Exoplanetary Poetry

As part of our Cosmic Consciousness artist residency the SETI Institute, we—three artist-researchers, Daniela Brill Estrada, Bart Kuipers, and Julie-Michèle Morin—are conducting an experiment in artistic co-creation with a speculative extraterrestrial being. We are currently training an AI to impersonate an alien poet using data on the chemical composition of promising exoplanetary atmospheres.

Our goal is to co-author poems in English with this alien poet, and then to translate them into chemical reactions. We ask the question: What kind of poem could be perceived by an alien intelligence? That is: what would it mean to write not for human ears or eyes, but for an organism whose perceptual apparatus is entirely foreign—tuned not to sound waves or printed glyphs, but to gradients of molecular vibrations, to volatile compounds, to atmospheric whispers in spectral traces? We can only speculate on the anatomy of extraterrestrials, but we can be sure they will have to interact in some way or shape with the chemistry around them. That’s why we propose chemistry as a universal language for the cosmos.

What if a poem were something to be inhaled rather than read, reacted to rather than interpreted—experienced as a shift in temperature, a tremor in pH, a resonance across membranes?

This question invites us to imagine poetics beyond the linguistic—to write for beings whose cognition is chemical, whose understanding is embodied in material flows. In doing so, we are not just speculating about alien life; we are also rethinking how we define language, sensing, and communication here on Earth.

This project is funded by the SETI Institute and the Federal Ministry of Arts, Culture, Civil Science, and Sports of the Republic of Austria.