Category: 07-Viewing

I think Calvin's got a point here. Its significantly more difficult to chop things we personify into entree-sized bits. Its also precisely what I loved about Allison Parish's talk and her approach to her work. Allison regards exploration bots and generative programs as personified robot beings that serve humanity by venturing out into spaces too hostile for us. What struck me the most was the comments some of the twitter bots were getting, where followers were directly speaking to the bot as a person no less than the rest of us. I tend to get attached to my work pretty easily, but perhaps that will allow me to create generative art and AI that feel real and have a unique personality. Every one of the automatons shown in class recently were far more than a set of servos and scrap material from CCR; it was even fitting for most of them to have names because ultimately in critique we referred to the automatons by their name and commented on their character. After seeing Allison's talk I'm certain the same could be achieved with the generative text assignment. Given the relationship humans have with reading so far, there's an inherent expectation that an author wrote the generated text.

The Deep Questions bot truly felt like there was a conspiracyKeanu-esque individual with too much time on their hands sharing their thoughts on the internet, and going forward with the generative text assignment I want to anthropomorphize the perceived "author" of the text just as much as the text itself.

I feel that the concept that stuck with me the most in watching the lecture was Parrish's conception of Nonsense. This element of challenging the human brain to dissect that which is has never been spoken before, or indeed is at all inhospitable to human reading/taking in, was a striking new way to look at poetry. In some respects, poetry for me is making that which is more subconscious more accessible to the reader, so to subvert this function for the sake of unique iterations and indeed images within the content I found was a powerful lesson in the power of the fragile nature of language.

After viewing Allison Parrish's 2015 EyeO lecture, there were a few things that stuck with me. The first thing, and what probably struck me the most was her opinion that the role of the AI bot in art should not be to replicate what a human artist might do, but rather to go into spaces that a human would not go into. Parrish demonstrated this point with her example of semantic space and how her bots typically attempt to navigate into the empty parts of this semantic space, effectively going somewhere where people would not be able to systematically go on their own.

I was also struck by how humorous generative literature can be. Much of Parrish's work appears to have a humorous element to it, and this might be by design, but I would not be surprised if much of this actually is the result of how we interpret language. Often times, absurd, nonsensical pairings of words are humorous to us. This is, of course, exactly what Parrish's bots produce.

Watching Allison Parrish's talk before actually doing the project has given me a very informative and helpful introduction to the significance of text in my daily life. Coming from a decision science background, I did research on word recognition and verbal perception. During the research and learning process, what I have been focused on is the human beings' impacts on words. For example, how our opinions/personalities influence the way we talk, write, and communicate. However, when Allison talks about the "lexical space", what is being reflected is how words show our behaviors. It focuses on words and its pattern to discover human beings instead of focusing on humans and see their impacts on words. This change in perspective is really interesting. While I am listening to Allison's talk, my mind has jumped to places where I reflected on how our language reflects our political standing, our emotions, etc. Then, some ideas came to my mind, it will be interesting to create an algorithm where the drawings are created based on the keywords in the text. And the text is captured through social media/email/messenger or any of the medium of communication. Then, without seeing the subject of this sentence, what are some interpretation that can be created upon the keywords, the word choice, the tenses, and other verbal patterns?

I really appreciate how Parrish continued the outer space analogy throughout the whole presentation. This not only made it easier for someone like me, with little knowledge on semantics, to understand the more technical aspects of the process of generative poetry and the concept of semantic space, but it also made everything much more beautiful. Outer space is wonderfully vast, complex, and unexplored, somewhat full of opportunities (of life, happiness - stars) but mostly of empty nothingness (the nonsensical unknown); when she finally described herself as an "explorer," I realized that this metaphor is a perfect description of my (and potentially others' at the STUDIO) purpose at CMU. Like Robin Sloan said during his lecture, we are all "media inventors" -- the quotes being a symbol of the unknown, nonsensical nature of the new media art we are inventing. Our projects are unfamiliar to the public and are therefore not yet semantically normal. Although this could be a frightening aspect of new media art, Parrish's discussion has inspired my desire to break through the "frontier" and make sense of the nonsensical.

As someone who has no previous experience in creating or even thinking about the topics that Parrish talked about in this video, I thought she did a great job in explaining and getting me interested in her work. I have spent a considerable amount of time writing myself, but fiction instead of poetry, and most definitely not procedural poetry. I have also never considered exploring nonsense, and why it's important to do so, but Parrish's analogies of exploration in the unknowns of poetry and language to the unknowns of science and space helped me understand. In a ways, I have always kind of looked down on nonsense and didn't get people who were obsessed with the random and unintelligible, but now I get why this exploration is valuable.

I thought this talk was brilliant, it was presented in a deceptively simple way when contrasted with the beautifully complex concepts Parrish expressed throughout the talk. She brought to light a lot of comparisons that I had never even considered before. Most prominently, her comparisons of exploring semantic space as similar to launching probes for space exploration but also a very independent exploration of its own. For me, one line stuck with me about how this exploration and using this technology allows us to reveal truths about ourselves and humanity we could not do by ourselves. Overall, this talk was very enlightening and did a great job at opening the viewers mind about ways to interpret generative text.

Parrish's presentation Exploring (Semantic) Space With (Literal) Robots brought up several interesting ideas surrounding the ethics of creating generative text utilizing corpora from other people, and of finding unexplored literary spaces. It reminds me of the question of whether math is invented or discovered. Are sentences invented or discovered? Surely once a language exists (whether invented or discovered), a simple algorithm could generate every possible combination of words (like the Library of Babel). This might imply that once a language exists, all one can do is discover (not invent) sentences because they were already implicitly invented. I think this is the crux of one of Parrish's ethical concerns about generative poetry from a given body of text. This is made more complicated by her project that generates entirely new words. Sure, they're new words, but they are constructed from old letters and letter patterns. I don't have answers to these problems (not to mention that Parrish brought up other concerns about generated texts' meanings/content, not just their origin) but they're interesting and important to think about.