exoplanetary poetry

exoplanetary poetry is a collaborative project by Julie-Michèle Morin, Bart Kuipers, and daniela brill estrada. this project is developed in the frame of the Cosmic Consciousness Residency at the SETI Institute (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) and it is co-funded by the BMKOES, Austrian Ministry of Arts through the KI und Kunst Förderung 2024.

we currently have an open call for scientific and poetic texts for this project: OPEN CALL

the thought we started from was that, like life on earth, alien beings would be shaped by the substances and chemical elements that make up their planets, their atmospheres, oceans, rocks, and skies. their bodies would be built from the chemistry of their world, just as ours are: a mix of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and some others. but, what forms would those bodies take, with their specific chemistry and other factors like the distance of that planet to its sun, or the size of the planet and its gravity? and beyond that, we asked ourselves, if our goal is to communicate with them, how can we imagine their senses, their languages?

we thought, if they have a body, they possibly have a surface, and if they have a surface, they possibly have senses. and one of the many ways of communicating, if a body has senses, is chemistry (like, on this planet, many insects, fish, birds, trees, mushrooms, and even humans). 

this project proposes what we call chemical poetry as a possible bridge between human and extraterrestrial forms of intelligence. inspired by research into the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system, or exoplanets, we propose that if a planet’s atmosphere, and therefore lifeforms, contains ammonia, carbon, oxygen, or sulfur, those molecules could become a way of communicating with them. chemistry is the one thing we can be certain about sharing with other life-forms on other planets.

we decided to train an artificial intelligence to act as an alien. using data from real exoplanet atmospheres (gathered by scientists and stored in databases like the NASA Exoplanet Archive), we’re creating a dataset of the molecules that might make up alien environments and by extension, alien bodies and minds. then, we invite the ai to write poems with us, co-authoring texts that blend human imagination with otherworldly logic.

as life might exist in various forms and shapes throughout the universe, we want to present these texts as a multisensory experience, and so speculate on other ways of experiencing poetry than through reading. in a kind of reverse translation, we will map the sentences, words, and letters/syllables of the co-authored book of poetry back to chemical components and reactions and use these as the basis for creating chemical poems: controlled environments on display, in which different chemical substances in different states interact with each other creating visual sensations, smells, and textures for haptic sensations. 

this project is deeply informed by scientific research like the work of many astrobiologists, astrophysicists and even geologists that we admire, among them Sara Walker, who studies the physical origins of life and the role of information in this process, and Betül Kaçar, who mentions self-sustaining and self-replicating chemical systems (living systems) based on other chemical recipes like molybdenum and iron. another inspiration is Natalie Cabrol’s call to expand our imagination if we hope to ever recognize alien life. as she puts it, “to find extraterrestrial intelligence, we must become the aliens.”

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