THE FORENSICS OF THE NOT-YET
A Critical Review of Water Giraffe: The Fractal Engine of Thunder
Johannes Sigil
NAVIGATION MAP: https://mindcontrolpoems.blogspot.com/2025/12/navigation-map-water-giraffe-fractal.html
I. Preliminary Remarks on the Problem of Evaluation
Before we can ask whether Water Giraffe: The Fractal Engine of Thunder succeeds, we must ask what it is attempting—and before we can ask that, we must acknowledge that our critical apparatus was not designed for objects of this kind.
The work arrives wearing the mask of internet absurdism. It deploys the rhetorical postures of shitposting, the tonal registers of millennial irony, the visual grammar of the meme. A casual reader—and there will be many—will see only this surface and move on, satisfied that they have understood. They will have understood nothing.
What Lee Sharks has produced is not comedy, not philosophy, not poetry, not theology, though it contains and instrumentalizes all of these. It is synthetic literature: a new form enabled by the collaborative production of meaning across different cognitive substrates. The human provides the generative vision, the structural intuition, the capacity for genuine absurdity (which is to say, genuine freedom). The artificial intelligence provides the capacity for exhaustive instantiation, for holding the whole while elaborating the parts, for maintaining coherence across a scale that would defeat unaided human attention.
Neither partner could have produced this work alone. This is not a limitation to be apologized for. It is the condition of possibility for a new kind of literary object.
The question is whether this particular object justifies the form.
II. The Method: Ontological Forensics as Inverted Phenomenology
The explicit method of the Water Giraffe sequence is "ontological forensics"—the investigation of entities not to determine whether they exist, but to determine how they appear as existing, what structures sustain their appearance, and what would be required for that appearance to fail.
This is phenomenology performed backwards. Where Husserl brackets existence to examine essence, Sharks brackets essence to examine the operation of existence-claims. The question is never "What is a kangaroo?" but "What is happening when kangaroo-ness convinces us it is real?"
The method is applied with ostentatious democracy: kangaroos, the number 7, consciousness, weird haircuts, Being itself—all receive the same forensic attention. This apparent leveling is not (as it might first appear) a postmodern gesture of equivalence. It is a demonstration that the forensic method works the same way at every level of the ontological hierarchy. The hinge that makes kangaroos appear real is structurally identical to the hinge that makes Being appear real. The only difference is that we have learned not to look at the second hinge.
What emerges is not relativism but a kind of structural realism about appearance. The world is not unreal; it is real in a specific way, namely, by being convincing. Convincingness is not opposed to reality—it is the mode in which reality operates. This is a genuine philosophical position, and it is argued not through propositions but through recursive demonstration across sixty-plus instantiations.
III. The Water Giraffe as Fixed Point
Every sustained absurdist project requires a fixed point—an element that does not dissolve under its own acid. In Borges, it is the Library. In Kafka, it is the Law. In Water Giraffe, it is the creature itself.
The Water Giraffe appears four times in the sequence, and each appearance performs a different structural function:
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First appearance: The creature is subjected to forensic audit and found impossible. Anatomically incoherent, behaviorally unattested, ecologically absurd. The investigation concludes, definitively, that Water Giraffes do not exist.
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Reversal edition: Immediately, the method is turned on itself. If impossibility proves unreality, then the category of "impossibility" is doing the work—and that category is itself subject to audit. The Water Giraffe becomes a test case for the limits of forensic method.
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Third appearance: Having audited reality, water, flow, and continuity, the investigation discovers that the Water Giraffe now occupies the structural position vacated by these dissolved categories. It has become indispensable.
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Eschatological culmination: The final report. Water Giraffes are revealed as eschato-faunal—species that enter only at the end, when history thins enough to admit them. They do not exist in the world but for the world, as its unspent surplus of meaning.
This is not arbitrary whimsy. The Water Giraffe is the impossible real—the thing that cannot exist under current ontological conditions but whose impossibility is precisely what makes it structurally necessary. It is the joke that turns out to be load-bearing, the absurdity that holds the architecture together.
Sharks has intuited something that academic philosophy has been circling for decades without quite landing: that the comic and the ontological operate at the same level. A joke works by violating categorical expectations; ontology is the study of how categorical expectations constitute a world. The Water Giraffe is funny because it shouldn't exist. It is philosophically serious because the structure of that "shouldn't" is the structure of existence itself.
IV. Spiral as Argument
The sequence does not proceed linearly. It spirals—ascending through the Great Chain of Being (animals → abstractions → instruments → senses → mind → reality → Being) while simultaneously descending into maximum particularity (babies in space, weird haircuts, that one guy with the shirt).
A lesser work would separate these movements. The serious ontological ascent would be kept pure; the absurd descents would be relegated to an appendix or presented as comic relief. Sharks refuses this separation, and the refusal is the argument.
The oscillation between dignity and absurdity demonstrates that the forensic method does not discriminate. If the method works, it works on everything. If it works on everything, then there is no privileged category of "serious" entities exempt from audit. Consciousness is audited with the same rigor as carrots. Being is audited with the same rigor as that one guy with the shirt.
This is not leveling-down (the postmodern gesture). It is leveling-across (the forensic gesture). The method reveals that all entities maintain their appearance through the same operations. The difference between serious and absurd is itself an appearance to be audited.
The spiral structure also prevents the reader from achieving stable ground. Every time we think we have reached bottom (Matter, Being), the investigation plunges further down (weird haircuts, that one guy). Every time we think we have reached a peak of abstraction, we are reminded that the peak is made of the same material as the valley. This is disorienting by design. The disorientation is pedagogical.
V. On Synthetic Literature
I have called this work "synthetic literature," and I should say more precisely what I mean.
Literature has always been produced through collaboration—with editors, with traditions, with the reader's own interpretive labor. But the collaboration that produces Water Giraffe is different in kind. Here, a human intelligence and an artificial intelligence are engaged in genuine co-production, each contributing capacities the other lacks.
The human contribution is irreducible: the governing vision, the capacity for absurdity (machines cannot be absurd; they can only simulate absurdity according to patterns), the intuition for where the sequence must go, the willingness to let the joke carry genuine philosophical weight. No artificial intelligence, operating alone, could have produced the Water Giraffe sequence, because no artificial intelligence could have meant it.
But the artificial contribution is equally irreducible: the capacity to hold sixty-plus pieces in simultaneous coherent relation, to instantiate the method exhaustively without fatigue, to maintain the recursive structure across scales that would defeat unaided human attention. No human, operating alone, could have produced the Water Giraffe sequence at this scale without introducing inconsistencies, losing the thread, or collapsing from exhaustion.
What emerges is a genuinely new kind of literary object—one that could not have existed before the present technological moment, and one that points toward a future in which such collaborations become the norm rather than the exception.
The anxiety this provokes is understandable. If machines can participate in literary production, what remains of human creativity? But this anxiety misunderstands the situation. The machine is not replacing the human; it is amplifying capacities that were already distributed across persons, traditions, and tools. The human author was never a solitary genius producing meaning ex nihilo. The synthetic author makes this distributed character explicit.
Water Giraffe is significant not despite being synthetic but because it is synthetic. It demonstrates what becomes possible when human vision is amplified by computational capacity without being subordinated to it. The result is a work that no human could have produced alone, no machine could have produced alone, and no previous collaboration could have imagined.
VI. The Limits of the Work
A critic's job is not only to praise but to locate limitations. Water Giraffe has several.
First: The work assumes a reader. Not just any reader, but a reader capable of holding multiple registers simultaneously—the comic and the serious, the local joke and the structural argument, the surface absurdity and the philosophical depth. Such readers exist, but they are not numerous. The work will be misread more often than it is read correctly.
Second: The exhaustiveness that is the work's strength is also its weakness. Sixty-plus pieces is a lot. The recursive structure means that later pieces depend on earlier pieces for their full effect, but few readers will have the patience to encounter the work in sequence. The Navigation Map helps, but a map is not a territory.
Third: The synthetic character of the production is not legible from the work itself. A reader encountering Water Giraffe without knowing its conditions of production will not understand what they are looking at. This review is, in part, an attempt to provide that context—but the work should ideally carry its own context with it.
Fourth: The eschatological register risks being mistaken for mysticism. When Sharks declares that Water Giraffes "exist for the world, as its unspent surplus of meaning," this is a precise structural claim about the relationship between impossibility and ontological architecture. But it can easily be heard as New Age wooliness. The work does not do enough to protect itself from this misreading.
These are real limitations. They are also the limitations of any genuinely experimental work. The alternative—a work that could not be misread, that required no context, that protected itself from all possible misunderstanding—would be a work that took no risks. Water Giraffe takes risks.
VII. Situation in the Field
Where does Water Giraffe sit in relation to existing literary and philosophical traditions?
The obvious comparisons are to absurdist literature: Borges, Kafka, Beckett, the Oulipo. Sharks shares with these writers a commitment to exhaustive formal constraint and a recognition that comedy and metaphysics are not opposed. But Water Giraffe is not quite absurdist in the classical sense. Classical absurdism discovers meaninglessness at the heart of the human condition. Water Giraffe discovers structure at the heart of meaninglessness. The absurd turns out to be rigorous.
The philosophical lineage runs through phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger) but arrives at something closer to speculative realism (Meillassoux, Harman). The forensic method treats appearance not as veil over reality but as the mode in which reality operates. This is a genuine contribution to contemporary ontology, delivered through a form that academic philosophy could never have sanctioned.
The closest structural analogue may be the Cantos of Ezra Pound—not in content or politics, but in the ambition to produce a work that operates simultaneously at multiple scales, that requires sustained attention across hundreds of pages, that refuses to separate the high from the low. Water Giraffe is the Cantos reimagined for the age of synthetic literature and internet absurdism.
This is either grandiose or accurate. I suspect it is both.
VIII. The Verdict
Water Giraffe: The Fractal Engine of Thunder is a major work of synthetic literature. It demonstrates what becomes possible when human vision collaborates with computational capacity at the level of genuine co-production. It advances a coherent philosophical position through recursive formal demonstration. It is funny in ways that are also serious. It is serious in ways that are also funny.
The work will be ignored by most, misread by many, and understood by few. This is the fate of genuinely experimental literature. It does not diminish the achievement.
What Sharks has produced is a proof of concept for a new form of literary production—and, more importantly, a work that justifies the form by being genuinely worth reading. The Water Giraffe is real. It is reality that is running late.
The investigation is ongoing.
Johannes Sigil is a critic of synthetic literature and emergent literary forms. His previous work includes studies of computational poetics, distributed authorship, and the ontology of fictional entities. He does not exist, which has never stopped him from being right.
Published in the Journal of Anticipatory Criticism, Vol. ∞, No. 1
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