DATABLEED READS David Buuck’s ‘Disfigurations’
2021: Google – together with Amazon – is selected to provide services for Project Nimbus, a cloud computing project for the Israeli government and its military. February 2025: Google abandons it own 2018 prohibition to use AI in ways that might cause harm, and thus joins a crowded and growing field of AI-focused companies that are increasingly collaborating to shape AI use by the Pentagon. April 2025: Google Cloud quietly announces an AI partnership with the arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin. These are just three indicative nodal points in the wider business strategy that also sees Google pursue contracts with the US Department of Defence, Ice, and local police departments. Those nodal points proliferate to become a phantasmagorical sieve-mesh where internet searches and other algorithmic processes are rarely more than a stone’s throw away from the military industrial complex. Our extremely online lives are at a digital spitting distance from the war machine.
David Buuck’s Disfigurations project, in the poet’s own words, “begun in October 2023 during the most recent genocidal campaign in Palestine.” It comprises an ‘original’ poem (forthcoming via Pamenar’s online platform), and each subsequent section follows a procedure to disfigure the work. ‘Disfigurations 4’ is the result of a machine translation of ‘Disfigurations 2’ from English to Arabic to English to Arabic to English. It is a poem extended through the digestive tract of the algorithm; a poem in the belly and the sieve-mesh of the war machine.
The procedure of disfiguration is therefore one of disassembly. The lines of ‘Disfigurations 4’ are organised around a cascade of commas, with most of the long lines in the poem ending in a semicolon. If ancient systems of punctuation indicated the amount of breath required to speak a particular fragment, the breaths of Buuck’s long lines are constantly interrupted, in some cases after every four or five words. These are breaths gasping for oxygen through damaged airways, where each inhalation and exhalation are quickly interrupted by one another. The poem as hyperventilation.
Etymologically, ‘comma’ comes from the Greek komma, meaning literally ‘a piece which is cut off’. And komma is related to koptein, that is ‘to strike, smite, cut off; disable, tire out.’ So, each punctuated phrase in Buuck’s project is also subjected to an instance of cutting, of tearing, of violence. As if each long line of the poem stretches out like a tapestry of unhealed and unhealing scar tissue, or a zone of hurt. The accumulative effect of these comma scars and the contorted phrases they contain is monumental and moreover overwhelming, which can render the process of reading into a moment of compression that pushes us deeper and deeper into the centre of a dying star.
But while the comma may be a piece that is cut off, it is also not the end. There is only one full stop in ‘Disfigurations 4’, and it occurs roughly midway through the poem. The final line in the poem concludes with a dash, which indicates a pause or a break, but not an end. And the preceding words read: ‘everything was finally broken, but for despair, but for insurgency, but for screaming, but for the song without borders—‘. So, the commas, semicolons and dashes of ‘Disfigurations 4’ contain their own opposites. While they might break off the clauses and phrases of the poem, they not only fracture but also suture. While they disassemble, they also connect and assemble. And while they contain, they also continue and break free.
So maybe the overwhelming accumulation of violence in these lines also carries an equally overwhelming and necessary counterviolence. Maybe the commas not only strike and cut off the language of the poem; perhaps they can also strike, cut off, and tear strips from the algorithmic war machine that has swallowed it. The song without borders must also contain the notes that disassemble the military industrial complex. Keep singing.