Poetry for Corporations
by Bruna Mori
with Kylie King and Wendy Belt
Full color, 100 pages
Available in Hardbound or Paperback
Hardbound edition ISBN: 978-1-947322-81-3
Paperback edition ISBN: 978-1-947322-94-3
Cover Price $55.00 / $32.00
Poetry for Corporations is a selection of copy written for notable brands between 2000 - 2015, repurposed and arranged in sections on content, form, and correspondence. Stock photography curated by writer Kylie King; design by creative director Wendy Belt. Conceptual, confessional, or constraint-based, there is a place for parroting one's livelihood toward a content doom in 2018, to remember when humans were encouraged to write like machines, as machines are now asked to have humanity.
Poetry for Corporations marks a vanishing era, back when there was no faux #taxbreak. Raw copy deck forms document a moment before AI transitions a livelihood--a time when we became ghosts for corporations, cobbling together taxonomies, disclaimers, word counts based on calculated attention spans, top 10 benign adjectives in some combination that conveyed the essence of a brand.
Most poetry about corporations looks at the phenomena through the lens of disaster capitalism (or more recently, accelerationism). Poetry for Corporations is the lightly placed disaster (or potential) itself.
--Bruna Mori
"Familiar and ice-cold, Poetry for Corporations marks the spot where the second person singular collapses under the volume of false address now aimed its way. 'Whoops You failed to make a selection.' Put this book in a time capsule. Let it document how the post-human world sounded."
--Rae Armantrout
"World building, powered by Bruna Mori, advances the study of immersive and collaborative storytelling as it intersects with emergent technologies. It's a powerful new narrative process destined to impact the future of entertainment as the richly detailed world becomes a container for countless stories."
--McKenzie Wark
"As should be clear to everyone by now, the original artificial intelligence is that creature called 'Corporation.' It speaks to us, at us, through us, and for us, slurping up the training data known as human language. Poetry for Corporations flips the script, parses the source, and minds the gap between advertising copy and what advertising can never copy."
--Julieta Aranda