D. radiodurans fluorescing with mCherry, the segment of genomic mutation which evokes the rosy glow of the poems’ dialogue. Courtesy of the artist.

Elisabeth Sweet: The Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice remains central to The Xenotext. Different versions of the story have persisted over time, so can you please recount the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in your own words very briefly?

Christian Bök: Mourning the demise of the nymphet Eurydice (killed by a viper), the herdboy Orpheus descends into the Underworld, striving to rescue her from the kingdom of Death, all the while using his songs to quell the dangers en route. And while leading her home, he suffers doubt that she follows him across the threshold into Life, and because he looks back, he loses her forever, squandering his chance at salvation. The sorrow of Orpheus (after this forfeiture) so offends the witches of Dionysus that they dismember him during their bacchanals. The story perhaps provides an allegory about the failure of poetry to bring the dead back to life, suggesting that poetry can serve only as inadequate expression of grief in the face of such a failure.

E: You cite William S. Burroughs’ famous aphorism, “Language is a virus from outer space” in the book, and theVERSEverse has lifted this aphorism for the title of the exhibition. What can you tell us about the influence of this line by Burroughs, or perhaps his work more broadly, upon the overall concept of The Xenotext?

C: William S. Burroughs provides a paranoid statement about language, suggesting that it might, in fact, be something ‘alien,’ a viroidal parasite that has colonized our brains, transforming them into organs for its own reproduction, evolving for its own sake, with instincts separated from the interests of its ‘host.’ The Xenotext has, likewise, hijacked the biogenetic mechanisms of a deathless bacterium, implanting a package of ‘alien words’ into the genome of a life-form so that it becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also an operant machine for writing a poem in response — a poem that can literally survive forever. I have, in effect, created a work of ‘living poetry,’ whose words can literally reprogram the behaviour of living things.

E: Has your perception of The Xenotext changed with the reception of the works created for the Special Edition by your peers, nine of whom we are celebrating in this exhibition?

C: The Xenotext probably transcends my own attitudes about it, since the work now has a ‘life of its own’ (so to speak) — and I can never predict how a work might find its audience in the world. I think that, given the heroism of this project in the face of the vast odds against its fulfilment, I might have created a canonically significant work of art (one that has the capacity to inspire the ambitions of other poets), and I feel gratified to know that peers have taken inspiration from my perseverance. A work of art might depend upon its own viroidal capacity to ‘influence’ the minds of others, causing them to add value to the work by commemorating it — and I like to think that the nine contributors to this exhibition might help to make the work even more ‘infectious.’

‘The Fay Imp in All Living Things’ depicts a colony of D. radiodurans, fluorescing with a ‘rosy glow’ under the influence of ‘The Xenotext.’ Courtesy of the artist.

E: With The Xenotext, you have effectively implanted a virus (language) into a bacterium (D. radiodurans), which does not easily evolve, because it resists mutation, repairing damage to its own DNA very rapidly. But with your chromosomal implantation, the behaviour of the bacterium changes, responding to the poetry by emitting a rosy glow. So I wonder: could this poem be a forcing function for the bacteria’s evolution?

C: You have asked a very incisive question. I have chosen D. radiodurans as the ‘host’ for my poem, in part, because the ability of the germ to repair its own DNA makes the germ a durable archive. I have designed a viable, benign protein that might persist long enough in the cell for the poem to remain both detectable and isolatable, before the cell metabolizes it. I do not yet know if this protein offers any ‘benefit’ to the survival of the organism (albeit such a benefit seems unlikely) — and in any case, drift in the replication of the gene can degrade the integrity of the poem over time (perhaps causing the germ to evolve back to its ‘normal,’ wilder state); nevertheless, this process is likely to be very slow, given these biogenetic mechanisms of repair.

E: How does The Xenotext engage with the generative dimension of genetics?

C: The Xenotext resembles an algorithm (written according to a set of restrictive constraints, all of which allow the poem not only to survive in a living microbe, but also to produce a viable protein). The poem becomes what it says that it does. When the organism generates the protein that enciphers a text, whose first lines say: ‘The faery is rosy/ of glow’ — the organism glows in response, fluorescing rubescently, like the ‘faery’ described in the poem itself. The work establishes a dialogue between the genetic code and an English text – and the sheer scale of the strictures upon such a dialogue might make this work one of the most stringently constrained poems ever written. A gene is, in effect, a kind of poem that makes life live.

‘Protein 13’ depicts the pliant ribbon for the sequence of 140 amino acids that encode the poem ‘Eurydice’ from ‘The Xenotext.’ Courtesy of the artist.

E: In the book, you write that there exist 7,905,853,580,625 encipherments of the English alphabet, from which you might have derived The Xenotext (and almost all of these ciphers result in absolute nonsense). You have, in fact, found the only encipherment that can make a pair of eloquent poems. Are you the progenitor or the discoverer of them?

C: The Xenotext partakes of some spookiness. The chances of these two poems arising from the constraint fall within the range of one in eight trillion — odds that might rival the chance of any planets hosting life, like ours, among the billions of stars in the galaxy. As far as we can tell, only our planet among the trillions of likely worlds seems to harbour any poetry at all — and for this reason my two poems provide an allegory for the anomaly of such an occurrence, replicating the cosmic rarity of life itself. I might note that the odds of finding a protein that can encode the second sonnet remain even more colossally improbable. I have not written these poems so much as I have derived them, finding them, hidden with the rules that govern our biochemistry.

E: We have discussed how the Earth might be either a lone culture left to itself in the cosmos or a late culture among many potentially adversarial civilizations, stealthy and watchful. A host of questions about readership and the relevance of poetry written by humanity arise in these speculations — and since The Xenotext addresses the role that poetry might play in the deep time of the cosmos, what becomes of the reader? Does a poem simply need to exist to matter, or must it be read and by whom?

C: The Xenotext takes some of its inspiration from Voyager 1 — the space probe that has left the imperium of the Sun, bearing a golden record that features an anthology of sounds and images from the heritage of our species. I regard this object as the most important of all artifacts ever made by us — and yet its contents might go unread for the lifetime of the universe. I believe that, if a poem needs a reader to matter, then every poem must, perforce, already matter, because every poem has at least one reader — i.e. the writer, appraising the work after completing it. I think that, in the case of The Xenotext, I aspire to have a ‘thinkership,’ in which no one needs to read my work — but everyone must, nevertheless, admit to its significance.

E: How do you think “beings” in the future might decode and then peruse The Xenotext?

C: The Xenotext might resemble a sphinx carved from a black block of granite in the desert, like a cenotaph bedecked with hieroglyphs that no one can understand — and yet, even though no readers might decode these messages, the craftsmanship of the work testifies to the intelligence of the maker. The future aliens who might listen to the golden record on Voyager 1 are going to learn much about us without ever having to ‘understand’ what we say. I think that I have left a lot of evidence in the genome of D. radiodurans to testify to the ‘artificiality’ of the organism — and if any hierophants of the future discover it, the fact that such a monument even exists at such a small scale already says much about the mind that has preceded their minds.

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Visit the exhibition The Xenotext: “language is a virus” on objkt

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Christian Bök is the author of ‘Eunoia’ (2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has won the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. After 25 years of effort, Bök has completed ‘The Xenotext’ — a project that requires him to encipher a poem into the genome of a bacterium capable of surviving in any inhospitable environment. Bök is a Fellow in the Royal Society of Canada, and he teaches at Leeds Beckett University.

Elisabeth Sweet is a poet exploring patterns of randomness. Her practice infuses ritual with critique on contemporary society, namely the forfeiture of attention in return for convenience. She leads communications and production at theVERSEverse, a digital poetry gallery where poem = work of art. Elisabeth’s poetry has been exhibited in London, New York City, and Paris, with a solo show in Berlin. She publishes weekly writings to her Substack, Species of Value.

With My Back to the World (cover)

Elisabeth Sweet: Where did the motivation for the poem visualizations come from? Was there a poem or one of Agnes’ paintings in particular that catalyzed the creative undertaking of these accompanying works?

Victoria Chang: Once I finished writing the poems in conversation with Agnes Martin and On Kawara’s artwork and writings, I didn’t feel truly “finished” conversing with these artists. I had an impulse to occlude the poems themselves, I’m not sure why, but perhaps because ultimately language feels inadequate to me to get at some of the things I was exploring in my poems. Perhaps mark-making through language wasn’t enough so I began to mark-make more in Martin and Kawara’s language which were more like strokes.

“Untitled #5, 1998” by Victoria Chang

“Happiness (from Innocent Love Series, 1999)” by Victoria Chang

“Perfect Happiness (from Innocent Love Series, 1999)” by Victoria Chang

E: Lines create a sense of security and expectation that allow minds and bodies to move and express freely within recognized boundaries. Later in life, Agnes spoke of living “above the line” always and not going “below the line for anything,” which you quote directly in “Perfect Happiness (from Innocent Love Series, 1999).” Yet, it seems that in life some lines are meant to be crossed, or at the very least examined from different sides in order to live at all. Throughout the process of writing this book and creating the poem visualizations, did you feel as though you were crossing lines, either self-established or imposed by others, even Agnes?

V: I think what Agnes Martin is saying is that she was at a different place when making those pieces such as “Perfect Happiness.” I’m not sure if the lines move or we move or both, but nothing is ever static. I think Martin’s work shows this transformation. For example, I think while I was writing the book, I was definitely below the line, to use Martin’s terminology. But years later, I am currently “above the line,” and perhaps working on that book helped shift my psyche above the line.

from “Today” by Victoria Chang

E: Can you tell us a bit about the process and intent behind redacting certain days in the visualizations for “Today” (Jan.8.2022, Jan.22.2022, Feb.6.2022)? Does redaction signal a heavier weight felt on those days or perhaps suggest events or experiences more private occurred? I cannot help but notice that on Feb.17.2022 the word “blossoms” burst through the dark.

V: I’m not sure, honestly. I think your guess is a good one. I think the act of erasure is the continued exploration of the inadequacies of language, like I mentioned above, perhaps a way of saying language is insufficient in the end, but perhaps the process was important for exploring some of the more difficult emotions I was exploring such as sadness, grief, mortality.

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Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems is With My Back to the World, published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the U.S. and Corsair/Little Brown in the U.K. It received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection. A few of her other books include The Trees Witness Everything, OBIT, and Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. She has written several children’s books as well. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.

theVERSEverse has curated Victoria’s work into two seminal exhibitions: POÈME SBJKT, an exhibition of literary arts held in Paris at Librairie Métamorphoses, and FeralVerse, the first exhibition of poetry on Feral File. in POÈME SBJKT, Victoria showed “2022 #1” her collaboration with Dianna Frid, a work which emerged from Victoria + Dianna’s shared interest in the obituary form and its potentials. the physical manifestation exhibited in Paris while digitized + minted versions of the work can be found on objkt: “2022 #1, Folio 1“, “2022 #1, Folio 2“, “2022 #1, Folio 3“. in FeralVerse, our team invited Alexandra Crouwers to visually + sonically interpret Victoria’s poem “Some Last Questions” which you can watch here.

Elisabeth Sweet is a poet exploring patterns of randomness whose work has been exhibited in Berlin, New York, and Paris. She is a core member of theVERSEverse, leading communications and conversations with poets + artists breaking ground in the digital. find her on socials @speciesofvalue.

Ross Goodwin released HOWL.camera on February 19, 2025 as a generative + participatory work on fx(hash).

the transcript of the conversation which took place on February 19, 2025 at Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles, CA is presented here.

very special thanks to Fahey/Klein, the Allen Ginsberg Estate, and the Tezos Foundation for supporting the project + event.

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[the conversation began with a group reading of “Howl, for Carl Solomon” in which guests read lines from the poem, cut up and randomly placed beneath their seats.]

Aya reads from “Howl, for Carl Solomon”

ELISABETH SWEET: “Howl” is a cry for the promised, for the promising, for the destitute, for the forgotten, the surrendered. For the brightest who fell into chaotic hells, who lost hope, and paid with their lives but for what?

I read each line of “Howl” as a headline, each a descriptor of a person Ginsberg knew – he’s telling a story with each line.

Take this one, for example:

“who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,”

This line is about Carl Solomon, the man who Ginsberg dedicated the poem to. Apparently he really did throw potato salad at a lecturer at a university in New York, and I don’t know if it was a professor at Dadaism, but it was an act of defiance, an act of protest. Carl Solomon spent a lot of his life in and out of psychiatric wards, that’s actually where he and Ginsberg met. Allen Ginsberg’s mother had a long history of mental health troubles. She was committed at the [psychiatric] hospital while Carl Solomon was also there, and that’s where the two met. Eventually, Carl Solomon turned himself into the state and opted for a lobotomy, in order to prevent himself going back into the cycles of the psychiatric hospital.

Some may think that this poem is old and outdated, and it is 70 years old, but I think that there’s so much to it that we can still take. You can read the poem and its verses as describing symbols and hyperbole, perhaps metaphor, but there is something very real here, there’s a depth. There are people in every single story that Ginsberg tells through this poem.

After he wrote “Howl” Ginsberg reflected,

I sat idly by my desk at the first floor window facing Montgomery Street [in San Francisco]…I began typing not with the idea of writing a formal poem, but stating my imaginative sympathies, whatever they were worth. As my loves were impractical and my thoughts relatively unworldly, I had nothing to gain, only the pleasure of enjoying on paper those sympathies most intimate to myself and most awkward in the great world of family, formal education, business and current literature.

[then later he adds:] I thought to disseminate a poem so strong that a clean Saxon four-letter word might enter high school anthologies permanently…

And so here we are today.

In some ways, 2024 bears a striking resemblance to 1956, when Ginsberg released this poem. We’re still in a post-war, cold war, never-ending war era. Racism and mental health have mutated into something that we collectively cannot live within, and powerful poetry is even more than ever.

When you look around the room, you see Mark Laita’s exhibition, Soft White Underbelly. This show captures this vulnerable, invisible parts of society that people like to forget about, that don’t fit the reality TV program, don’t fit the shiny get-ready-with-me videos or whatever is going on social media these days.

This is real, and these are the people that I believe Ginsberg would have connected with and who howls through the poem. And so, the fact that this exhibition is up is really, really powerful. Maybe the simulation is working.

But there are, of course, big differences between 1956 and 2024. One of the biggest changes is technology, how we use it, how it looks, how we connect with each other, and how we make art with it.

So, now, to HOWL.camera. I’ve been talking for a while, and we’re gonna hear from Ross soon. HOWL.camera is a project that blends several areas of poetry and technology from the classic poem itself to the poetic devices within it, from Markov chains to generative language models.

Elisabeth Sweet & Ross Goodwin

Ross Goodwin has given us a new perspective through which to read one of modern literature’s most significant works of poetry.

To begin, I’d like to focus on the powerful, yet surprisingly humble tools that Ross, this scion of algorithmic intelligence, has chosen. I don’t wanna say basic, but he’s chosen really fundamental tools to computing. And so I’d like to start with asking about the computational aesthetics of HOWL.camera, why you chose a small language model rather than a large language model. Maybe we can even get into a little bit of the ASCII aspect of it.

ROSS GOODWIN: Yeah, sure. There’s a lineage to pieces. I did a piece before this based on “The Wasteland” [by T.S. Eliot], exploring that relationship between a language model and the material the language model is based on – the relationship between those two things. They’re not the same thing, and it’s much more apparent when you’re dealing with just one poem.

You can use a large language model on one poem, but the result of that is going to echo the vast depths of the internet and the many, many books that a large language model is trained on. Just showing [the model] one poem over and over again after it’s read the whole internet isn’t going to shape the work as much as you might think. It’ll start writing in that style, but it’s still carrying forward everything it learned before. The other reason I went with simpler tools this time is because I’m really disgusted with the tech industry right now, to be honest.

I don’t endorse a lot of what’s happening right now, in the AI universe especially. I think a lot of it’s really destructive, or it can be really destructive. I want people to question the use of these massive, massive, massive language models for virtually any application.

Don’t get me wrong, I think they’re great, I use them myself. In many ways, they’re very powerful tools. I think of technology, capital-T Technology, as a neutral concept. You know, it’s like the weather, or even more so it’s just a force of nature. It’s also very embedded in our humanity.

But, lower case-t technology is never neutral. I think that the way the tech industry is responding to current events, and the way that things are unfolding, especially with the dismantling of DEI initiatives, is really disgusting.

So I wanted to take a step back from using the cutting edge tools that are out on the frontier of computer science, which is where I started my practice 10 years ago. Those tools were very different 10 years ago, the cutting edge was a different place.

I wanted to reevaluate the need for such tools in the common context like this, because the idea behind HOWL.camera is not to make like robo Allen Ginsberg back from the dead.

ELISABETH SWEET: It’s explicitly not that!

ROSS GOODWIN: Yeah, the idea is to pay tribute, an homage to the poem. It’s supposed to encourage reading it in different ways and looking at it in fragments rather than looking at the whole thing, or looking even in ways that aren’t intended.

There’s a big gap between intent and perception. I think a lot of artists, art critics, and people in the art world will recognize that an artist can tend to a lot of different things in their work, but the way it’s perceived is ultimately what’s important in terms of its impact.

“Howl” is perceived in myriad ways and has been a powerful cultural icon for quite a long time. I don’t think that we can speak to which parts of it speak to which people. So looking at it through a fragmented lens lends itself to a perspective that embraces the perception side while looking through the intent side.

Ross Goodwin

ELISABETH SWEET: Really well said, I appreciate that. Something that’s really sticking out to me is that this smaller language model gets more specific, which can then be more personal.

And so through the personal, we say at theVERSEverse – well, this is not just us, people say this – but that the more personal you go the more universal your work becomes. And I think that that is something that I see in this work, where you’re rewriting “Howl” but very much from the bowels of “Howl” itself.

You’re not necessarily pulling from everything that’s happened over the last 70 years, you’re really looking at what language is and how language forms. And a little bit later we’ll talk about the photograph aspect and how that kind of comes into everything as well, how the photographs are then also reading the work.

Though maybe we’ll just talk about that now! Thinking about how a collector of this work chooses a photograph and then that photograph becomes the page upon which HOWL.camera reads and rewrites Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Then this ASCII visual comes up, and then within 10 seconds, the piece is screaming, howling the poem into existence, and howling the poem onto your screen. Can you talk a bit about that?

ROSS GOODWIN: I think it’s important to talk about ASCII visualization, because it is a reverberation, right? [That reverberation] is literally in the algorithm, that’s what it’s doing. It’s cycling through a set of characters that represent grayscale values, represent pixels in the image. And what it’s doing is pretty simple, honestly. It’s a couple lines of code to do that ASCII noise.

It’s more than that to set up the whole grid, and to get it all to sync, but just to make that ASCII is only a couple lines of code, and it’s a relatively simple operation. But what it represents is this reverberation. “Howl” has a reverberation to it, has an energy to it that transcends the medium that it exists in. And I think that a lot of Ginsberg’s photographs speak to his experiences that inform that poem. And the way in which those photographs can reverberate physically in the ASCII space, I think it speaks to a lot of those themes.

ELISABETH SWEET: I love that. It’s like an anaphora, which is in poetry, it’s a poetic device that uses repetition. So in “Howl” a lot of the lines in the first third start with “who” and then you have the section that starts “I’m with you in Rockland” at the beginning of every line. So this is an interesting anaphora in more of a technological sense.

ROSS GOODWIN: That’s a really good analogy. It’s literally one because the characters are repeating in the same way. And then I would also say that in photography, there’s a lot of importance in terms of AI, and the connection between the invention of the camera and the world we live in now. People who lived in the 19th century and witnessed the invention of the photographic camera had a lot of the same misgivings that people today have about artificial intelligence. In that they saw something, which had taken a measure of human effort, become automated and it made everyone really disconcerted.

People thought it was going to kill painting dead, but if anything, it set painting free in a way. It led to modernism. It led to painters really transcending photo-realism with the abstraction of more and more photo-realistic paintings. This is similar to medieval paintings – they’re not very realistic. Then you have Renaissance paintings, made when they were taking apart dead bodies to figure out how to paint a human form effectively, thinking about space and how bodies move through space and how things reflect light. And all of those things fed into the invention of the camera. Then the camera changed the system in which it was born into.

So I think AI is very similar. In large language models, you trade the camera for writing.

ELISABETH SWEET: So if photography freed painting, what does AI free in poetry?

ROSS GOODWIN: I think that is yet to be written. It could potentially lead to a world where people can write beyond themselves. I feel like we’re already in this world where I can write something better using Claude and ChatGPT or a fine-tuned model, if I use it in the right way, than I’d be able to write myself. And I think that we can look back to other historical examples, like the typewriter. You know, Nietzsche was the first philosopher to use a typewriter, and he thought that it didn’t just change the way he thought about writing, but it changed the way he thought in general. He called it “a mechanized word” or something like that.

There’s a really good book called Gramophone, film, typewriter by Friedrich Kittler that talks about this. But, yeah, the typewriter also feeds back into HOWL.camera because typewriter art is sort of the origin of ASCII art. People still make visual art using typewriters, and I’ve always found that tradition really fascinating visually and aesthetically.

ELISABETH SWEET: Thank you. I’d love now to kind of turn to the content of the poetry.

Early in our conversations about this project, we acknowledged that there are words in this poem that are considered offensive today. So thinking about censorship and how to bring “Howl” into today’s world, do we take out words that have caused grief and that we now recognize are insulting and derogatory?

We had a lot of conversations around this, as theVERSEverse and with Ross, and eventually we left it up to Ross to decide. I’d like to revisit that, and understand where your thought process went.

But before I do, I just want to make a tie-in that I can’t help but see with the Obscenity Trials that Lawrence Ferlinghetti the publisher of “Howl” underwent because of “Howl” [and other publications]. In the State of California, [Ferlinghetti] was brought to court for publishing obscene works that were suspected to be disruptive to society. He stood trial, and people brought evidence to court about how “Howl” had cultural value, and how “Howl” said something that had to be said. Eventually Lawrence won, and was then able to publish works that were censored previously like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. So without that trial, without that process, we might not have these other works that have really shaped modern literature in big ways.

And so thinking about how to censor “Howl” or if that’s appropriate was a really interesting thing for me to consider throughout this process, and especially now that the release has happened, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

ROSS GOODWIN: It’s a really complicated question. For example, in 2018, I worked on this project called “Please Feed the Lions” with Es Devlin in London. If you’ve ever been to Trafalgar Square in London, there are four of these giant lion sculptures in bronze that were put there in the 19th century that symbolized the British monarchy and lots of things that I don’t know because I’m not British. Anyways, we put in a fifth, dayglo red lion. You could feed it a word and it would roar poetry back at you. A poem would appear on a screen in its mouth, and then at night it was projected all over the lion and Nelson’s Column behind it.

I hadn’t thought much about censoring the people who were putting words into the machine. Until the day I showed up in London, and my colleague from Google, who was sponsoring the project, came to me and said, so the mayor of London’s a bit worried that there’s going to be a little group of skinheads snickering in the corner of Trafalgar Square as all their code words go up Nelson’s column in giant white letters. And so I spent the next few nights on what’s called a whitelist approach. But that was a very particular case where we were trying to prevent a publicity disaster and a harm from taking place in a very public venue.

“Howl” is something that exists, and it’s not a symbol of the British monarchy, or a symbol of anything super mainstream at all. It’s really a symbol of counterculture. And I did not think it was appropriate to censor any of “Howl” in this project.

I came to that decision not to censor rap music when I was training models on rap music back in 2016, because that language is part of the medium in this case. I think there’s a balance, because you can’t say, oh, the machine said that, I didn’t say that, when you’re the creator of a system like this. You have to take ownership of the language. If your self-driving car kills somebody, it’s the engineer’s fault, probably. You have to take ownership of the language, but that becomes a really complicated issue I think when you’re dealing with something like “Howl.”

So it was a challenge to decide, but ultimately I just didn’t touch the poem at all. In this case, it felt obscene to tamper with it.

ELISABETH SWEET: Thank you. That was my gut feeling during it, during our discussions, but, you know, it is a question. I’m interested to see in the outputs how much those words are represented, or how much they could even be detected.

ROSS GOODWIN: The other thing is that the 1950s happened, right? We can’t erase the past, even if it’s super haunted and cursed. The truth is that “Howl” is a document that exists from a moment in time, and it reflects that moment. In the same way that 1984 is really more about what was going on in 1948 when the book was written. Science Fiction and literature and poetry, they reflect the times in which they are written and the fears and hopes and aspirations of those times. I think “Howl” is a really good example of something like that.

ELISABETH SWEET: I think that bringing that into the modern day, letting [those works] speak through and to understand what we’ve learned since then, and considering how those messages and those lessons still apply can show us how we’ve changed and evolved and grown since then.

I’m glad you brought up the Es Devlin project, because the next thing I want to ask is about this theme of participation that I see throughout your work. theVERSEverse curated a piece for an exhibition we had in Paris a few years ago, where Ross turned a car into a pen, specifically a 1995 Porsche 993.

He turned the car into a pen and asked the car to write a poem about the drive from the Eiffel Tower to Versailles. So, in this sense, you are inviting this machine to really do the writing.

In the Es Devlin piece, as you mentioned, you invite random Londoners or people traveling through London to feed words to a lion that roars poetry back at you.

I know that there are other examples of participation in your work, and I really noticed this with you. Especially with this collection, it seemed really important to you, at least I understood it as such, that the collector chooses the photograph that the algorithm then reads the poem through.

Why is participation important to you in this work specifically, in HOWL.camera? And then more broadly, how does poetry invite participation by people in ways that we might not always see so directly?

ROSS GOODWIN: You know, I’m a student of language and vision, and I think that something I’ve learned is that language is a participatory process. We’re all participating in the creation and destruction of our languages all the time, even if we don’t know we’re doing it.

Language is a very amorphous thing. We use roads that are older than the languages that name them. There are other things that we take for granted that are much older than the languages we speak. Language is something that’s constantly in flux.

And I think that to deny your role as a participant in the future of that is to deny your humanity in many ways and your participation in society. I think it’s really important for us to think about ourselves as active participants in the evolution of language.

That’s always been something I’ve thought about with this kind of work. So, I like work to be interactive and participatory. I think that it’s about elevating the conversations we’re having about language and technology and the way those things intersect.

The way to start a conversation, in my opinion, is to facilitate more through interaction.

ELISABETH SWEET: And why in HOWL.camera was it important to you that the photograph was chosen by the collector rather than some other aspect or some other mode?

ROSS GOODWIN: Well, you know, photography is a very subjective medium. Weirdly enough – people don’t think about it this way, and it’s going to sound absurd to some of you – but photography is the most abstract form of art.

[Photographers] are taking a slice of reality, they’re not deciding what goes on a canvas. The painter engineers their work in every way. A photographer has to find it, essentially. Or make it through Herculean efforts of staging and set design, but photography is a very abstract pursuit.

In HOWL.camera, I wanted people to feel like they were choosing the frame in which they were going to absorb this poem. I have other work that’s similar to this, work where I’ve used webcams to show people their own reflection, essentially like a mirror.

Good art is like a mirror. For something to be art, it has to reflect the human experience. Otherwise, it’s pretty useless. Somebody told me that a long time ago. And I really take it to heart. I think it’s true. Even through the lens of technology. If you’re making art that’s for AI, you’re not really making art, you’re making something else. And while I think that would be okay, art is about human experience, and it’s a reflection of humanity.

ELISABETH SWEET: And we can more deeply experience something if we’re participating in it.

ROSS GOODWIN: I think so, yeah. I think lived experience is the ultimate. A lot of my work is very performative in a way people don’t expect, I think.

ELISABETH SWEET: What do you mean by that?

ROSS GOODWIN: Well, I think of coding as a performance. You’re like, sitting at a keyboard and your hands are up doing this [marionette gestures], and thinking and solving problems in real time. Something I think about a lot is how a computer is an instrument that you can play like a musical instrument. A lot of technologies become that over time. Engineers build platforms and artists instrumentalize them. I like thinking about computers as an instrument that you can play, most of all. That’s my favorite way to frame the device.

ELISABETH SWEET: Thank you. Now I have literally no idea what time it is. But I would love to open up for questions from the audience, if anyone here has questions for – hand! Let’s go!

Peter Wu+ asks Ross Goodwin questions about HOWL.camera

PETER WU+: Thank you so much. That was a great talk. Thank you so much, Ross. Thank you, Elisabeth. One really basic question, and then a more complicated one. The first basic question is: are the images that were used for HOWL.camera, are they self-portraits that Ginsberg took? They’re of him?

ROSS GOODWIN: Yes there are self portraits.

PETER WU+: So he took them.

ELISABETH SWEET: So he took all the photos, and some of them are self portraits.

PETER WU+: Okay, so I mean, who are the subjects? Are they mostly him or are there other poets or?

ROSS GOODWIN: It’s the whole Beat Generation practically.

ELISABETH SWEET: There’s Willian Burroughs, Patti Smith, Jack Kerouac, there’s everyone, it’s incredibly iconic.

ROSS GOODWIN: Yeah, it’s this whole group of people. It’s really interesting to me, especially with Burroughs. Burroughs is an interesting figure. We talked about the cut-up method before. But like, Burroughs murdered his wife, and a lot of people gloss over that, by accident in theory. Still, it’s a really dark origin.

The story is, they were at a bar in Mexico and she supposedly challenged him to a game of William Tell. They all had guns, and he tried to shoot a glass off the top of her head, but he shot her in the face. They had to flee the country and he got away with it.

He was a really famous writer at that time, and he has a lot to say about it obviously.

ELISABETH SWEET: He says that without that experience, he would never have been able to write what he ended up writing, the best works of his life. It’s something he expressed remorse for, but still.

ROSS GOODWIN: Yeah, it’s interesting, it’s a complicated history.

ELISABETH SWEET: Super complicated.

PETER WU+: The second question is, the idea of… Okay, so you talked about how ChatGPT could help you and make something that’s even better than you could write. There’s this idea of perfection, right? Or this idea of “what is humanity” in this thing? Where do you define that line? Because mistakes in general are human. There’s going to be a point, I see in work, in art, and poetry, that we’re going to take all these things, even spelling mistakes or whatever. For example, when I’m writing a grant, and I feed it through AI, and it gives me bullet points, I will make sure that it’s not “too AI.” I’ll put some other things in purposely to make it seem more human. And I think that we’re going to go even more in that direction. Where do you feel that?

ROSS GOODWIN: I have a lot to say about that. I think that first of all, the idea of perfection is a delusion. Art is not about achieving perfection. It’s about pushing culture forward. There are a lot of perspectives on that. But I guess what I’ll say is that the type of machine learning that I do falls in this category that we call constructive machine learning, which is where you’re not trying to get it to a perfect state, you’re not optimizing. Optimization, the process of computational optimization – the idea is you reach an optimum. You reach the highest point on the graph and the lowest point, whatever you’re shooting for.

But what if the graph, what if the surface you’re looking at is in so many dimensions, that you don’t really know what the highest or lowest points are?

PETER WU+: The ladder never ends.

ROSS GOODWIN: The ladder never ends. There’s a theory that there’s an infinite number of dimensions. It just keeps going and going and going. So at what point is the local optima, or the local minima, or the local maxima, versus the global minima, the global maxima. These are different words that people in different fields have used.

It’s interesting to highlight the difference between the word optima and minima or maxima, which is the difference between how computer programmers describe the lowest and highest points on the graph. Something can be the highest point, but perfection is an entirely different question.

In terms of ChatGPT and how we work editing computer output, I think what’s interesting about this is that writing can be a subtractive process now. You can chip away at the block of marble until you find the statue inside, rather than just trying to build the statue up layer by layer. And I think that’s okay, and that’s a logical evolution of form. I think to resist that as the next step is not the right answer, but neither is to accept it without questioning it.

I think we all have a role to play in the discussion that happens now about how these systems are designed and what they’re used for. Because there are a lot of people who are saying that AI is for the defense industrial complex, it’s for murder, essentially. And a lot of people in the tech industry say that now actually. If you don’t believe that should be true, and you disagree with that perspective, I think that those voices need to be heard and they are being heard now.

PETER WU+: Thank you.

OSCAR SHARP: You observed one thing, that there are roads that are older than the languages we use to name them. You gave me shivers with that one. It’s been a while. Glad to feel them again. The name Ross is much older than Ross Goodwin. Should people, or gulfs, or mountains, care what they are named? And if so, why?

ROSS GOODWIN: Yeah, I think so. I think names are important. Names are points in a very high dimensional space that we call language. And names represent a landmark in that space, a definitive point. But they can also be little prisons, right? You’re drawing a box around some concepts when you name it. And the associations a name has, within a culture, within a language, really shape the way that thing is, the way that thing is treated by others, and the way that thing exists within the system that describes it.

So, yeah, I think names are really important. One of my favorite books from back in the days was Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, and they talk about that, about an example where this guy names his kids Winner and Loser, and the guy named Winner ended up in prison, and the guy named Loser ended up being a successful guy, who goes by Lou. Or at least he was more successful than his brother, Winner.

But names aren’t your fate, they aren’t etched in stone. And that goes back to what I said before about language being this amorphous thing that we’re all shaping together.

Your name in a way is the most direct thing you can shape with what you do, the way you move through the world, the way you treat other people, and how other people think about you. That’s the biggest contribution you’re going to make to language, probably. That’s an overstatement, but yeah.

ELISABETH SWEET: But we don’t choose our names, I mean we can, but –

OSCAR SHARP: I did.

ROSS GOODWIN: So, just a second. As background, Oscar and I have a long history together. We made the movie Sunspring together in 2016. So, if you want to know about that movie or about that film in general, talk to this gentleman.

OSCAR SHARP: Although we didn’t name it.

ROSS GOODWIN: We didn’t name it, that’s very true. It was named by the sci-fi and filmmaking contest that we entered it in.

PETER WU+: Really? What movie is it?

ROSS GOODWIN: It’s the first movie written by AI. We made it to the Sci-Fi London 48-hour film festival in 2016, when we were both in grad school which is where we met, at NYU. Oscar was in film school and I was in this program called ITP, it’s like art school for engineers or engineering school for artists.

PETER WU+: Were you using TensorFlow?

ROSS GOODWIN: TensorFlow did not exist yet.

PETER WU+: Oh, Jesus.

OSCAR SHARP: This is old school.

ROSS GOODWIN: Yeah, [TensorFlow] was just coming out at that point. It came out the following year, in that timeframe.

OSCAR SHARP: We made another one a year later which predicted the writers’ strike in the face of artificial intelligence six years before the writers’ strike in the face of artificial intelligence.

ROSS GOODWIN: We used Torch.

PETER WU+: Oh, Jesus.

ROSS GOODWIN: Torch was the one, which is the Lua framework.

Oscar Sharp asks Ross Goodwin a question about names and the significance of naming things and people

PETER WU+: So for HOWL.camera, how big was the dataset that you used?

ROSS GOODWIN: It’s just literally “Howl” – just the poem – and there’s nothing else that it’s trained on.

PETER WU+: So when it’s generating so many images with the text, is that predetermined?

ROSS GOODWIN: Nope, it’s going to generate more and more forever, it’s all gonna be different. But they are fragments, so every five letters is directly from the poem. And it’s a character-level model, not word-level model. So it’s actually stitching words together as it goes.

It kind of knows where the word is, not because it’s literally defined, but because a word is sort of where space occurs. The space between spaces.

ELISABETH SWEET: It also pops the seams of each verse. There will be a word, and then that word is taken and brought down to this word.

PETER WU+: From each one?

ELISABETH SWEET: So, when you look at the work, different verses will start to appear, and then all of a sudden it bursts into the ASCII performance of “Howl,” and if you leave the code running, it will eventually be populated entirely by verse that is constantly changing and being reassembled and re-aligned based on the Markov chains that Ross designed.

MARGARET MURPHY: Can I ask a question that might help answer some of your questions?

PETER WU+: Please!

MARGARET MURPHY: Okay, great. In terms of the ASCII and then the code or the poem that’s generated, it’s doing so in the style based on, I would assume, highlights, shadows, contrast, gradients of the images in some ways, or it’s mapped through that. So obviously he has a huge archive of photographs. What was the selection process like for choosing the 54 that ended up being part of the renders?

ROSS GOODWIN: I used all the ones they let me use. I wanted to really share the whole range of photographs and not try to curate them. I thought about curating them and doing some other stuff, but I thought it would be more powerful to use them all.

ELISABETH SWEET: And Nick, correct me but all the photographs were from Muses & Self? Yeah, so Muses & Self was the Ginsberg exhibition that was here in 2023. All those photos were used in this collaboration. When you go to the Fahey/Klein website, which we’re going to link to on the HOWL.camera website, you can find the captions for each of the works. You can see who is actually in it and when the photo was taken. There’s more context there that we’re going to build in.

ROSS GOODWIN: There will be a website for HOWL.camera, it’s just under construction.

LAURENCE FULLER: So it doesn’t know the meaning of the word in a broader sense, just within the context of the poem it understands?

ROSS GOODWIN: It’s literally going: what letter comes next, what letter comes next, what letter comes next? And if a letter came next more often than another letter, it chooses that letter. There’s sort of an equation by which it decides which letter. The equation is called Unsmooth, Maximum Likelihood, which is the version of the Markov model that I discovered in 2015. I think it’s the highest quality Markov output you can get. Or it’s just the most interesting to me because it exists at the character level. You’re viewing the language more atomically when you look at the character level. Language isn’t even just made of characters, it’s made out of lines and dots. A character is a set of marks in space. And that’s true across all languages. I think the more we can drill down to the building blocks of language, the more we can understand it in certain ways.

MARCELA VIEIRA: Considering translation, when you translate a book or a poem, you are bringing a poem or novel into the language of the day. Do you consider what you are doing a kind of translation?

ROSS GOODWIN: Yeah, I think so. That’s a really interesting way to put it. I think it’s an adaptation more than a translation, but I think translation is another way to think about it. It’s more like translating two media into one. It’s kind of like a forked process or something. So yeah, adaptation and translation, I think those are adequate words to describe what’s happening.

AYA: So back to the small language model. My understanding, from what you described, it sounds like it’s making decisions more on frequency or representation of the word, how often it’s showing up. But I was wondering why you didn’t consider something more semantic, so really understanding what the word means. I wonder if that’s because it is a small language model. Is that the reason versus how large language models have that history of knowledge to understand semantics?

ROSS GOODWIN: I’m going to quote Oscar. Oscar has this great quote that I quote all the time, which is that meaning is overrated. At least in art.

OSCAR SHARP: Wow, I haven’t said that in years.

ROSS GOODWIN: You haven’t said it in years, but I think you should say it all the time.

PETER WU+: How do you feel about it now?

ELISABETH SWEET: What does it mean to you now?

ROSS GOODWIN: It’s not to say that meaning is meaningless or meaning is bad or that meaning is less than, it’s just that meaning is not the only thing that is important in a piece of artwork. And it goes back to that thing I said about intent and perception, those are the two halves of a piece’s meaning that you drill down to at any level. It’s this really crazy fractal shaped thing that you can constantly describe in more and more detail and never really get to the answer. Meaning is, I think, a rabbit hole when you’re talking about systems like this.

The one thing I would say is you’re right to point out that a statistical model is going to be biased in ways that the original author or Ginsberg wouldn’t be, it’s going to be biased in ways we don’t expect.

In response to that, the Unsmooth Maximum Likelihood model that I use is my authorship on this project: the choice of algorithm that I’m presenting. Part of my role in authoring this is deciding the aesthetic of what’s going to come out.

I think that the Unsmooth Maximum Likelihood model, for whatever reason, is more representative, it does a better job of capturing the essence of a piece of work when it’s presented this way.

view the collection on fx(hash)

first movement: PARSING PATTERNS

second movement: ONLY MIRACULOUS

third movement: INVISIBLE VALENCE

con(text):

David Hume writes to understand the way we perceive + act in the world. experience comes from impressions which shape our perceptions of the world. we think, act, and operate based on our perceptions. we are what we experience and can never be anymore than that.

Ludwig Wittgenstein builds on Hume and explores the logical possibilities around how different experiences or impressions of the world might combine and decompose to create something new. both suggest that there is a prevailing order to the world, but that we can never know it because we cannot know every single piece that contributes to the whole.

Hume and Wittgenstein, specifically their respective works An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and Philosophical Investigations (1953), serve as the philosophical foundation of encapsuled: var(semic).

read INVISIBLE VALENCE, the second movement of encapsuled: var(semic) below.

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Elisabeth Sweet (ES): in this conversation, we’ve explored the illusion of randomness, the miscalculation of newness, and the incoherence of miracles. still, these three propositions – randomness, newness, and miracles – maintain a firm grip on the human mind. the fear or yearning for some random event to change one’s life, the revelatory impact of experiencing something new, and faith in the occurrence and possibility of miracles serve as conscious guides to life, singularly or in combination.

randomness, newness, and miracles all carry a tremendous amount of uncertainty, but not necessarily doubt. Hume argues vividly against the tyrannical doubt which Skeptics hold dear, and Wittgenstein sums up the cruelty of doubt (through the English of G.E.M. Anscombe): “Just try — in a real case — to doubt someone else’s fear or pain.”

what makes uncertainty a better philosophical guide than doubt?

Michelangelo (M): the two phenomena are quite similar, as they both refer to a lack of knowledge about something, some missing associations between perceptions we had or between a perception and its context. with both, our mind does not have a path and it’s working hard to create one.

the main difference between doubt and uncertainty is our inclination to form the path. in the case of uncertainty, we want to create it, while in the case of doubt, we are more inclined to reject it. so uncertainty is the result of an open attitude while doubt is a reflection of our inclination to stick to our current paths.

in this light, uncertainty is decidedly a better philosophical guide as it’s more adaptive and makes us incorporate new inputs, resulting in more complete and malleable theories and less dogmatic beliefs.

ES: in “Of Standards of Taste” (1757), Hume writes, “The object of eloquence is to persuade, of history to instruct, of poetry to please by means of the passions and the imagination.” eloquence, history, and poetry are transmitted through embodied language, spoken and written.

in Philosophical Investigations (1953) Wittgenstein (through the English of Anscombe) writes: “It would never have occurred to us to think that we felt the influence of the letters on us when reading, if we had not compared the case of letters with that of arbitrary marks. And here we are indeed noticing a difference. And we interpret it as the difference be- tween being influenced and not being influenced.”

asemic writing may be defined as a mix of symbols and lines written without meaning, or even perhaps as “arbitrary marks,” as Wittgenstein describes above. as your practice is heavily rooted in the asemic, and considering the statement and sentiment of Wittgenstein alongwith the significance inculcated by Hume, what is the influence of “arbitrary marks” where one might expect a codified language?

M: it’s all about the significance of the marks. a symbol is something that stands for something else, and one needs a way to decode the symbol to understand what it stands for. in the case of arbitrary marks there is no decoding possible, and so the marks are not symbols and as Wittgenstein points out they cannot influence us.

when asemic writing is used how I use it, the decoding is not explicit, but possible. there is an intent in my creative process, an idea behind the order that can be found. this makes my asemic marks symbols. in action painting, for example a painting by Pollock, there is no idea or order, hence nothing to decode. it simply is and it doesn’t stand for something else, so it cannot be a symbol.

asemic writing invites the viewer to decode in private. the endeavor activates their imagination, which is often sleeping, and they complete the process by returning to the original message, finishing the art- work themselves.

ES: “Beauty, whether moral or natural, is felt, more properly than perceived,” writes Hume in the final section of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). nine years later, Hume writes, “Beauty is no quality in things themselves.” beauty felt may be followed with the hope of making its impression indelible on the mind, body, or soul. whether we develop an affinity or a fear, as Rainer Maria Rilke writes of the terror born in beauty, it may be said that we are guided by what creates a sense of beauty within us. 

I cannot help but connect beauty in this context to intuition: the feeling of knowing what is right or wrong without evidence stronger than an internal sense. intuition is our greatest guide through uncertainty. of intuition, Wittgenstein (through Anscombe) writes, “If intuition is an inner voice—how do I know how I am to obey it? And how do I know that it doesn’t mislead me? For if it can guide me right, it can also guide me wrong.” Wittgenstein highlights how challenging it can be to hear and follow one’s intuition, if in fact it is a source of deep knowing.

if beauty only exists in the mind of the perceiver, might uncertainty bear the same weight? is uncertainty, like beauty, more properly felt than perceived, thus exerting its influence more on our senses rather than on reality?

M: our senses and reality can never be separated, together they form our experience, so what influences one inevitably influences the other. we can never be in contact with the naked reality, it always comes to us through a lens and with a context.

uncertainty in particular is subjective as it pertains to a judgement we make towards some perception – we are not certain of what will happen next. it may be because the context is not familiar or because our senses are not receiving the expected inputs. a missing path that is not within reality itself but in our mind.

beauty is very similar, as it’s a judgment we make pertaining to a specific object or experience. while there may be some generic property that is often associated with beauty, I’d argue that it’s a result of our previous experiences. we are taught from the very beginning of our life what is beautiful and what is not, and our concept of beauty evolves in response to our experiences.

ES: what is the sound when a mind transitions from uncertainty to certainty?

encapsuled:

– – –

read the first and second movements of encapsuled:var(semic) here.

read ONLY MIRACULOUS, the second movement of encapsuled: var(semic) below.

– – –

Elisabeth Sweet (ES): if proximity and repetition guide our perception, it might be said that something familiar is an impression held close and repeated often. thus some- thing unfamiliar would be far away and infrequently experienced, if ever. we can explain the familiar while the unfamiliar is unexplainable. that which is unexplainable is typically dismissed, feared, or revered. why does the unexplained – the unfamiliar, the far and infrequent – intrigue a human mind so set on pattern-seeking?

Michelangelo (M): exactly because it breaks the pattern. when the unexpected happens, it means that our system failed to predict the course of events, it made an error. errors are fatal in evolution: what cannot adapt perishes. so it’s critical for us to take into account this new piece of information – the unexplained – and explain it, incorporating it in our realm of possibilities so that we are not taken again by surprise. fear and reverence are opposite ends emotionally but they share the same high intensity, reflecting the importance of this new information.

however, incorporating new information means that we need to restructure our system and that is very hard to do, often even traumatic. so rather than going through this process, an easier answer is denial, dismissing the possibility of our system being wrong. this can be useful to preserve some coherence in times when our system is already challenged but usually leads to less adaptation – and adaptation is necessary for existence.

ES: part of the seduction of a miracle is that it can never be proven, yet this uncertainty is what gives it the strength to withstand reason. miracles rely on human testimony, which Hume says is something we can never fully believe because “it is nothing strange that men should lie in all ages,” yet it is the central thing we hold when considering history. miracles are used to codify religion and create an aura of sanctity around people and objects, yet their persistence throughout history points to a real impression – therefore a perceivable truth – experienced by one or many. when can we know if something is “only marvellous, [or] really miraculous”?

M: miracles are a specific category of facts. facts are quite complex phenomenons: they cannot determine themselves, facts require explanation, interpretation. there is always a context associated with a fact and the context is what determines the meaning of the fact and its truth or falsity. for example, what does “coming back to life” mean?

to answer, even literally and not metaphorically, we need to define what “life” is. every time a human interacts with another, they share parts of them- selves that become part of each other. these parts remain even after the physical death and inform our decisions, our actions, our future. “coming back to life” can mean that the influence a person has on us becomes stronger.

language requires definition, definitions are made by humans, humans necessarily have a specific context. “only marvellous” or “really miraculous” are subjective lenses applied to an objective fact, remembering that a fact can never be observed without a lens.

ES: Wittgenstein writes much about the “ostensive definition” of words, or what a word points to in reality. one might think of this as the role of the word. what is the role of “miracle” in lan- guage and subsequently in society?

M: ostensive definitions work when the par- ties involved understand the category that is being talked about – referring back to the blue walnut example, if I point to it and say “blue” to someone who does not know English, they might think that “blue” refers to the type of nut and not to the color. it’s important that the people in dialogue are in agreement on the category that is being talked about, and I think that a misalignment in categories is often the problem.

a group of people may think “miracle” as “act of God(s)” while others may think about it as “something unexplainable”. but these two categories are radically different, for one implies the existence of at least one superior being and the other not. I think that “miracle” is a polarizing word and as such should be used carefully, thinking about the tension mentioned earlier.

ES: fusing Wittgenstein and Hume, a miracle is “a proposition” in “violation of the laws of human nature.” to believe a miracle, one must suspend their continuous impression of reality and allow an anomalous category of facts to become the pattern. if a person did not witness the miracle directly, then they place belief in the testimony of others, which amounts to agreement with the language used to express an impression or experience.

Hume says testimony is a challenge because men lie while Wittgenstein might say that even the testimony, because of its root in language, hides the reality or essence of the event. yet despite argument and disagreement, miracles and their claim persist throughout history, demonstrating the strength of their proposition and thus the power of their original and continuous impression. what might we call a miracle everyone agrees on?

encapsuled:

– – –

read the first and third movements of encapsuled:var(semic) here.

read PARSING PATTERNS, the second movement of encapsuled: var(semic) below.

– – –

Elisabeth Sweet (ES): in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), David Hume writes, “Every idea is copied from some pre- ceding impression of sentiment; and where we cannot find any impression, we may be certain that there is no idea.” how do you think about randomness in this context?

Michelangelo (M): I’m aligned with Hume. all we know is due to our previous impressions, what we call perceptions in the modern context. without perception there is nothing, and yet from connecting perceptions we can form new ideas. so, nothing is ever really new or random. every individual will necessarily evolve and move through space and time as a result of all previous experiences. it’s much like seeded randomness in generative art: not true randomness but only apparent.

in generative art, what usually happens is that the artist crafts an algorithm with some parameters that have a degree of freedom, which is a complex way of saying “a set of choices”. to go from the algorithm to a specific output (often called “iteration”), choices need to be made. that’s normally the job of the seed. given a specific seed the algorithm produces all the choices, necessarily. no matter how many times it’s executed, with the same seed you get the same result.

it looks like randomness to an external observer, but the algorithm already had all the choices inside of it. reality is much the same: there are rules that control everything even if those rules are not evident – secret rules like secret powers – not secret in absolute, they are possible to know in theory, we’re just not there yet.

ES: thinking about Ludwig Wittgenstein through the lens of Hume, Wittgenstein digs into what Hume calls the “secret powers” of words as they appeal to our “sensible qualities” which allow us to communicate with each other through language. how do words create impressions of the world and invoke experience beyond the moment of dictation or conversation in which they arose? what might Wittgenstein say about impressions or experiences formed beyond words?

M: I’d love to ask Wittgenstein and Hume this directly, but without knowing their perspective I’ll talk from mine instead. I’d say that the secret powers of words are storage, abstraction, and condensation. language is able to draw from the existing impressions of the world that form from our experience and extend to new ideas that then become part of our domain of knowledge.

a basic example: think of a blue walnut. assuming you’ve never seen a blue walnut before, you can still picture it in your head by applying the property “blue” to the object “walnut.” language extended your knowledge without you having to experience the object directly. this is a very basic example, but it extends all the way to “best practices in project management” and other abstract concepts. properties of existing experiences can be applied to new ones, so that with only a few words you can expand knowledge by a lot.

so, to define the secret powers of words: storage: ability to “store” an experience to be communicated with other people abstraction: ability to extend an existing experience or part of it to a new experience condensation: ability to craft new words to summarize complex concepts

ES: Hume’s bold argument about the doctrine of necessity analyzes our bias toward believing in cause and effect, neither of which we can really know. his rebuttal of causality makes us question the Western conception of reality. Wittgenstein’s concept of simple component parts provides a map for under- standing the essence of an object – reality – by looking at the pieces as an approach to estimating the whole. how would you think about the human in this context?

M: I agree with Hume: the concept of cause and effect is flawed, there’s only proximity and repetition. so the only difference between a cause and an effect is that one occurs before the other, but it’s also impossible to think of a cause with no effects or effects without a cause, since the terms are defined interdependently. causality is something we define to help us understand, organize, and predict the world, but I don’t think it’s some- thing that belongs to the world itself.

to me the human is an inevitable and continuous reality. an effect of all precedent moments and cause of all sub- sequent. the only difference is the moment we are considering.

ES: considering the continuity of reality amidst the semblance of change described in different yet intersecting ways by Hume and Wittgenstein, it might be said that nothing is ever really new, nothing ever really changes, and everything is known but not by a single mind. however, we can point to examples from cognitive memory and the present that would qualify as new, suggesting that there is an experience or reality of newness. given this paradox, what could we call something that is not new but previously unknown?

encapsuled:

– – –

read the second and third movements of encapsuled:var(semic) here.

read the polls + tied & final results:

this edition of var(verse) took an audiovisualverbal approach through a collaboration between KHD and Elisabeth Sweet. read + listen to the conversation:

KHD: var(listen, q1)

KHD: var(listen, q2)

KHD: var(listen, q3)

ES: It sounds like listening is a whole-body experience for you – your senses lock into the world and unlock a poem. Beyond the primary five (sight, smell, sound, touch, taste), which senses empower you most as a poet?

KHD:

from KHD: var(listen). visit the project which culminated in “Howling” by Katie Dozier

ES: It sounds like listening is a whole-body experience for you – your senses lock into the world and unlock a poem. Beyond the primary five (sight, smell, sound, touch, taste), which senses empower you most as a poet?

KHD:

from KHD: var(listen). visit the project which culminated in “Howling” by Katie Dozier