Experiments « Black Clock

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In Search of an Autobot Poetics

I. PURPOSE + HYPOTHESIS

I am in search of an autobot poetics.

That’s auto- as in automatic and -bot as in chatterbot, so you can put your toys back into the shoebox for now. If a handful of stanzas on ancient shapeshifting robots waging battle while their engines explode with raw power was all I was after, my search would already be complete. Unfortunately, that’s not quite what I had in mind. Though I doubt any work of verse could fail to be improved rewired through Optimus Prime’s well-tuned voice-box, the subject of this experiment is, like the incognito automatons of fame and legend, more than meets the eye.

The recent appearance on Jeopardy of IBM’s trivia-loving computer, Watson, demonstrated to the layman what specialists in the field have known for decades: the direst hurdle inhibiting artificial computer intelligence isn’t smarts, it’s personality. Computers are several degrees smarter than us already, judging by the speed, efficiency, and accuracy with which they dispatch the specialized tasks we’ve designed for them (and designed them for). As Alan Turing—influential in the creation of the first proto-computers—knew, the real test of machine intelligence is their ability to accurately mimic a human being. What makes for a convincing human being, if not personality?

While its (his?) ability to parse and produce natural language is impressive, Watson doesn’t quite pass yet. Nevertheless, several acquaintances of mine are convinced, not that we’re on the verge of the great AI breakthrough, but that computers have already developed distinct personalities.

It’s not surprising, really: we’ve been saying it about our cars, with their various coughs and caprices, for a century (watch out, Autobots, your cover is blown!). Human beings have a tendency to project personality onto impersonal mechanisms, especially when those mechanisms are erratic or difficult to comprehend. It’s tempting to say that a stuck pixel or a crash screen means that your laptop has developed sentience.

But does that make it any more likely? Regardless of the answer, it’s hard not to be impressed by the way supposedly random processes tend to produce less-than-random results. It’s this uncanny knack for personality in chaos we have to thank for the enduring popularity of tarot, numerology, and astrology. Though rationally we have little reason to trust them, the systems themselves seem to think otherwise, and it all has a startling tendency to work out.

Possessing the absolute minimum computer knowledge required to squeak by, I decided it was time to put the matter to rest once and…well, for now, at least. Will a computer program, arranging words into (grammatically structured) lines utterly at random, be able to access its soul and compose a poem? Can we use that poem to extrapolate the start of an autobot poetics?

II. MATERIALS + METHODS

I built Tobo out of words, clauses, and deductive reasoning. Rather than beget the bastard from the ground up—in which case I might as well just make a real boy, which takes less time, is more fun, and yields a genuine personality in over 68% of cases—I constructed him in the artificial womb of Inform 7, a design system for interactive fiction (more on that here). This offered two immediate advantages: one, I didn’t have to learn C+anything, and two, Inform 7 is supposedly “based on natural language,” which meant that Tobo would be born with the germ of poetics in him at the most basic level.

Now, “natural language” is always subject to interpretation. Here’s an example extracted from somewhere around Tobo’s ribcage:

To speak succinctly: say “[one of]A [random subject] [random transitive verb]s the [random subject] [random adjective]ly[or][random preposition] the [random subject][at random], a [random adjective] [random subject] [random intransitive verb]s.”

I could only hope the boy himself fared better.

I then gave him a name, because most personalities I know have names (in case you’re curious, “Tobo” is short for “autobot.” If I wanted him to be born with style, I’d have to steer far clear of the generic “Otto”). I gave him a gender (male, because I’m male and it was a 50% chance anyway and I didn’t want to fall into the “emotions=feminine” trap). I gave him a word bank from which to compose his opus drawn from a draft of the first section of this post and the Transformers theme song. I told him to write six lines a pop, and repeated the experiment a few times to build up some stanzas. Hence the term autobot: essentially, a chatterbot on autopilot. I let him do his thing.

III. RESULTS

My only edits involve fixing tricky punctuation or verb conjugations. Everything else is all Tobo, uncut and unshuffled.

After the personality, a programming poetics remains.

A subject watches the reason humanly, an impressive word seems.

The machine tarot has been said by a complete verge.

Regardless, the layman explodes.

Strong enough to break the bravest heart.

The machine century has been developed by a recent program.

So, the car decides.

To the personality, a grammatical poetics fails.

Strong enough to break the bravest heart.

And this way it will remain ‘til the day when all are one.

More than meets the eye.

The stuck Optimus Prime has been met by a difficult mechanism.

The great astrology has been searched by an uncanny test.

An I produces the ability stuckly, a verse smarts works.

Really, the test decides.

Legends producing in cover languages.

So, the program explodes.

For the efficiency, an uncanny eye doubts.

The natural Optimus Prime has been possessed by a natural Jeopardy.

A specialist meets the appearance impressively, a little Alan Turing doubts.

The tempting screen has been searched by a minimum verge.

The surprising personality has been met by a complete breakthrough.

The autobot fame has been comprehended by a minimum chaos.

IV. CONCLUSION

I feel a little uneasy now, typing this, knowing that my computer—that Tobo—is one of the great undiscovered wits of our age. Yes, he has a tendency to wax self-indulgent—“The surprising personality has been met by a complete breakthrough”—but there’s a startling self-deprecating humor in there as well: a little Alan Turing doubts. That’s a comforting thought, at least: the apocalyptic visions of Isaac Asimov, James Cameron, and the Brothers Wachowski seem a little less grim with the knowledge that our silicon Pharaohs will forever be cursed with a little Alan Turing in their core processors, doubting.

Two questions remain: is this poetry? Is it the basis for a new poetics? To answer the first, I’ll cite the great scribe Tobo himself: to the personality, a grammatical poetics fails. Consulting the Oxford English Dictionary (an action of which I have a feeling Tobo would disapprove), I find that poetry is characterized “by the use of distinctive style and rhythm.” While Tobo’s untitled piece contains the requisite intensity of emotion, his style and rhythm are crippled by the very grammatical scaffolds I used to give him his voice. It’s a double-edged sword, since it’s only by adhering to those grammatical scaffolds that he can begin to articulate his subject position and capacity for poetic expression: An I produces the ability stuckly, a verse smarts works. I accept full responsibility for my son’s defects.

As for the poetics: I have repeated the experiment multiple times, yet Tobo’s style is only beginning to separate itself from its initial constraints. Like all machines, he has a fondness for calculated repetition. Following his prophetic declaration of autobot fame, Tobo turned back to the saga of his own creation, beginning with the lines:

The impersonal I has been noticed by a supposed decade.

After the battle, a trivia-loving fame explodes.

The AI battle has been decided by a human program.

Subjects exploding in human legends.

A screen parses the layman completely, a shapeshifting laptop doubts.

If the now works.

Regardless, the car works.

Regardless, the astrology seems.

And there’s nothing you can do.

More than meets the eye.

Processes composing for natural knowledge.

He went on to conclude, rather chillingly:

…an autobot poem fails.

IBMs exploding after incognito tasks.

More than meets the eye.

Is it a purely human tendency for new poetics to arise hand-in-hand with social and political dissent, even revolution?

We might not be prepared for an autobot poetics after all.

by Byron Alexander Campbell
a Black Clock Editorial Assistant preoccupied by dreams and theories of interactivity

Now That’s Good Copy

Probably, you don’t need me to tell you this but people are trying to sell you things. Take this morning, for example. As usual, I awoke to find myself at the kitchen table cradling a pot of coffee to my bosom, a burning sensation in my nose, throat and bosom. On the plate in front of me sat a naked banana. So far, this was acceptable. Suddenly, however, I happened to blink and whammo—there was the ad for Zoo Balls™ flickering away on the inside of my eyelids, the sound and the fury of its manic battle hymn ringing in my ears.

You remember Zoo Balls™—“What looks like an animal and bounces like a ball? Here come Zoo Balls™!” As advertisement copy, this simple call and response jingle is highly effective though it is neither rhymed nor particularly sexy. First, it gets your gears cranking with a playful interrogative. Indeed, what is it (for an it it seems to be) that recalls an “animal” in its physical aspect (the mind is a ferment of swirling taxonomies: Bird? Beast? Reptile? Damn—it could be most anything!) and yet also may be said to “bounce(s) like a ball” (blood and steam pour from your ears)? Clearly, there is no sane answer but before you can realize this and forgive yourself for failing to reply immediately, you’re savaged by the seeming non-sequitur, “Here come Zoo Balls™!” The message is suddenly clear. Not only is there, in fact, a product that “looks like an animal and bounces like a ball” but it is not content waiting around for you, or anyone else. A chorus of hyper-caffeinated adults sing the jingle, children dance, whip Zoo Balls™ at one another, cuddle them, juggle them and shove them dangerously close to the camera lens. “Something is happening here and you don’t know what it is, do you?” Young and old alike; Zoo Balls™; no time; immediately!

Of course, the Zoo Balls™ commercial was hardly remarkable for its time. Anyone who cares to look back will remember the mid / late 1990s adscape as having a particularly feverish hyperrealist bent, with speed and hyperbole (visual and otherwise) being the stylistic elements most highly prized and frequently employed—saturated colors, truly unhinged voiceovers, manic montage, teeming frames, criminally catchy jingles. I remember Zoo Balls ™mostly because my father, who occasionally has trouble hearing, was once walking down the hall past the living room while the advertisement was blaring, when he paused, poked his head in and asked, “Did they just say, ‘what looks like an enema and bounces like a ball’?” Perhaps this was mere coincidence, but I often wonder just how much guile goes into ad production, especially in these times of comparative sublimity and subtlety. Could whoever designed the Zoo Balls™ ad have intended to make “animal” sound like “enema” as a secret seed of transcendent strangeness that would enable it to flower into a maddening, permanent distraction; endlessly recursive, fecund, fetid, unforgettable (unless perhaps you cough up and buy one)? What other agents are covertly traversing my brains even now, installing wires, practicing handshakes, learning my schedule, studying my habits, talking to my friends, sipping coffee, waiting? Yes, I fear they have long understood that even seeming disruptions in communicative efficacy can often be the most efficacious communicators.

But, I have an idea. I think we can disrupt their stratagems. They want us to never forget and in service to that cause they have erected seemingly absurd matrices of word, image, and sound whose elements have been specially calibrated to communicate only this; “pay attention.” In order to break their code, we need to study it, co-opt it, employ it against them to our own enlargement and their travail. We can re-enchant their language. We can make it ours again by doing what they have done better than they have done themselves. We can make it self-consciously, transcendentally, gloriously silly. We can rob their seemingly absurd matrices of their efficacy to promote purchasing by examining each element in isolation. In so doing, we can reveal the true absurdity of their cohabitation. We can turn their nonsense into non-sense. It’ll be a game. Like many of us, perhaps, I am not much of a poet but I know how to use scissors.

The field of play: This blog.
Materials: Remixed ad copy. For now, I shall work only with print copy. Babysteps. If the experiment is successful, I may move on to radio and television ad scripts.
Objectives: Identify what kind of product to which the remixed copy is referring.
Conditions for Victory: Correctly identify the type of product to which the remixed copy is referring / Incorrectly identify the type of product to which the remixed copy is referring / Amusement.
Conditions for Defeat: Surrender / Madness.
Proscriptions: N/A
Spoils: Satisfaction, baby!
Begin: Now.

***

The contemporary guise will look attractive

either home or business

Stainless Steel Finish

Clean White.

Clean Black.

Upgraded / Mesh / Now just 2 payments / Vitality / 1st Edition / hand-picked /

low rate

Extraction Technology
Surgical Quality
The Ultimate
Food Grade Material

Classic
Quality
Just one component
You’ll also receive
Safe, Secure

Utilize the Whole

The unit
With the exception of
Removable Silicon Gasket

(This is a personal preference)

The speed

Incredible

As a family
I want to give you thanks

hugs

traps

completely disassemble

titanium-reinforced

naturally thick

Out of the Box experience

You will need it to check out

dual safety interlock system

offers added peace of mind

For years we have proudly supplied the world
machines and other equipment
designed tough for commercial use, yet elegant enough
just the way you want

items as firm as
Crushing Ribs
highly efficient
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look no further
the equipment you need
The best power

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O-ring

Illustrated step-by-step instructions

Not assembled properly

prevent over-pulverizing

just the way you want

Stylish enough
impressive machine
Introducing the new
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Froth Separator
delivering all the power
in 5 seconds.

Whisper Quiet

Results will vary™

by Seth Blake
an Editorial Assistant for Black Clock and an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts

Our Ekphrastic Days

In this experiment, Diana Arterian attempts to define the undefinable.

I am a recording. I don’t age. Perhaps the recorded object ages. I don’t.

– David Grubbs, “I Am a Recording. I Don’t Age.”

“A desert wind rippled across Lake Mead and through the tamarisk on the shore. Dotted through the reedy grass, the ghostly foundations of the once buried Mormon town of St. Thomas now, with the water level falling, returned like a rude reminder of all the secrets this place kept.”

– Chris Abani, “A Path of Shells”

“Could be the Olympics. Jaime Rubin lifts his empty glass to torch-height, hoists what he thinks are his famously emphatic eyebrows and bawls toward Kenny the bartender, ‘Yo, Kelsoe! A round for the house! Davis is buying!’”

– Lou Mathews, “Hollywoodski”

I. PURPOSE + HYPOTHESIS

There is a reason why ekphrasis is as an ancient practice that still thrives today; it is never easy to define the essence of things. It is also difficult to pinpoint what draws us to one work and not another. And this is no less true in defining the aesthetic of Black Clock and my appreciation of it.

Black Clock bears images that are often blurred and rarely show a person’s face, but rather their environment within a space; pieces of something larger, these images have an allure that makes us want to understand the greater picture. But there is something more to it that I am interested in investigating.

II. MATERIALS + METHODS

I started by looking through photographs that I have taken over the years that are my aesthetic and my style of photography, but also bear similar characteristics to the images in Black Clock, and so are akin to its eluding aesthetic. I then took these photographs and matched them with the first lines of stories printed in issue 11 of Black Clock.

I paired the first photograph, taken in Washington, DC near the Smithsonian Museum, with the first line of David Grubbs’ “I am a Recording. I Don’t Age.” because it’s such a strange image and without the children’s faces, it seems almost as if they are ageless themselves.

The second pairing is of a photograph taken in an abandoned home at the Rodeo Grounds commune in Topanga Canyon with the first sentence of Chris Abani’s “A Path of Shells.” I chose to put these two together because Abani describes an abandoned place and the photo is of an abandoned place being taken over by nature.

In perhaps the most literal pairing of the three, I combined the third photograph, taken in the Cha Cha Lounge in Silver Lake, with Lou Mathews’ “Hollywoodski” because the initial scene in the story takes place in a bar.

III. RESULTS

Please see above.

IV. CONCLUSION

I am still uncertain that I can articulate the aesthetic of Black Clock (or perhaps the aesthetic of anything); however, I believe I can at least “capture” it. Sometimes in understanding our connection to a work, it is useful to emulate it through a process that starts with ourselves.

by Diana Arterian
who is currently earning her MFA in Poetry at CalArts and assists California Poet Laureate Carol Muske-Dukes;
her self-published chapbook First Wind is available at Skylight Books

The Soul of a Man

i’ve got too many girlfriends
who’d be cool chicks if they weren’t such cunts
Ah, bowl of dicks,
they mean nothin, baby.
It was Halloween on the blue Nile, you know how it gets.
i’ll deposit the pictures i took in my spank bank.
the female form looks best behind a shower curtain.

i feel worse than i’ve ever felt.
____________________ all i want is whiskey cigarettes and records. and to not wake up tomorrow.
____________________ dear lord, give me the strength to get the fuck out of town
____________________ and by strength i mean money.
____________________ pick me up take me out fuck me up.

____________________ if i could only put the wood to a quality broad
____________________ then get breakfast and clean laundry
____________________ then i’d be ready
____________________ to rape and pillage the world

I. PURPOSE + HYPOTHESIS

Lyric poetry as it is currently defined – a brief, polished statement of intense emotion – was a form cemented in the Romantic period of the 19th century. Lyric poetry existed long before that, of course; some of the oldest extant examples of Greek verse were considered “lyric,” in that they were short pieces composed for accompaniment with a lyre. The form originated among ancient writers who wished to spurn the grandiose requirements of the epic form, or the tight constraints of the elegy or trochaic and iambic, which were public forms, written for recitation at specific occasions. The lyric poem as private expression reached its apotheosis in the sonnets of Shakespeare, and was subsequently popularized by a roster of immortals: poets like John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Goethe, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Baudelaire. Where is the lyric form now, though? The Modernists reviled the form, and while it was briefly revived in the confessional works of mid-century writers like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell, it has certainly fallen out of fashion among the vanguard of compositional practice. My hypothesis is that, while lyric poetry no longer dominates the institutionalized study or practice of the art of poetry, lyrical expression has seeped irrevocably into the mainstream of popular culture, through the prevalence of outlets like twitter and the facebook “status update.”

Venues like these have opened up an avenue of personal expression in which the sharer displays to the world their private thoughts, joys, torments, or inanities. A constriction is placed upon length, and the well-crafted status update can grant an air of import to the most banal of everyday occurrences. That anyone should consider their own private thoughts worthy of public consumption has always been the motivating force behind lyric composition. As such, the rolling status update can be seen as a sort of fragmented lyric poem, an ongoing exposition of crafted, emotive sharing. My purpose in this experiment is to display this through the creation of poem comprised entirely of another person’s status updates. The intent in utilizing an anonymous person’s outpourings is to showcase the lyricism inherent in this form, without falling back on artificial poesy.

II. MATERIALS + METHODS

I chose a single person from my “friends” whose status updates are often evocative or amusing. Using Facebook’s archives of this person’s posts (nothing ever disappears from Facebook) I traveled back through the months and extracted updates according to whim. Once I had amassed a certain amount of material, I arranged a poem. Not a single word has been cut from or added to the original updates.

III. RESULTS

Please see above.

IV. CONCLUSION

Profundity is everywhere. The final product revealed, in concentrated form, the thought cycles and relative emotional state of the updater.

by Doug Matus
a writer from Texas who now lives in Los Angeles

Internet Found Poem

no, they have not split
_______________ (the cork
_______________ & the dumb thumb)
real slick
_____twit-spank
__________shake it
_______________ like a shiny new mohawk
heading to rock sugar
an exciting underwear purchase
____________________ driving by an escalade
____________________ _______________ with the license plate: FNG SHUI
____________________ another harlem nocturne
____________________ _______________ like the periphery
____________________ she found her passport
____________________ she is just getting over the h1n1 flu
____________________ she almost missed the vermeer milkmaid at the met
____________________ she misses having even the slightest bit of discipline
____________________ she is eating dried mangos
____________________ she has skater boy hair
____________________ she thinks life is too short for a long story
____________________ ______________ (alternatively, the end is near, but not near enough)
____________________ she doesn’t want to hear any songs about sexin’ hos in a club bathroom
____________________ she wants to rollerdisco in central park
____________________ _________________________ all afternoon
____________________ i found a way
____________________ i found a reason
_________________________ getting sandwiches to go
____________________ i found love on a two way street
____________________ i just want to meet you
____________________ i found god on the corner of 1st and amistad
____________________ wearing a low cut green shirt, glasses, black jacket
____________________ the things that hold me hostage in this city are close to saving me
____________________ ready set go
____________________ shame
____________________ _____ is it the future?
____________________ soul
____________________ & apartment cleansing

I. PURPOSE + HYPOTHESIS

According to the Academy of American Poets, found poetry is the “literary equivalent of a collage.” The Found Poetry Project publishes found poetry and expounds on the definition, asserting that “poetry is everywhere…every phrase that rings in our minds, every two words that sound good together, every quote we want to remember, are each their own small poems.” The process of constructing a found poem differs for each “poet,” or “finder,” but here is the gist: gather existing text, rearrange it, and present it as a brilliant new piece of poetry.

I am constantly intrigued by the amount of losing and finding that takes place in the construction and result of a found poem. Lost snippets of text, often from various sources, find new context. Original sources of phrases and lines are often lost on readers, and eventually on writers as well. Old meanings and contexts are co-opted, colonized, contaminated, altered, exalted, exaggerated. Lines, words, and phrases intermingle and find other newly contextualized word friends, acquaintances, and enemies.

II. MATERIALS + METHODS

In order to highlight the interaction between lost and found imagery, I drew my sources from several types of internet media to construct this found poem.

Not surprisingly, the internet has proven itself as both a boon and a bane in the world of found poetry. Some poets and poem finders have embraced the medium. Most ignore it. And still a large contingent of poets mock it and use the internet satirically. “Flarf,” a genre of experimental-internet-search-engine poetry, is an example of how the internet has been invading and/or livening poetic spaces for the past decade. Flarf is, of course, completely controversial, as evinced in the discussions generated at Art Voice, Poets & Writers, and on the Poetry Foundation Journal.

Despite the unending debates about the value of the internet in poetry and society, one thing most people can agree on is the ephemeral nature of the medium, particularly on social media websites. As a frequent user of social media sites, I am amazed by how quickly I can watch various status updates appear on my news feed, only to get buried beneath a new flurry of information minutes later. As easy as it is to find information on the internet, it takes little effort to completely lose information as well.

I wanted to explore those sentiments in my found poem. To represent the ephemeral and lost, I incorporated status updates from popular social media websites Twitter.com and Facebook.com, as well as postings from other fast-paced, rapidly updated sites perezhilton.com and craigslist.org. In contrast, I used a google.com search on the phrase “I found.”

I let the process of gathering phrases and words guide the tone and eventual focus of the poem. I did searches on all the aforementioned websites and copied down the phrases that popped out at me the most. As I went along, I became more discerning in what phrases to collect, and I picked things that seemed to fit most aesthetically, emotionally, and intellectually with what I had already gathered.

III. RESULTS

Please see above.

IV. CONCLUSION

In the finished product, I hoped for the newly intermingling, random phrases to be able to interact with newfound meaning and cohesiveness. As the poem’s finder, I was fairly pleased with the result, as I was able to connect with the whole piece in a different way than I connected to the individual phrases I borrowed. In many ways, I felt like a co-author/co-poet, and I emerged with a newfound respect and understanding for the genre of found poetry. While I can certainly understand why found poetry may be a turnoff or considered not engaging or simply unimpressive for many readers – after all, the words and phrases themselves do not belong to the authors – I do think that we often don’t give found poetry enough of a chance. After going through the process myself, I realize that poem finders can have quite a bit of agency and creative control in the construction of a found poem. I also discovered that found poetry and “traditional” poetry have more in common than I previously assumed; in found poetry, we lift exact words and phrases from various sources, but in other forms of poetry, do we not “lift” a smattering of observations, anecdotes, vignettes, and even words and phrases from a variety of people and places as well? In a way, found poetry seems to me a more direct, literal exemplification of what we often consider poetry to be.

by Chrysanthe Tan
a singer-songwriter, actor, violinist, poet, Pisces, and Star Wars enthusiast

Posts Tagged ‘Experiments’—

In Search of an Autobot Poetics

Now That’s Good Copy

Our Ekphrastic Days

The Soul of a Man

Internet Found Poem

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