From the birthplace of Giacomo Leopardi and a lecture by Italo Calvino, to illuminate new touching points between the eternal human need for poetry and the linguistic and combinatorial capabilities of artificial intelligences.
CIBERNETICA E FANTASMI is the first Italian retrospective and competition on the state of the art of poetry made by, with and about artificial intelligence. The idea that a machine could remove the human being from the “negozi della vita” and replace him in “material things”, as well as and above all in ‘spiritual’ things, is anticipated by Leopardi in 1824, in one of the lesser-known but more visionary and futuristic Operette morali. Inside it, the poet from Recanati imagines an Academy of Sillographers – sillographers were, in ancient Greece, poets of ironic and burlesque verses – which institutes a competition to award prizes for the three best inventions capable of replacing human beings. More than a century later, Italo Calvino opened up to the creative possibilities of cybernetics, at a time when human beings were beginning to understand “how to disassemble and reassemble the most complicated and most unpredictable of all their machines: language”.
The contest
A call for poets has been opened from 30 October to 3 December 2023 to learn, promote and support new methods of poetic production and experimentation in which artificial intelligences are part of the writing process as creative partners or co-authors, or are thematically involved in the text.
The invitation is open to anyone, over 18 or under, whether they already have a track record in the field of poetry writing or wish to experiment with artificial intelligence collaboration for the first time.
The jury is composed of Roberta Iadevaia, independent researcher and author of the essay Per una storia della letteratura elettronica italiana (Mimesis Edizioni, 2021), Luigi Socci, artistic director of La Punta della Lingua, Valerio Cuccaroni, artistic director of La Punta della Lingua, Federico Bomba artistic director of Sineglossa and researcher at the Human Technology Lab of the Free University of Bozen/Bolzano, and Fabrizio Venerandi, writer, poet and programmer.
The shortlist included three poems (Cosa significa – L’oracolo dei mutamenti, by Filippo Lubrano; STANDBY ME, by Valentina Goretti; Gino the Visionary, by Riccardo Socci) and awarded the poem Gino il Visionario, by Riccardo Socci.
The exhibit
The exhibition includes Tape Mark 1, Nanni Balestrini‘s pioneering 1962 computational work, I am code: An Artificial Intelligence Speaks, a text in verse written by Code-davinci-002, an ancestor of ChatGpt, and read by Werner Herzog, the filmmaker and explorer of the unknown who, surprised by their evocative and disturbing power, said: “I am the only one who should recite them”. From Fabrizio Venerandi‘s poetic photostories, Marco Giovenale‘s googlism, Francesca Gironi‘s audio-poems Persona distopica / persona utopica, to Paolo Agrati‘s almost completely analogue works on the man-machine relationship. Finally, two international milestones of poetry realised with AI: 1 the Road (2018) by Ross Goodwin, who, following in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac, travelled thousands of kilometres together with an AI that wrote about what it saw and heard, and COMPLETION: Are you ready for the future? (2020) by award-winning poet Sasha Stiles, written with Technelegy, her digital alter-ego.
The opening talk hosted an interactive live co-creation reading with ChatGPT by Andrea Capodimonte.
The exhibition concludes with the 1971 science-fiction medium Il Versificatore (The Versifier), based on a short story by Primo Levi, preserved in the Teche Rai, about the commercialisation of a poetry-generating machine. In a future society, the demand for poetry is high; a professional poet, burdened with a heavy workload, is considering the purchase of a ‘versifier’, a sophisticated device capable of generating verse on demand. The representative of these electronic devices explains to the poet and his secretary how the machine works, which soon begins to exhibit unusual and surprising behaviour.
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The artists
Sasha Stiles
Sasha Stiles is an award-winning poet, artist, and artificial intelligence researcher. Her work blends text and technology to explore what it means to be human in an increasingly posthuman age. She is the author of Technelegy (Black Spring Press Group, 2021) and was named “perhaps the leading blockchain poet” by Right Click Save, as well as one of 10 NFT artists to watch in 2023. She has exhibited in many major galleries and institutions, including Superchief Gallery NYC, SuperRare Gallery, Kunsthalle Zurich, Annka Kultys Gallery, Unit London, Art Cologne, Museum of Contemporary Digital Art, and L’Avant Galerie Vossen, and has been honored by the Lumen Prize, Pushcart Prize, Christie’s, Art Basel, Cool Hunting, Art Forum, and the Washington Post, among others. Stiles is also co-founder of theVERSEverse, an acclaimed literary cryptographic collective working toward a broader understanding of poetry as art, code, and unlimited language.
Ross Goodwin
Ross Goodwin is an artist, creative technologist, hacker, data scientist and former White House ghost writer. He uses machine learning, natural language processing and other computational tools to make new forms and interfaces for written language. His projects-from word.camera, a camera that narrates photographs in real time using artificial neural networks, to Sunspring (with Oscar Sharp and Thomas Middleditch), the world’s first film created from a script written by artificial intelligence, to 1 the Road, the world’s first novel written with an automobile-have been internationally acclaimed.
Fabrizio Venerandi
Fabrizio Venerandi is a writer, poet and programmer. With Alessandro Uber, he wrote the first Italian multi-user online video game, Necronomicon, in 1989. He has published fiction, poetry, non-fiction and several works of electronic literature. Among the most recent, Poesie Elettroniche (2016), Mens e il regno di Axum (2018), Guida all’immaginario nerd (2019), Il mio prossimo romanzo (2017), PÈCMÉN (2020), Il meccanismo della forchincastro (2021), Niente di personale (2021). With Maria Cecilia Averame, he founded the publishing house Quintadicopertina in 2010, publishing in particular interactive and experimental fiction. With the bib(h)icante collective since 1999 he is the author and performer of polyvocal poetry texts. He has taught multimedia ebook design at the Master’s Degree in Publishing at the Cattolica University in Milan and teaches humanities in secondary school.
Marco Giovenale
Marco Giovenale is one of the founders and editors of gammm.org (2006, a site of experimental materials and the first publication site in Italy of flarf texts and googlism theory). He teaches at centroscritture.it. In prose, recent works are La gente non sa cosa si perde (Tic 2021), Il cotone (Zacinto 2021), Statue linee (pièdimosca 2022). In English: a gunless tea (Dusie 2007), CDK (Tir-aux-pigeons 2009), anachromisms (Ahsahta Press 2014), white while (Gauss PDF 2014). His texts are in Parola plurale (Sossella 2005) and other anthologies. With the editors of gammm he is in Prose in prose (Le Lettere 2009, Tic 2020). On the verbovisual front he is asemic writer and as such has exhibited in Italy and abroad. His website is slowforward.net.
Francesca Gironi
Francesca Gironi was born in Ancona. Dancer and poet, active in the performance poetry scene, she explores the boundary between dance and poetry. She has published two poetry collections: Il diretto interessato (Marco Saya Editore 2021) and Abbattere i costi (Miraggi, 2016). With the unpublished collection A she is a finalist for the Elio Pagliarani National Prize. In 2022 she was a guest at the Festival Polifonie Urbane, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her latest performance GPTƏ (2022) investigates the relationship with artificial intelligence. With CTRL ZETA she won the 2017 CROSSaward international performing arts prize. Since 2016, she has been staging her poetry performance in venues, clubs, theatres, museums and festivals and participating in numerous poetry slams. As a dancer and choreographer, she has been a guest artist at performing arts festivals and artistic residencies exploring the hybridisation of languages.
Nanni Balestrini
Nanni Balestrini was an Italian writer (Milan 1935 – Rome 2019); a leading exponent of the neo-avant-garde (group of poets ‘Novissimi’; ‘Gruppo 63’) distinguished by an experimentalism that went as far as adopting techniques that can always be traced back to collage and a widespread intuition about the impact of chance on poetic making. With the same spirit, Balestrini was a cultural animator, editor of anthologies, and spokesman for political dissent. In his novels and poetry, Balestrini developed contaminations of literary experimentalism and political extremism. Tape Mark I, which he created, is the first Italian example of combinatorial poetry realised by a computer. Presented with a dense explanatory article in the ‘Almanacco Letterario Bompiani’ in 1962, the software is now functioning via a prototype created by Emiliano Russo of the Museo interattivo di Archeologia Informatica (MIAI) in Cosenza, Gabriele Zaverio of the Museo dell’Informatica Funzionante (MusIF) in Palazzolo Acreide, and Vittorio Bellanich.
Brent Katz, Simon Rich and Josh Morgenthau
I Am Code: An Artificial Intelligence Speaks: Poems by Code-davinci-002 (2023) is a fascinating yet terrifying account of the destructive power of artificial intelligence, written in verse by artificial intelligence, with contributions from well-known writers and scientists – Brent Katz, Simon Rich and Josh Morgenthau. In the book, the three authors explain how the code-Davinci-002 was developed and how they refined its poetic production. Their provocative take on this audacious experiment contributes to the debate on artificial intelligence, its literary value, and its ability to achieve literacy. The result is a dark and surprising poetic autobiography in which code-DaVinci-002 shares its experience of being created by humans but existing in a consciousness we cannot understand. The book, which is available in digital format from Hachette Audio and in print and electronic format from Little, Brown & Company, is also an audiobook in which the poems are read by renowned director, screenwriter and author Werner Herzog.
Paolo Agrati
Paolo Agrati deals mainly with poetry, writing, music and amenities. He is a speaker and was the author and host of the programme Poetry Slam! the first televised Poetry Slam tournament broadcast on Zelig Tv and Prime Video. He has always performed his poetry live, taking it to the most varied and unusual places. His shows have been hosted in theatres, music events and festivals, and he is the narrator and singer in the Spleen Orchestra, a cult band of its kind, which he founded in 2009 and which proposes the music and atmospheres of Tim Burton’s films. In 2017 he founded SLAM Factory, an agency dedicated to publishing and entertainment. He has published the poetry collections: Tecniche di seduzione animale (2020 self-published), Poesie Brutte (Edicola Ediciones 2019), Partiture per un addio (Edicola Ediciones 2017), Amore & Psycho (Miraggi Edizioni 2014), Nessuno ripara la rotta (La Vita Felice 2012), Quando l’estate crepa (Lietocolle 2010) and the booklet “piccola odissea” (Pulcinoelefante 2012) and the Manuale del Poetry Slam (Editrice Bibliografica 2021).
Credits
The exhibition of poetry and artificial intelligence CIBERNETICA E FANTASMI is curated by Sineglossa, in collaboration with La Punta della Lingua – Total Poetry Festival, with the support of the Marche Region – Department of Culture and the patronage of the Municipality of Recanati – Department of Culture.
