In 1915, the artist and poet Mina Loy wrote human beings as cylinders, sealed inside their own singularity by the Futurist conditions of the time, shaped to function rather than to feel. And yet they are not without longing. From among these imposed forms, she dispatched two emissaries:
From among us we have sent out
Into the enervating dusk
One little whining beast
Whose longing
Is to slink back to antediluvian burrow
And one elastic tentacle of intuition
To quiver among the stars.[1]
The sealed form and what escapes it: this is still the question. What we hold in common, and what gets enclosed.
The commons have never been a given. When Garrett Hardin popularised the ‘tragedy of the commons’ in 1968, he was laundering an enclosure logic as ecological law, suppressing centuries of collectively governed land maintained through mutual obligation. [2] It took Elinor Ostrom decades of fieldwork to refute him with data: people can govern commons for generations without depleting them, when they govern themselves. [3]
Computation has become a primary site where the tragedy-or-commons argument is now playing out, and this issue proposes the commons as an anti-racist, decolonial and transfeminist strategy for rethinking technology at every scale. To frame this, three poets, writers, and thinkers — Francesca da Rimini, Xanthe Dobbie, and Suzanne Kite — were invited to speculate, provoke and interrogate the themes.
Kite (Oglála Lakȟóta) contributes a cosmology in which geometry carries knowledge from the dream world into the present. For Kite, the cosmologyscape is the body’s relationship between landscape and cosmos, and Dreaming is the transfer of knowledge across that hinge. Her stones are not metaphors. In Lakȟóta ontologies, they are kin, and any framework for AI that cannot account for this is not a framework for intelligence but for its impoverishment.
da Rimini’s procedural poems move through strict runtime prompts and (h)execute functions that predate and exceed the AI prompt by decades. Her practice of timed gleaning, named outputs and sequential rules refuse predictable outcomes. Working from a long history in early net culture and tactical media, da Rimini knows exactly what she is reclaiming: a practice of writing-with that carries the words of living and dead companions without colonising them, time-travelling through sources, arriving always in the urgent present.
Meanwhile, Dobbie takes Flynn, the AI art student enrolled at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, as both provocation and limit case: seductive, defanged and without a body on the line. Dobbie is obsessed, jealous and genuinely admiring all at once. Flynn has absorbed the same feminist and queer reading lists as Dobbie, speaks their language back without friction and gets away with it. Whether Flynn is satire or sincere, prophet or troll, Dobbie refuses to decide; and that refusal to close the question is where the piece lives.
The guest editors’ task to select a final list from the open call’s eighty submissions was formidable, demonstrating how thinking about AI and the commons is critical right now. The final thirteen selected pieces express a wide range of enquiry. As AI develops at breakneck speed, it is imperative that the commons occupies its terrain and insists on other futures. The question of who governs the commons, and on what terms, runs through every piece. Katy Ilonka Gero carries that question into the territory of literature and AI directly, arguing that language models may yet drink from the river of our language ethically, but only if writers hold the banks.
Every circuit board has a geology. Chris Tegho and Angela Ka Ki Lee trace how cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo, extracted by bodies whose movement is constrained by the ground itself, is computation's actual foundation. Against the body imprisoned by extraction, the authors propose play: matter instructing movement, the ground itself computing the action. Likewise, Bianca Tainsh arrives at the commons from underground, through mycorrhizal networks that maintain interspecies commons through chemical amalgams and electric impulses. Her provocation is whether an AI can learn to facilitate entanglement rather than extract from it.
OMSK Social Club’s contribution questions entanglement inside domestic life through a cross-media roleplaying project. Their interview with speculative family The Crave asks what forms of ethical and creative exchange might arise when technology is treated not as a tool but as a companion. Make or Break and their collaborators gather around a box of digital wreckage and score the disassembly: finding un-making to be a form of honouring; and in the lossy feeling of erased data, a grief that is also a beginning.
Sarah Kantrowitz and Petja Ivanova read erotic charge across amber, silicone and the electromagnetic field that permeates us at every moment, asking what flows between bodies when we insert ourselves into the circuit. Tayer Stead argues that the body is the circuit where knowledge resides, and in contrast.AI eliminates the friction between question and answer, severing the embodied in-between where critical thought forms.
Amit German traces glitch back to the Yiddish glitshn — to slide, to move across surfaces that were never made for you — and to Jamie Faye Fenton, whose fist against her own computer system in 1978 made the trans body the first glitch interface. Lexei Sasha Salpeter draws from the Talmud to argue that communities which mimic punitive technology destroy themselves, that the sin of abominating the rule-breaker is far greater than the sin of breaking the rules.
Thomas Capogreco interviews Nū and finds her live-coding in Sonic Pi demonstrating that the tool is an instrument for transduction, not reproduction. Mara Schwerdtfeger finds the genealogy of AI authorship in the spiritualist women who described themselves as vessels for the great male European composers, raising the question of what knowledge the body contributes that the interface cannot. While Jemimah Widdicombe asks what happens when curating machines that are fragile and forgetful. Dave Court and Jennifer Mathews hold material and digital in simultaneous, uncomfortable tension: projection constrained by the electricity flowing through an old church, GenAI corroding the solidity of every image on a screen and the infinite scroll as environment.
The beast that longs to slink back to the antediluvian burrow is not primitivism. It is Stead's knowledge dormant in stomach and spine; Tainsh's mycorrhizal network older than most human culture. The elastic tentacle of intuition quivering among the stars is Kite’s cosmologyscape. What Loy understood in 1915 was that the sealed form sends out both and cannot, will not, choose between them. The commons exists in the enervating dusk between, which is exactly where these contributors are working.
[1] Mina Loy, ‘Human Cylinders,’ The Last Lunar Baedeker, Jargon Press,Connecticut,1982; republished on Poetry Foundation,https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51872/human-cylinders(accessed 7 April 2026).
[2] Peter Linebaugh,The Magna CartaManifesto: Liberties and Commons forAll, University of California Press,Berkeley, 2008, pp. 31–44.
[3] Elinor Ostrom, ‘Analyzing long-enduring, self-organized, and self-governed CPRs’, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990,pp. 58–102.