That plus in high school, my creative writing teacher had us read Gertrude Stein, the modernist poet.Īnd so I think those three interests combined together to make this the inevitable outcome of my artistic practice. And I think those two interests, and I was captivated with computer programming, and I loved the way that Tolkien used language in his books. The thing that I loved especially about it was Tolkien’s invented languages. My dad gave me a copy of The Hobbit to read when I was 10, and I loved reading it. I’ve always been interested in language since I was a kid. And it came with a programming manual, and I started doing computer programming for it. Yeah, I got my first computer as a Christmas present when I was five. So were you a computer programmer first who became a poet? Is that your medium? Or how did you come to this approach? That’s what I think is an effective tool, especially for the kinds of ways of that language is used in this contemporary context. I want to do it with computers, because that’s what I like. It needs to be cut down to size, so that we realize the ways in which it is arbitrary. I think language needs to be punched in the face. And so when I say I want to punch language in the face and I want to do it with computers, that’s what I’m getting at. When I do things intuitively, the way that I do things intuitively is through computer programming.Īnd I also think that computational thinking and the tools that it gives you for breaking the world down and thinking through processes, rethinking processes, I think that has the potential to be a really interesting artistic tool. So I understand the skepticism surrounding, computation and its use in the arts. Computers historically have also been tools that have been used to project certain forms of power, and not good forms of power. Among poets, there’s kind of I would say a Ludditeism, which I think in a lot of ways is justified. Though with the computer part, that’s a little bit more difficult to explain. Anything that limits the expressiveness of language, that’s what I want to punch in the face. Right? Anything about language that forces us to see the world in a particular way, maybe not with our consent. That’s the kind of language that I want to punch in the face. So that ability of language to do things to facilitate power, the kinds of power that I’m not interested in facilitating. Notably in things like movements in the United States of making English the first or the official language of the country, is one example of language being used as a platform.įor politics, in particular kinds of projections of power. And one of the roles of poetry in my opinion is to sort of destabilize language or call to attention the ways that language shapes the way that we think, the ways that language enforces particular worldviews, the ways that language shapes the world, right? The English language in particular has a history of being a force for particular forms of our, and that comes in lots of different forms. There are a couple of parts to that quote. So I have this quote from you here that I think this is a reason enough for me to try to get you on the podcast that says, “I want to punch language in the face, and I want to use a computer to do it.” Alison, thanks for coming on the podcast. Her thoughts on computer programming for just the pure beauty of it, they also really resonate with me. And we end with some tips on how people can get started creating things with text. And she also does a couple of readings of her computer generated poetry. Alison was nice enough to answer my somewhat blunt questions about the nature of art. So today we talk about word vectors, and also about poetry and art. She uses the tools of NLP and computers to create her poetry. She’s a computer programmer, and she’s a poet. She teaches a class called Computational Approaches to Narrative. I’ve been trying to get her on the podcast for a while. Join me as I learn about building software. It’s something that has an inherent beauty to it that is worthy of studying. It’s not because it’s going to get you a job, not because it has a particular utility, but simply for the same reasons that you would pick up oil paints or do origami, or something. That’s the reason that you should want to do it. Computer programming is beautiful and useless.
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