Sample Proposal, Xenopoem Conference 2026

This sample proposal demonstrates the level of clarity expected for submissions. A successful proposal describes what the audience will encounter and how the work itself produces xenopoetic conditions. 

Title

Cryptobiosphere – Zoetica Ebb and Kenji Siratori

Medium

Film, spoken word, live-generated sound

Proposal

Moving image, live voice, and generative sound form a sensory setting that approaches snow as a distributed intelligence within the landscape.

The work centers on a short film recorded across winter landscapes in Hokkaido during an expedition through northern terrain. The film attends to processes that unfold beyond the scale of human intention. Snow appears as a material system that records pressure and redistributes energy across the landscape over time, a slow intelligence operating across geological and meteorological timescales.

Ice, wind-driven particulate movement, buried vegetation, and shifting light are treated as signals within a slow computational system. The camera follows patterns of accumulation, compression, and erosion rather than conventional narrative framing. The resulting images present the landscape as a dynamic surface where information is deposited, transformed, and erased.

During the screening, a live reading will take place in parallel with the film. The text consists of field notes taken during the filming process, reconfigured into fragments that operate as shifts in attention rather than descriptive commentary. The language follows distributed patterns of observation: partial measurements, speculative translations, and interruptions that mirror the unstable rhythms of the landscape itself.

These fragments are read aloud during the film, creating a shifting relationship between voice and image. At times the text aligns with the visual frame; at other moments it diverges or interrupts it. This instability prevents the viewer from settling into a single interpretive frame and instead invites attention to move across multiple layers of perception simultaneously.

The reading enters into conversation with a set of generative bio-instruments developed by Kenji Siratori. These instruments are built from field recordings gathered during the same expedition: wind interacting with frozen surfaces, distant mechanical vibrations carried across ice, the compression of snow underfoot, and the low resonances of winter landscapes.

The instruments continuously transform these recordings through algorithmic modulation. Frequencies stretch and contract, and sound fragments reappear in altered configurations. The system operates autonomously while remaining responsive to the acoustic presence of the live reading.

Voice and instrument therefore form a feedback system. Spoken language enters the sound stream and is absorbed into its modulation patterns, while the evolving acoustic environment subtly alters the cadence and pacing of the reading. The film, voice, and instruments gradually synchronize into a single structure in which no element retains authority.

For the audience, the presentation becomes an ecological encounter. Moving image, live speech, and sound form a temporary sensory architecture. The viewer is drawn into a shifting constellation of signals that continuously reorients attention.

By staging contact between environmental processes and human articulation, the work produces structural pressure on the viewer’s cognitive habits. Meaning emerges through a gradual reorientation of attention toward distributed processes that normally remain outside habitual awareness. In this way the presentation recalibrates perception through contact with a non-human system.

Xenopoetic Method Statement

The presentation operates xenopoetically by constructing a sensory ecology in which human language becomes one signal within a vast distributed network of processes. Film, live reading, and generative sound interact to destabilize the viewer’s expectation that narration originates from a human center.

Instead of representing non-human intelligence, the work stages a direct engagement with environmental processes that operate across scales larger and slower than human cognition. Snow functions as a recording medium, a computational surface, and a distributed archive.

The xenopoem emerges through the interaction of these elements in real time. Image, voice, and sound produce a structural shift in perception, inviting the viewer to inhabit a landscape formed by non-human temporalities and signals.

Documentation

As the film is currently in production, we have included a short video clip demonstrating the sound-generation process that will be presented during the conference.