Expanding the Circuitry of BODYELECTRONIC
Today I'm releasing a new poetry project that uses my chapbook BODYELECTRONIC as the sample-base for a collection of AI generated poems called ELECTRIC NOBODY
Hullo Friends!
Today’s newsletter celebrates the release of my new poetry project called ELECTRIC NOBODY.
ELECTRIC NOBODY is a set of 100 AI generated poem-remixes of the poetry chapbook BODYELECTRONIC by Aerik Francis (me, lol). Page design, programming, and coding by Hào AJ Tran (the homie!).
https://electricnobody.github.io/
Most of the text is just going to copy the preface I wrote for the project. I wanted to call it a “foreword” but it seems that “forewords” by definition have to be written by someone other than the author. Given that the poems are AI generated, there is still an argument for this, but ultimately I landed on preface because it is my brain-spawn and I wrote the sample text (aka my chapbook).
Just like the title suggests, I wanted to expand out the circuitry of the project. In making the audiobook– (which I’m hoping will come out soon. I realize I' have been saying this since August at this point… Now I know how musicians feels, at the whim of someone else to release a project you already completed months/years ago because you are stuck waiting for mixing or mastering or distribution or whatever… and to be honest, it’s frustrating! I think of how long it took for SZA’s S.O.S to come out, or how Sky Ferreira recently came to twitter to lament about how long it is taking her new music to come out– her last album was released a decade ago…)
Okay, let’s try that sentence again: In making the audiobook, I used a lot of techniques to work collaboratively with technology, including a poem-group piece performed by me and text-to-speech voicing, or autotune, or just general voice edits like adding filters or reverb or flangers. It inspired me to consider how technology itself might participate more actively in the project/process.
I’ll admit, the idea of AI poetry has always bored me. My first exposure was a decade ago from this guy I worked with at the Smart Museum in Chicago when I was in college. His creative thesis made use of AI to generate AI poetry from weather reports (honestly this is probably NOT what it was, it is just how I remember it, something about AI and the weather and maybe baseball statistics too). It sounded mostly unappealing to me, especially compared to the wonderful poetry I heard at the Catcher In The Rhyme slams on campus. And much like most AI art, I just wondered why I would support it over human artists.
I’m sure we’ve all gotten a glimpse of the AI generated images and filters on social media. While those are fun by themselves, there is also the implicit conversation about where the source materials come from and questions of property rights and theft from human artists.
More recently, however, I’ve noticed a lot of really cool innovation with use of AI generated art that was less relying on AI to generate something beautiful in and of itself, but rather, demonstrated collaboration and generation in working together. I’ve seen musicians make use of AI music generators to create new sounds and textures within their own work. I would imagine this is happening across all media, but it is the music that convinced me (as it usually does). When the musician Arca released her first official remixes of her music and revealed that they were AI generated, something lit up in me, especially considering how futuristic Arca’s music already is. Not too long ago I woke up and it occurred to me that this was another avenue in which the central thesis of BODYELECTRONIC could multiply. I called up one of my best friends, who happens to know coding and programming, and as a result, ELECTRIC NOBODY.
The rest of the text is the preface, copy/pasted. Please take a look at the poems and tell me what you think. I would like to imagine this experience is enhanced by reading the sample text, but feel free to engage with the art in whatever ways are most comfortable and pleasurable to you.
Preface by Aerik Francis
ELECTRIC NOBODY is an anomaly, an anagram, an amalgam of BODYELECTRONIC. To me, it is a logical conclusion of the text, an expansion of the ethos of the project, a furthering of the collaboration of physical and digital, as well as a continuation of pushing the limits of [its] poetics.
The poems of BODYELECTRONIC constantly surprise me in how they continue to reach beyond the page and into pixel and performance. The poem _Stasis:Lagging_ for example has seen many iterations and continues to multiply every time I share it. The poems inhabit a new sensation on the page, on the stage, in audio, paired with music, paired with visuals, and beyond. And particular poems are unabashed in their fused relationship with the virtual and the artificial, some speaking candidly about awareness and others demonstrating their own poetic intelligence. _Ars Poetica (DoomScroll)_ is a poem with an expansiveness in how it may be read and arranged, given that each tweet that it is composed of are released simultaneously with no real indication of order. So when I say that this current project, ELECTRIC NOBODY is an expansion of the ethos, I think of poems like _Ars Poetica (DoomScroll)_ and _Game Theory: Poetica Ex Machina_ in how they lean into that exponential potentiality that is offered through innovations in technology.
I was most immediately inspired to try this project by thinking about the artist Arca and her release of 100 unique remixes of her song Riquiquí generated in collaboration with Bronze ai. That she considers these the first official remixes to her songs is also significant, especially reflecting on the futuristic sounds her music incorporates. She refers to the accompanying artwork “as an instant gateway to a forever-mutating instance of the song.” I loved that idea of a forever-mutating instance and wanted to imagine what BODYELECTRONIC would look like in collaboration with a digital intelligent sentience, how the central thesis of the project could, too, be a forever -mutating instance. ELECTRIC NOBODY is the first official remix of BODYELECTRONIC.
This project is very much inspired by the project The Woman Factory by Ava Hofmann in which her poems, separated by captchas uniquely/specifically generated for the project, ask questions about the realms of human and non-human through technology.
For me, also, this project allowed an opportunity for unique collaboration. In many ways I’ve always wanted to collaborate with Hào as one of my oldest and best friends. We have a lot of shared interests but with unique takes. For example, we are both musicians and music enthusiasts but have very specific and different tastes and abilities. Hào has a lower range and a beautiful texture to their voice, and they play guitar! We have jammed together before, we’ve collaborated before, and so this is another occasion of coming together for a project. Here, though, we make use of both of our current niches– programming and poetry.
Hào can offer more citations and explain more of the technical details about the process of generating the poems of ELECTRIC NOBODY. What I can say simply is that BODYELECTRONIC was the essential sample for the program to derive its content from. We ran the program until we got to 100 poems. These poems then went through a moderation review. While I mostly wanted to keep the poems intact, the program would often generate new titles without original content, as well as original content with reused titles. Moderation included replacing titles with originally generated titles as well as removing inappropriate and explicit content.
It is important to note a content warning: some of these poems generated included explicit sexual or violent content, so discretion is recommended when reading through. We do know that many AI technologies have a problem of replicating the biases and violences of the humans who program them. In that spirit, I did want to leave the poems untouched as much as possible to continue thinking about that relationship. Given that problem, however, moderation is necessary.
While we only created a fixed set of poems, one can imagine creating an infinite amount, and to me the imagination is the most important part, that exponential potentiality.
The poems surprised and delighted me, emphasizing that they are indeed poems and that they do have things to teach us just the same about form, structure, language, syntax, order, sound, feeling. In a way, it felt like a satirizing or a dangerous exaggeration of the work and words of BODYELECTRONIC. But mostly, I am amazed at how these poems extend and stretch the conversations in BODYELECTRONIC in myriad vectors. Some of these poems are shocking and stunning. Some of these poems are hilarious nonsense. Some of these poems are queer and some are just questioning. Some of these poems heavily rely on phrases and repetitions from BODYELECTRONIC. Some of these poems veer completely in their own direction with their own concerns, their own obsessions, their own syntax and form, and even their own language (sometimes they create their own words and characters). For example I am really fascinated with the set of “Naughty Jackie” poems that were created. I love how striking the titles generated are.
My biggest hope for those who interact with this project is to simply be inspired. Maybe you are inspired by an idea, a word, or a phrase. Maybe you are inspired into thinking more about coding, programming, and computer science. Maybe you are inspired to look specifically in to AI poetry, coding poetry, and the intersections of programming languages and literary languages. Maybe you are inspired to collaborate with a friend (we actually had a fun time putting this project together!). Maybe you are inspired to read more, to read more of the artists and projects that inspired this project, or to check out BODYELECTRONIC. Maybe you are inspired to write or make music or make art of some sort. Maybe you are just inspired to think deeply. Maybe you are inspired to keep reading poems of ELECTRIC NOBODY. Etc Etc Etc. I just hope that some kind of inspiration can be generated and some kind of artistic permission be granted.
This is ELECTRIC NOBODY.
(Also you can purchase BODYELECTRONIC here and here)
Always with warmth,
Aerik