Colour, Perfect-bound Paperback, 210 x 148mm, 68pp

Set in a dystopian 22nd-century world in which robots and humans live in conflict, Inside Ocean Größt’s Time Capsule is a neo-futurist exercise book, presenting varied writing prompts tailored for visual poets.

“If a utopian belief in the future sustained the avant-gardes of the twentieth century, imagining the future from the vantage point of the twenty-first requires new strategies. Astra Papachristodoulou’s solution is to jump forward in time to discover a vanished post-human neo-futurism that hasn’t happened yet. Through this perceptive manoeuvre, she explores the potentiality of visual poetry, partly as test tube experiment and partly as a game in which the reader is invited to participate. Speculative fiction and collaborative playfulness frame these elegant visual poems that keep a range of possibilities alive between language and matter. Where there is a poem, something is waiting to happen; despite all predictions of disaster, this is a reason for joyful optimism.

— Zoë Skoulding

Step inside Astra Papachristodoulou’s strange time capsule and be transported into a reality where poetry breaks free of the limitations of the page to inhabit test tubes and laboratories, jewels and jenga. Every page of this instruction manual/pataphysical guidebook exhorts you to become an astronaut of inscription, a cosmonaut of creativity and to take part in a new poetic form. Here every sample bottle, every test tube, every doodle contains the future: level up!

— Derek Beaulieu

Astra Papachristodoulou intermixes the low-fi poetics of Fluxus with the sci-fi poetics of Moebius, to create a scrapbook of visual poetry, in which the author calls upon the reader to respond to asemic relics, salvaged from the remnants of a futuristic metropolis. Open this book, as you might a test tube, to sample its admixture of daydreams thought up by robots.

— Christian Bök