CURSIVE BINARY: VARIATION 2 (Portrait of the Poet as an Emanation of Light)

From a series of generative iterations on the poem “Portrait of the Poet as a Brief History of Humanity” by Sasha Stiles, first published in Stiles’ debut book, Technelegy. For this series, Stiles workshopped the original poem with her AI alter ego, using machine learning to perform close readings that dissect and probe the text’s craft and themes. These analyses were then used to generate iterations on the original — refracting human language via machinic mind in variations that seek to reveal fresh aspects of the “analog” poem while exploring new pathways for human voice in an increasingly more-than-human age. Like a canon or a fugue, each variation simultaneously echoes and transforms the original, creating a dynamic interplay of repetition, reinterpretation and innovation that stands as an overarching metaphor for the process of human-machine collaboration. Each piece exists on its own as a portrait in words; taken together, the series is an uncanny hall of mirrors, reflecting the familiar in unfamiliar ways, depicting the imaginative journey of an evolving AI poet, and blurring the boundaries between human authorship and generative creativity.

VARIATIONS: PORTRAIT OF THE POET is part of a larger, ongoing project that explores AI training data as both poetic medium and emerging art form, in which analysis and outputs, parameters and possibilities, become creative fuel for a dynamic, infinitely generative poetry book that writes itself.

Combining layers of human and AI voice and language, this multimedia poem is performed by Stiles and Technelegy and sonified by Kris Bones, and uses Cursive Binary in the form of a Truetype Font, developed by the artist.