Exhibited at gallery or event

nstabilities 2 [...] subjects a discontinuous text to various kinds of processing. The screen is divided into three sections which counterpoint each other. The top section consists of a video made by Hazel Smith comprising twelve short texts. The middle section consists of the same material processed in the program Jitter by Roger Dean, and involves various forms of overlaying, erasing and stretching of the words. In a third section of the screen the same texts together with others which do not appear in the top movie are processed in real-time by Roger Dean by means of a Text Transformation Toolkit (TTT) written in Python. The processing substitutes words and letters so that new text emerges, together with a spoken realization of some parts of the text, new and old. The pre-written fragments circle around the idea of social, historical, and psychological instabilities, but during the processing new instabilities syntactical, semantic, and phonemic also arise.  Improvised and composed music is performed by Roger Dean, Greg White, Phil Slater and Sandy Evans. In addition, computer-synthesised voices add an aural dimension to textual change.

"Código de barras" (Barcodes) was part of a collective exhibition titled "The Only Bush I Trust is my Own". The use of a barcode reader (an iSight) allowed the visitor in the gallery to reveal political and poetic messages against domestic violence, imperialism, consumerism, and informatic control. 

This short video work was filmed in New York in 2000 and involves a plastic owl reading Bill Joy's text Why the future doesn’t need us, published in Wired magazine in 2000. The text outlines a dystopian future where humans a rendered obsolete and are replaced by the sentient beings they created. The plastic owl hose sole purpose is to scare pigeons from the rooftop of the house in the west village spins whilst the words are whispered and the pigeons continue to go about their business paying no regard to it.

In a 1980 interview with David Remnick, John Ashbery describes the formative impact that the poetry of W. H. Auden had on his writing: “I am usually linked to Wallace Stevens, but it seems to me Auden played a greater role. He was the first modern poet I was able to read with pleasure…” In another interview Ashbery identifies Auden as “one of the writers who most formed my language as a poet.” For Auden’s part there was a mutual yet mysterious appreciation for the younger poet’s work; Auden awarded Ashbery the Younger Yale Poets prize for his collection “Some Trees”, with the caveat: “...that he had not understood a word of it.”

This web based exhibition presents a creative experiment using OpenAI’s GPT-2 and traditional recurrent neural networks to develop a generative poetry pipeline loosely modeled after this short narrative describing the dynamic between Ashbery, Auden, and Stevens. While this modeling is subjective and playful it aims to map the relationships between the three poets appropriately into different aspects of a machine learning framework. By exploring the potential of using social and personal relationships and the narratives they imply as inspirational structure for designing generative text pipelines and creating “Transformative Reading Interfaces” that explicate the relationships between the training corpora, the machine generated text, and the conceptualization of the artist.

The Hollow Reach is a choice-based virtual reality (vr) experience built on becoming posthuman to overcome the trauma of emotional and physical loss. What at first appears to be an adventure game turns out to be an exploration of psychological and physical recovery, not a retreat from reality but a coming to terms with it. In this interactive puzzle game, virtual reality offers a space of recuperation through adaptation and prostheses. In this piece, the player progresses from the human to the post-human only by letting go of their notions of what is and is not under their control to encounter a life augmented and transformed by the digital.

Voidopolis is a digital performance about loss and memory that is currently unfolding over 40-ish posts on my Instagram feed (@kmustatea). It is a loose retelling of Dante’s Inferno, informed by the grim experience of wandering through NYC during a pandemic. Instead of the poet Virgil, my guide is a caustic hobo named Nikita. Voidopolis makes use of synthetic language, generated in this instance without the letter ‘e’ and the images are created by “wiping” humans from stock photography. The piece is meant to culminate in loss, so will eventually be deleted from my feed once the narrative is completed. By ultimately disappearing, this work makes a case for a collective amnesia that follows cataclysm.

in a planet earth with out humans a old chinese poet is still alive a fight vs the alien occupation and extraction of earth. Is the battle of the carbon based life in planet earth. So a ambassador from the year 8888 came to 4444 to hear the poems of Li Po. Then, the antidote to capitalism that we know thanks to Li Po poems is send to our times for sell as Rice to prevent the alien occupation. 8888 is the code that the future send with the antidote.

Abstract: As a project that is situated between “the print” and “the digital” and as one that places print-based artifacts in conversation with digital artifacts, “not a book” is concerned with the histories, presents, and futures of books and the technologies of reproduction and replication used to make them.  Created from digital images of the traces left from the original copper engraved botanical prints on the interleaved blank pages of a digitized edition of one printed copy of an 1844 issue of “Flora Batava” magazine, the project reflects on and raises questions regarding just what a book is and was by delving into the history of “the” book as a collection of historically contingent technologies and social processes.  Seeking to document and understand how the material traces of bookmaking processes and technologies become legible in new ways once they are reframed and accessed in the context of new technologies of replication and reproduction, this project offers viewers an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which histories of print technologies are embedded in digital technologies and how the “not a book” image functions both literally and metaphorically as a “digital negative” of the printed original.