Inside the Castle is a small press operated from Lawrence, Kansas by John Trefrey. Their books are unique from one another but share a vision, that literature is not representational but incantatory, that books are objects that exist much like other objects in your life and home, only they have additional dimensions, not dimensions separate or distant from the ones you occupy, but involuted dimensions that only become apparent when you reach out to them. _ Megan Jeanne Gette is an anthropology PhD student and fellow at UT Austin. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Minnesota. Her research explores the role of the mineral in renewable energy transitions, sensory ethnography, and subterranean/energy imaginaries. She is a section editor for the Visual and New Media Review and co-creator of con-text-ure at Society for Cultural Anthropology's Fieldsights. In Majority Reef, there are 8 SURFACES. Eight surfaces can form an octahedron, which looks like two triangular prisms put together at their bases, which forms the interior of a sphere, such as the globe. Within each section is a lyric essayistic syntax of "recursive loops of longing" or an "infinite palimpsest of pain or desire," a variety of 8 tones--or perhaps a doubling of the 4 humors--that loop in a style I am calling Weeping Lemon Meringue, or echo-poetics, the ant-I- narcissus. _ Germán Sierra got his MD and PhD degrees at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) before doing postdoctoral research in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Brain Research Institute in UCLA. He currently works at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). As a writer, Germán Sierra is deeply interested in contemporary experimental fiction. He has been included among the “Mutantes” or “Afterpop writers”: a group of Spanish writers who are strongly committed with innovative literature. Most of his fictional work deals with metamediatics and the role of science and technology as cultural discourses in post-postmodern and posthuman societies. In the clever [dis]guise of fiction, what The Artifact in fact foists upon its readers (hoisting us up in so doing so that ultimately we can look down on the whole situation from a higher perspective—albeit only to crash like a bluebird into the window through which we bear witness) is a veritable Germáneutic: an intriguing interpretation and lucid elucidation of what it is (and is not) to be human in the era of big data, of computation beyond the bounds of human intellection, and—spiralling-off from the latter—of intelligent machines (indeed ‘A.I.’) that can learn and discern far more than the human, perceiving—and who knows: conceiving?—in the vast void qua bind-spot of our own biological being. _ John Trefry is an architect and the author of the books Plats, Thy Decay Thou Seest By Thy Desire, and Apparitions of the Living. Current works-in-progress: Massive (a novel) & Inanimism (a nonfiction poem). More diminutive writings have appeared in various other outlets. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support