[-empyre-] A poem is a small (or large) machine

[Margaret J Rhee]

Thank you so much again Will for these rich insights, I really 
appreciate how you place the threads in conversations, and the questions 
of robot poetry, and on awareness and AI. It is fascinating to think of 
Shklovsky and Russain Formalists, and bridging with Butler and gender 
performativity.

warmly,

Margaret

On 2017-05-31 00:44, William Bain wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hello Empyeans,
> This discussion is growing so fast it’s not easy to keep up! But
> I’d like briefly to respond to Margaret and Stirling re: the
> Williams quote. While enjoying the heady feeling of having correctly
> identified 5/6 human or machine authors in the npr article— But
> Stirling I like the way you approach machine or robot intelligence as
> artificial, that is, I suppose, a tool. This seems to make
> intelligence something closer to te military usage of the word as
> information. Yet to write poetry seems to require association, entry
> into an as-if world. Perhaps tis is where Margaret’s inclusion of
> gender takes hold, wih the basic question reducing down to
> awareness—maybe even awarness of intelligence, then , further, to
> awareness of applications of intelligence. What awareness, however?
> And whose? Is the robot poem different if created by a cyborg? Are all
> robots cyborgs simply because human programming is involved? Going
> back to William Carlos Williams, after Margaret’s post I remembered
> that the Russian Formalists, especially I think Viktor Shklovski or
> Shklovsky considered texts in general but especially poetic texts to
> be machines. They are tools, surely, but ones made up of series of
> speech acts (reference Judith Butler on gender here). Best wishes,
> Will
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-- 
Margaret Rhee, Ph.D.

Visiting Assistant Professor
Women's and Gender Studies
University of Oregon