(An Echo is the Place)
Audrey Razak
(An Echo is the Place) is an investigation of artificial intelligence as a co-collaborator rather than a tool. This exploration centers around the alternation of human and machine decision-making and dichotomies such as text and image, analog and digital, fluidity and structure, and feelings and logic.
Poetry is an intrinsically emotive art form with structures and rules, and when contextualized within a machine, the fluid, tender qualities of a poem begin to challenge the technicality and logic of a learning machine.
Lyrics, poetry, and even miscellaneous notes app jottings were collected to build a source text for an artificial intelligence training model. This database formed a collective consciousness of the people around me and was used as the basis for alternating human and machine inputs and outputs. The artificial intelligence text generator machine was trained to generate additional poetry in a style evocative of the participants’ style. Who then becomes the author of these poems? Does this ultimately become a product entirely of human collaboration?
This exploration resulted in more transparency on how artificial intelligence can work, insight on coding and artificial intelligence as a creative process, and how the validity of machine generated art is dependent on the aesthetic value we assign to it.