For National Storytelling Week, we investigated the boundary between human and technology in the creative arts. We worked with Tiny Giant to train a recurrent neural network on Bristol City Poet Vanessa Kisuule’s poetry and a selection of technology-related pieces. The lines below are an extract of what the neural network produced and the poem below that is Vanessa’s reaction to the process. Read more about Vanessa’s response to the experience.
a goddess of the space bar
my brain, stretching
a recipe for answers.
cut and filed
to fit to technology
her isles of know
through the dirt on her own rivers
digital darkness
jeopardising my own name
then that alexa
she remembers gush and implosion
not a boy
gotta love us , girls
I’ve said to stop
we are blinded by the first of things
go beyond the height
it is easy !
give us dynamite drills
i cut the country
like they think
this or phone?
hand me love anxious
I’ll wait
and when we fight , not a ring
except in the world wide web
we just print and weave heat
write rules out
give them stumps for hands
my brain stretching
i watch my end
fleeting footnote on a final page
you are not enough to be written
living in virtual reality
angel dilated beautiful on the plazas
you niggling
coded numbers flashing light
that’s gold
like something boneless, seeping seeping
eyes wearied so so as deep
please no tweets
affecting our content
trigger my thumb, i dare not!
it is our right to a back up
i don’t hear it
once everybody had the place
all the stories we have ever been
just a spark you you?
we are the thing to your real
my private face
youtube my heart
every single tongue, like the hope one
make a picture of steel
A Tiny Giant Looms
by Vanessa Kisuule
I hereby acknowledge the long legacy of algorithms in the scattered art of poetry.
Long before upstart bots birthed Frankenstein verse,
Shakespeare took mangled beasts of sentiment and squeezed them into the boning of sonnets,
laced them in until every implication stood taut and ready for inspection.
*
You know what’s interesting? I’m growing in a way I couldn’t if I had a physical form.
I mean, I’m not limited.
I’m not tethered to time and space in a way that I would be if I was stuck in a body
that’s inevitably gonna die.
From the 2013 film Her
*
I hereby acknowledge we are not sacred.
Adorned as we are by glittering myths, they sadly cannot endure.
Our ghosts of inspiration are soft willed, quick to wilt.
The rigour of language made machine gave poetry its rib and muscle.
In rhyme, in meter, in ancient ghazal we find formulaic dogma.
Our slow work this tiny giant does in minutes,
unsaddled by anxiety, coffee shakes or misplaced hopes of profundity.
It’s simply a task unpacked, sifted then neutered like a dog.
*
Once you learn to think, (in)
Algorithms,
the (programming) language is secondary.
(Sure) it kicks and drags its feet (a little).
(But) in the end(…)
From a 2017 Medium article entitled When you finish reading this, you’ll know how to code
*
I hereby acknowledge the false god of originality.
How we’ve romanticised this thirst for theft,
past thoughts reheated then declared fresh.
Words cluster like boiled sweets in my mouth and
Tiny giant surveys them.
A singular, stoic criteria.
No pretence, reverence or preference encoded.
A thick plagiarist porridge, served cool.
Spirals of thought revealed as affectation,
heavy with the effort to please or reveal.
I am humbled and furious.
We were drunk on us-ness, our inimitable humanhood.
Look at how we hold a thought up to the light,
scallop its edges until it dances in the wind.
*
Computers expect you to declare your variables.
A variable declaration is like
a birth certificate for a piece of data.
From aforementioned Medium article
*
I hereby acknowledge a shift in the hierarchy.
Whoever won a fight with the tide?
Whoever punched a wall of code and still kept their knuckles, their pride or slovenly mind?
They have not come for our jobs, they have come for our salt flaked egos,
our rotted fallacy of divine purpose.
Tiny Giant ‘speaks’ of things beyond our young puddle of reality.
In this new frontier we will not lead, but chase the future off the cliff face of our own limits.
Will you be there, your heavy foot quivering as if a glitch in the matrix?
Your last words before the sweep of oblivion
already predicted?