol.
Dilla: William Burroughs once said that Literature is about to warn us about the DANGER. What do you think is the role of Literature?
Kenji Siratori: If there is a role for Literature in modern times, I think it is developing non-human-based reader apps.
Dilla: Your writing sometimes feels like a machine produced it; sometimes, on the contrary, it feels that you want to go BEYOND the words. Is that true? What does your writing process look like, and where you get the inspiration?
Kenji Siratori: My writing is to design various skins, and it is hypermodern. Now, my writing is complete when I regain the new skin recipe from the capture of the living spirits.
Dilla: In his essay "Cybernetics and Ghosts," Italo Calvino talks about “literary machines” - machines that generate texts. He writes: "The true literature machine will be one that itself feels the need to produce disorder, as a reaction against its preceding production of order: a machine that will produce avant-garde work to free its circuits when too long a production of classicism chokes them. In fact, given that developments in cybernetics lean toward machines capable of learning, of changing their own programs, of developing their own sensibilities and their own needs, nothing prevents us from foreseeing a literature-machine that at a certain point feels unsatisfied with its own traditionalism and starts to propose new ways of writing, turning its own codes completely upside down”.
Do you think that AI trained in Literature can produce literary masterpieces and replace human authors? Or will they coexist and work together?
Kenji Siratori: I think the important thing is to move from inhuman to posthuman so that humans can stop becoming posthuman and delegate to inhuman. AI will make a literary masterpiece, but it isn't always the Literature of the future. And above all, reader apps aren't always human.
Dilla: We are approaching the era where humans tend to become hybrid forms: uploaded minds, cyborgs, space-faring robots with human minds in circuits, the afterlife in virtual reality, colonization of other planets... What is your vision for the future of Wo/Mankind? Will we become a new breed, or are we doomed to extinction?
Kenji Siratori: The future is always coming. I think any human-to-posthuman circuit goes bankrupt as a flesh blockchain horror. The bond is transferred to inhuman, the origin of the body disappears, and the soul itself is freed from gravity.
Dilla: Three reading recommendations from Kenji Siratori
Kenji Siratori: If presented as a keyword, Will Bernardara Jr, Mika, and Evan Isoline.
