Please join Text/Tech, the English Media Lab of UCLA, for a conversation at the edge of literature and code.
Authorship and/or Automation brings together four major digital artist-theorists to explore how emerging forms of technology are reshaping the acts of writing, performing, and publishing. Through short presentations and a roundtable discussion, participants explore the consequences of composing with algorithms and large language models; how digital tools transform our conceptions of voice, style, and authorship; and where human imagination meets, resists, or exceeds machine computation.
This event will be online (Zoom). However, if you would like to participate as part of the “live studio audience,” please join us at the Text/Tech room in Kaplan Hall 211. Refreshments will be served. Organized and moderated by Brian Kim Stefans.
Register here to attend.
Participant Biographies:
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is an African American writer, poet, artist, and educator whose poetic practice includes the intersection of computation, AI, race, and gender. They are the author of Travesty Generator (Noemi Press), a book of computational poetry longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. They are the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Their other poetry books include How Narrow My Escapes (DIAGRAM/New Michigan), Personal Science (Tupelo Press), a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press), and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press). Their most recent full-length poetry book, Negative Money, was published in 2023 by Soft Skull Press. Their chapbook, written with AI, is called A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content and won the 2023 Diagram/New Michigan chapbook contest. They direct the MFA in creative writing program at the University of Maryland and are a 2024 Foundation for Contemporary Arts poetry grant recipient and 2024 Deutsch Foundation Ruby’s Grant recipient. They are co-editor with Nick Montfort of the recently released anthology Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953-2023 published by MIT Press.
Kyle Booten is a scholar-practitioner whose work explores the algorithmic mediation of human thinking, especially poetic thinking. His most recent book is Gyms (dispersed holdings), a book of poetry written with and against nine different algorithmic “word gyms” designed to make writing more strenuous. His current project, Noöhacking, reimagines the notion of care in a posthuman direction. With Katy Ilonka Gero, Booten edits Ensemble Park: A Journal of Human+Computer Writing. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Connecticut.
Nick Montfort is a poet, artist, professor of digital media at MIT, principal investigator at the University of Bergen’s Center for Digital Narrative, and director of lab/studio The Trope Tank. His projects include ten computer-generated books exploring language, solo and collaborative work online, and the book of poetry All the Way for the Win (Penteract Press), consisting entirely of three-letter words. He has six books on computational media from MIT Press including Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities (second edition, 2021), Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (2005) and most recently Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023 (co-published with Counterpath), which he co-edited with Lillian-Yvonne Bertram.
Brian Kim Stefans is a poet, digital writer, and scholar whose work spans print, electronic literature, and computational poetics. He is a Professor of English at UCLA and author of numerous books of poetry and scholarship including Word Toys: Poetry and Technics (University of Alabama Press) and For Trapped Things (poems, Roof Books). His latest work is the AI-assisted chapbook “Beauty Face: A Poem,” available for download at www.arras.net.