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Unread 07-23-2022, 05:16 AM
Sarah-Jane Crowson's Avatar
Sarah-Jane Crowson Sarah-Jane Crowson is offline
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Allen, you don't make me feel bad at all. I really appreciate your comments.

This is a worthwhile critical challenge, from my perspective, much of it valid and needing me to think about sound counter-arguments - and it's also an interesting way to think about poetry/arts in general. It's the sort of comment that helps me think about my work and improve it.

So, I think in terms of collage and erased/found text you have a point. It'd be possible (and has probably been done already) to devise an programme that crawled through text on a single page and found stress patterns - language/text is a coded entity anyway. So rhythmic patterns could be found. Equally, a computer could be programmed to make sure that these made syntactical (?) sense and some kind of logical sense.

And with the visual images you could set up a set of four/five key compositions and choices of image (flower/butterfly etc) & press enter. It's a process I replicate when making these. I work in series, using the same motifs. Sometimes I use motifs that represent me, and my life experience or sometimes my motifs are my friends etc - which is probably more human and would be harder to replicate as the choices there are emotional/subjective - but not in this one - they are simply images that have some bearing/link to the source material which a computer could probably replicate.

But, the creative decision-making in the setting up of the choice of source and the particular choice of initial visual objects to use in compositions I think is more 'human', unless it was very derivative (for example, based on a particular artist's compositions).

I also think that the nuance, the interplay between source text and erased text is something a computer would struggle to replicate, as it's based on essentially subjective/cultural decision-making - it's more holistic and I struggle to reduce it to an algorithm. And there's also the creative decisions in deciding to create the piece - why, why does this matter, that are more 'human'.

And there's the choice of decisions about form. What source, what method (erasure), why, and then how to best put the materials together (tunnel book, accordion book) - here is where it gets even more human - as it's about sensory decisions like the feel of paper, the choice of ink, the smell of the artefact. I'm going to bind this sample, so it's also about the binding, how that works with materials and source - and the weight of this.

These are more human decisions. That particular synergy of material, source text, composition, text, all swirling around and (hopefully) not ending up with pea soup - although I do not think that this piece is great, by a long way - there are aspects that are not very good). What I'm taking out of this (and this is why I appreciate constructive critical comments so much) is that I probably must try to make the subtle interplay between source and 'erased' material more obvious, more articulated, and that creating artefacts/objects is more important than I thought.

Too long! But thank you. I share your concerns about AI. I worry about the messy human getting lost. I think it's important to discuss.

Sarah-Jane
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