Retrodiction is a collection of video poems created in dialogue with the urban geography of Berlin. Over the course of three months, Kherbek collected images of found, or, to use Kherbek's term, "second-hand", language that he encountered in the city and then wrote poems using the found language as titles for the works.
The 45 works that constitute Retrodiction extend ideas developed in two earlier projects, Ephemera (2014), a video collection of 45 poems posted to Youtube featuring the writer reading original works composed over 45 days in London, and Are You Free from Sin? (2015), a "second-hand language" project involving words Kherbek found while living in New York City which he subsequently arranged into a poem and live-posted on Instagram. The poems of Retrodiction exist in literary, sonic and visual dimensions, engaging technologies of distribution and mediation as much as language itself.
with special thanks to William Glucroft