[We]'ve Got Mail!
New Letters, Best of the Net Noms, and our Fall Reading List,
Hello from Substack-space! Re•mediate’s submission window is in full swing now, and we’ve gotten some really cool submissions. If you’re interested in more details about our open submission call, [MachineWitness], you can look back at our previous newsletter or at our submissions page <3.
OUR FIRST LETTER :
Speaking of submissions, last time we put out our always-open call for Letters to Re•mediate! Our very first of these, accompanied by a code-poem, was sent to us by Claire James Carroll! You can read “This Poem Opposes Genocide” today on our /letters page, and we invite you to run the code of the poem yourself in your own terminal or in a Juypiter notebook we’ve linked in the process note.
This letter was meaningful to us on a number of fronts. We’re going to include it in Issue•4, since it aligns well with our [MachineWitness] call, but given the urgency of the crisis in Gaza and the urgency of action required, we’re glad Claire sent it to us as a letter!
We really love the piece for its content and its conceptual work. “This Poem Opposes Genocide” invites us to consider the outcomes of ‘reading’ and ‘action’: we humans can read the code, we can read the output, and we can read the poem— and while the computer can read and execute the code, it doesn’t feel the urgency and compassion of any text, and it doesn’t even read the poem, which is commented-out in the python code with the # symbol. Even though it’s executing different text based on emotional categories, it's not affected by any of it.
BEST OF THE NET NOMINATIONS:
This week, we’re going to be submitting our Best of the Net nominations. Best of the Net is an award for literary organizations that publish online, and they have several criteria for submission. Because the publication window includes pieces that were published before June 30 2025, but after July 1 2024, Issues 0, 1, and 2 are eligible for nomination. There’s a cap on how many pieces we can nominate: 6 poems, 2 fiction stories, 2 creative nonfiction pieces, and 3 art-works. Many journals participate in the nominations, but…
Re•mediate is proud to nominate the following works for the Best of the Net awards! :
· CNF:
- Issue•0’s “Binary Dreams”, by Autumn Fourkiller
- Issue•2’s “Dear [Ghost]”, by Mica England
· Fiction:
- Issue•2’s “The Home-Life of the Spoonbill, the Stork and Some Herons”, by Daniel Lichtman
· Poetry :
- Issue•1’s “Shock Collar or Mistaken For a Body”, by Emilio Loew Muscarolas
- Issue•1’s “Metaverse”, by Andy Oram
- Issue•1’s “Anonymous”, by Gibson Bartlett
- Issue•2’s “Stone Poems”, by O Neace
- Issue•2’s “WE LIKE THE $TOCK”, by Mez Breeze
- Issue•2’s “Faithlist()”, by anna sokolova
Next year, there’s a great chance we’ll be able to fill out every category for the Best of the Net nominations, especially the Art category, as contributors send us the full range of work eligible for nomination! We’re incredibly proud of all the innovative, relevant, and prescient work we’ve published in Re•mediate so far, and we wish great success to all of our nominees.
What do you think of our selections?
Our Reading List
In the meantime, we invite you to consider our reading list, which is always being updated. For our themed issues, we curate specialized lists, which we’ve been posting about on our Instagram and Bluesky for the past month. Our reading list is not really comprehensive, but it helps constellate some of the aspects of our thought process as we put together our Fall call for [MachineWitness] submissions this summer.
Books
Empire of AI, by Karen Hao
Leonardo to the Internet, by Thomas J. Misa, from Johns Hopkins University Press
The Cyberfeminism Index, edited by Mindy Seu
Gyms, by Kyle Booten, from Dispersed Holdings
Snail Generations and Memory Foam, by Dan Power
Internet Artifacts
Grammatron, by Mark Amerika (*Content Warning, hardcore)
All the Ghosts You Will Be, by VSauce, on YouTube
WITNESS.org, with attention to gen-ai.witness.org
The Critical AI Journal
Poetry Daily: “What Sparks Poetry: Language as Form”, Interview with Nora Claire Miller
The Offing: “Exquisite Corpus”, by Geetha Iyer
*The Cyberfeminism Index is also an online resource
If you have any reactions or resources to share, we invite you to write us a letter as you engage with our reading list, with past issues, or even as you finish this newsletter!! What would you like to hear more about from us?
As the semester heats up, we hope that you’re able to find a bit of cool earth to rest in as you write and submit. If this newsletter has made you think of anyone, we invite you to share this with them! Now go write! And then submit!
Talk to you in October,
« Re•mediate » <3