Loops — 18.06. | 19:00 

Verbal Matter at Flutgraben e.V.
with Daniel Falb + Yağmur Uçkunkaya and Artur Cipriani

For this session, we bring together Daniel Falb, Yağmur Uçkunkaya, and Artur Cipriani for a conversation on language, AI, animism, and the material operations of computation. Moderated by Jonny-Bix Bongers.

Daniel will present his recent poetic research around Animism and AI. He investigates the resonances between current animisms around AI and animisms in early cultural history. As we live in a form of prehistory ourselves, the earliest beginnings of AI, the question of preserving that which rapidly antiquates becomes critical. At the same time, preservation today is often entangled with surveillance and privatization, while communizing collections remains an open task.

Yağmur Uçkunkaya and Artur Cipriani will discuss how language is reorganized in large language models through encoding and statistical proximity, where words, sounds, and images become exchangeable within a shared numerical space. They will explore language as a system that reproduces itself through its own archive, where meaning emerges from comparison, retrieval, and recombination rather than fixed reference. The figure of the encoder will be one entry point, among others, to think through how these processes reshape how language is produced, circulated, and experienced.

Together, the session asks how AI reshapes language as memory, infrastructure, and relation, and how the intensity of words changes when they become operative within systems that continuously encode and reproduce the world.

Daniel Falb is a poet and theorist. He lives and works in Berlin. Falb’s work revolves around naturalistic metaphysics in the context of Anthropocene thought, biographical time, and the dynamics of the world’s population, and most recently, the automation of natural language. In this context, he published Earth Spirits. Notations on AI Animism (2026) and Trainingsdatensätze und Weltliteratur (2026). His new volume of poetry, Grosse Sprachmodelle, will be out this fall with Mattis&Seitz. www.danielfalb.net

Yağmur Uçkunkaya works transdisciplinarily across contemporary technologies, media, and sound. With a background in Medieninformatik, she spent several years at a creative AI agency, contributing to projects ranging from anarchic speech synthesizers to experimental sound interfaces for inclusive artistic expression. Her current work is shaped by research-driven and critical engagements with contemporary AI, also informed by her Master’s studies in Design & Computation at UdK-TU Berlin. She is a lecturer at the Folkwang Universität der Künste as part of Sound Practice Research.

‍Artur Cipriani is a Brazilian psychoanalyst and researcher based in Berlin. With several years of clinical practice and formation within the World Association of Psychoanalysis, he is a Researcher and Assistant Organizer at The New Centre for Research and Practice. His work explores the intersections of Lacanian psychoanalysis, language, and technology.

@rayne.yes

@arturcipriani

‍