ABSTRACT
Maturana and Varela's early attempt to redefine the classification of living systems offers an innovative way to reassess a key question posed by Belen Gache in the context of Gustavo Romano's IP Poetry Project. In her essay titled "On Non-Human Poems and Talking Heads," internationally renowned visual artist Gache, inquires: "Their bodies may consist of different technological gadgets, but their mouths retain a human shape. At the very least, an interrogation of specific philosophico-linguistic themes vis-a-vis autopoietic theory's formulation of cognition, consciousness, life and language will permit a more rigorous approach to the IP Poetry Project's quasi-linguistic system in terms of a living machine that perhaps thinks and even has self-consciousness. Maturana and Varela's famous dictum—"life is cognition"—initially appears to complicate the applicability of the autopoietic model to the IP Poetry Project, since at first glance it is difficult to conceive of this robopoetic system as an organism that lives and thinks.
