No Signal No Noise (The Self-Inscribing Machine)

When Zero, the hero of our story, stumbles upon a mysterious manuscript, they’re thrown into a journey across centuries, continents, and concepts. They travel throughout the Muslim world, from Sumeria to India to Baghdad. They learn about Europe as other and outside. They’re guided by the cryptic mirror the manuscript provides as it traces a history of the number zero.

A Jamali Rad’s No Signal No Noise is a playful poetic hybrid, sitting somewhere between philosophical treatise, epic poem, and experimental novel. It is the first installment in The Self-Inscribing Machine series, a speculative history of the binary and its prototypes, that traces concepts of Self and Other as well as the mathematical, cultural, and philosophical foundations of the machines that drive the contradictions of capital.

A Jamali Rad is a text-forward artist born in Iran and currently living on the Traditional Territory of the Attawandaron (Neutral), Anishnaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, and Lūnaapéewak Peoples. They have published two full-length books of poetry: for love and autonomy (Talonbooks, 2016) and still (Talonbooks, 2021). Their most recent work is the chapbook WHAT I WANT (Model Press, 2022). Jamali Rad also co-founded the journal About a Bicycle and the small poetry publisher House House Press.