Birgit Kempker
Sphinx

Sphinx is an interactive literary platform that went online in 2004. Users can pose the most diverse questions and expect an individual, oulipoetic response. Oulipoetic is short for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, a workshop for potential literature in which Birgit Kempker has found the basic verse form for her responses: The sestina verse of Baroque lyrics, with its six stanzas of six lines each.

The Sphinx is put to the test both as fortuneteller and omniscient thinking machine; she is consulted on matters of love and on philosophical topics, as well as on dates for future discussions. Her answers reflect the diversity of questions and are rarely clear; most often they are humorous, and they always are semantically ambiguous and enigmatic. Unlike the Sphinx of Greek mythology, whose gaze was deadly to the traveler who could not answer her riddle, here one survives the direct gaze into one of the blue eyes on the homepage, the rest of the face remaining hidden behind the perforated surface. Not only are you guaranteed to live through this visual contact; there is another contact – a poetic confrontation via the Internet. For this Sphinx, the longing for guaranteed unambiguity is unrequited, as her answer is the riddle.

(Text: Bettina Back)