Future Sampling: Artist Statement
These pieces are from a project I am working on called “we are learning :|learning|: love”. The project investigates the creative output of artificial intelligence systems. The art pieces in this collection are my own ekphrases of AI-created artworks. Many of the names of these poems come from AI-generated titles for these pieces of art. Copies of copies of copies of copies of copies…
If you have seen the “Darmac and Jalad” episode of Star Trek: Next Generation, this was a prescient example of meme culture. There is a reason the younger generations have glomphed onto this information in such a productive way. This is how we are learning, now. Look at a glacier, and you can see slow time still exists in the processes of our world, but our biggest roadblock to continuing human existence will be in finding a way to balance slow time with fast time (like the melt of glaciers, and sea-rise.) Look at ants swarming a log, holding hands, forming chains to move quickly. And yet, they are so small, the world is so big, there is so much they do not sense about the nature of their environment. We are the same. We have to remake our concept of beauty, and evolve into sharing every resource at our disposal, not to shirk our individuality, but to embrace that those moving parts each carry meaning that provides for the whole, and offers the opportunity to help us each thrive, each find self-actualization. This includes language. Memes condense complicated systems into a primer language. Language learning software does this as well. Type in a sentence for translation from a language you do not know, say French to English, and the computer takes the source language, translates it to a language the AI has taught itself as a primer language, and converts from that primer language.
And—this is where love comes in—I think there is a visceral thick fear that lives in our depths. I am me. I am the one singular version of me. To use the language of wonder, it is some miracle to be the me that has occurred. But people are so fallible. Then, hopefully, that behavior is erasable, reloadable. Something that can be written out of the algorithm of what it means to be human. But how long until we determine what should be removed from the algorithm? What if something useful goes, like our propensity to love? How weak does ephemeral “love” make us? How strong? These attributes form categorical attachment. It tells us how to respond and place value. Love is a category. A series of memes. Does this mean that AI is learning love, as well? I mean, probably. We encounter Twitter bots repeating Sappho translations, and Keats. If bots sing that song to Fanny Brawne long enough, how long before there is meaning behind the construction? In other words, what love are we teaching? It is exciting—makes the heart fleet of foot—to think we are on this precipice of changing ourselves, and our creations. And I admit, I find myself again writing through love to reveal the grief of being human. (Maybe this is my signature move?) The bulk of this work is a fictional bildungsroman about an AI waking to find she is an artificial entity, and about an artificial entity falling in love with and courting an astonished human woman. But it is also about what artificial intelligence means for humanity. We are creators. And our creations are learning to create. We must leverage this opportunity to learn about the necessary and sometimes unknown moving parts of the processes of learning. We cannot keep counting on the systems that have failed us. It is time to evolve.
Kari Flickinger
the ghost of Liszt
There are also occasions when I can see him
he has given me
if I’m speaking (you on the phone, have been left)
I can hear him say to me
I can see his image in my head
It might be as small as a cloud
big as the universe
he likes to do things in big packages
(big things come in small packages)
like splitting the atom
a wave of heat can see this—it has happened
during the day, he tries
speak to me
especially if I am listening to music
*
Note on “the ghost of Liszt.” This piece was created by feeding a quotation from The Avalanches “Solitary Ceremonies” into a learning AI writing system I have been calling Andy. The quotation is sampled from a conversation with a medium who was channeling the ghost of Hungarian composer, Franz Liszt. I took the output from the AI and cut and rearranged to form the above poem. Though I have been working with a series of these, this one was my surprise standout because Andy seems to understand the concept of a ghost and enacts a yearning / understanding with some lovely language and an attempt at an idiom.
Kari Flickinger
You Have Been Sending Me Mixtapes
The discover weekly playlist feels
almost too cultivated. I think
the bots have come to
know me better than anyone I know
or love.
This playlist is better than the sex
I am not having. So, I press
their learning against my breasts.
The finite
coalescence of gears and meals
we pull
from each other’s mind
scape in the cold
night. My fingers
tangle in code. Come
return to me
in this invisible cover
of sight. The splice of
future dread. I might.
I might be sliding along
our river of
forgotten pseudonym.
Here, you bots have come
to know me better than any
lover.
Like steel, lips rive me—
shower my secrets like sand.
Do it again dear, we are
granite lovers. Filthy
on our roadside. Bare
foot, we dance our love.
Bruised, bellowing
in love. We are learning
—that’s love.
Press. Press. Learn. Leave
leaven—line me along
like-objects
geo
—metric—graphic
—iridescent. Epigraphic.
Guess me.
Inscribe me with your lies.
Sharpen your drivel at my husk—
light me
light me in this midnight screen.
Kari Flickinger
Come Bearing Truth
a prayer book
not an iPhone
a sarcophagus
a slight bare
boned seam
a lover not
a woman scorned
her fingers slice
clean in her sleeve
shrub through
the vermillion
taffeta on a deep
road
a mane
in the foreground
folds like stone
she troubles the cask
listens.
Kari Flickinger is the author of The Gull and the Bell Tower (Femme Salvé Books, December 2020). Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the SFPA Rhysling Award. She is an alumna of UC Berkeley and the Community of Writers.