A contest and an exhibition on the state-of-the-art of poetry written by artificial intelligence, in collaboration with artificial intelligence, and about artificial intelligence
YEAR
2023
ROLE
Curatorship
CATEGORY
Art & technology
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 to learn about, 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, identified a shortlist of three finalist poems (Cosa significa – L’oracolo dei mutamenti, by Filippo Lubrano; STANDBY ME, by Valentina Goretti; Gino the Visionary, by Riccardo Socci) and awarded the prize to the poem Gino il Visionario, by Riccardo Socci.
The exhibition
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.
For more information
Discover the exhibition CIBERNETICA E FANTASMI.
Discover the winning poems of the CIBERNETICA E FANTASMI poetry and artificial intelligence call.
Read all the poems submitted to the call.
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.
