Transcending digital dualism through networked poetry

Over the past year, Kalmyk American poet Sasha Stiles has become the public face of the burgeoning world of poetry NFTs, which circulate and monetize poems outside of poetry books and magazines. She co-founded theVERSEverse, a “poetry NFT gallery,” in 2021 sold its own tokenized poems through platforms like Christie’s and SuperRare, and spoke widely about the commercial and even aesthetic potential of NFTs for poetry. Inspired by the idea of ​​”ars poetica” and text-based visual art, theVERSEverse homepage boldly declares “poem = work of art”. The 2021 exhibition “Computational Poetics” at the Beall Center for Art and Technology featured her alongside artists such as Nam June Paik and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer; his personal exhibition »B1NARY 0DESis on view at the Annka Kultys Gallery in London until March 18.

Stiles co-wrote his 2021 book Technology with GPT-2 and GPT-3, precursors to the now ubiquitous ChatGPT—forming them on his own poetry and selecting other literary materials. AI-powered poems typically deal with the impact of emerging technologies on the human condition: how will artificial wombs change the way society values ​​women? What can Grand Linguistic Models (LLMs) reveal about the roots of political extremism? Some of the text falls on the page like concrete poetry; other images in the book include photographs of his “analog binary code” installations (in which objects like seeds or pills are arranged like bits in a grid) and examples of his “cursive binary” (a handwritten script Twomblyesque of 0 and 1). Online, his poems take the form of static digital boards or multimedia videos with spoken or electronic soundtracks, usually designed to sound like the credits of The matrix or word paintings by Ed Ruscha. Stiles has also experimented with storing generative poetry “on-chain”, raising the question of how poetry itself looks like an NFT. The comparison upends the binary thinking (past/future; human/machine) that generally shapes our understanding of digital technology.

THERE IS THIS GENERAL IDEA that poetry is essentially human and deeply expressive, while technology is sterile, automated, emotionless. For me, it’s a fake binary. My job is to try to use technology as a lens through which to understand why poetry has always been so important to humans and why it might continue to be relevant to the things we bring into the future.

I have said for a long time that poetry is a code, and vice versa. All poets throughout history have used an algorithm in pattern and syntax to evoke feelings, recall memories, and achieve some kind of poetic immortality. Humans invented poetry as a data storage system. All the devices we learn as poetic techniques – rhyme, rhythm, meter, assonance, repetition – are not just aesthetic; they have a utility in that they helped make spoken language easier to remember before the advent of the written word. And once I entered the blockchain, it occurred to me that poems, in a sense, are non-fungible tokens. If you swap out a different word or even remove a period or change a dash to a semicolon, everything changes.

Poets transport us through space and time, let’s try other identities, simulate other realities. Successful poetry challenges the mundane, prosaic life (what we might call IRL) and heightens a reader’s base reality. In this way, I think poetry is already the metaverse that we are trying to build. We tend to believe that virtual reality and augmented reality and the metaverse are antithetical to an authentic version of what it means to be human, when in reality they are evolutions of the inventions that have made us more and more human in the past. over time.

Artificial intelligence, too, is often thought of as extraterrestrial or anti-human, when in reality it is hyperhuman – a system built by humans to ingest, process, synthesize and utilize vast amounts of human information. I’m very interested in what AI tools like big language models could tell us about human nature by facilitating networked imagination and collective consciousness, allowing us to write with all the historical literature handy, instead of just the books we have personally read.

Of course, datasets have gaps, biases, blind spots, and limitations that show up in the outputs of an algorithm. At the same time, they can yield surprising results that suggest new possibilities. When working with a text generator, I can adjust the predictability dial from shape recognition and imitation to shape transcendence. I could program a generator to write like me, but I’d rather have a smart co-writer who takes me beyond my own imagination and whose partnership results in a third transhuman voice that isn’t mine nor that of the machine, but something else that can only exist in synergy.

Which is true for much of the human condition: we can’t really separate ourselves from the technologies that shape the way we think, move, live and create. That’s why, in addition to experimenting with natural language processing and generative literature, I write in different mediums across the virtual-analog spectrum. I’m also playing at taking words off the page and figuring out how to bring them into the world in a way that resonates with my devices and daily activities, via a kind of moving type that reconsiders what printing can be and do in network, web world3. Why not take a 100% human-written poem and publish it as a media-rich palimpsest, using digital animation as a kind of character design and electronically enhanced spoken words to evolve the oral tradition? Why not let text unroll like a digital scroll, rather than like pages? Why not use a generative algorithm to “read” and interpret a single poem hundreds of times? Why not turn a long AI co-written ars poetica into a series of thirty interconnected NFTs, collectively owned by a group of poetry patrons? New technologies have always inspired new forms of art and literature, and I feel like I carry the torch of a long tradition of writers and poets pushing the boundaries of language to explore what it means to be human. , Today.

– As said to Tina RiversRyan