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

[William Bain]

Hello Empyeans,This discussion is growing so fast it’s noteasy to keep up! But I’d like briefly to respond to Margaret and Stirling re: the Williams quote. While enjoying the headyfeeling of having correctly identified 5/6 human or machine authors in the nprarticle— But Stirling I like the way you approach machine or robot intelligenceas artificial, that is, I suppose, a tool. This seems to make intelligencesomething closer to te military usage of the word as information. Yet to writepoetry seems to require association, entry into an as-if world. Perhaps tis iswhere Margaret’s inclusion of gender takes hold, wih the basic questionreducing down to awareness—maybe even awarness of intelligence, then , further,to awareness of applications of intelligence. What awareness, however? Andwhose? Is the robot poem different if created by a cyborg? Are all robotscyborgs simply because human programming is involved? Going back to WilliamCarlos Williams, after Margaret’s post I remembered that the RussianFormalists, especially I think Viktor Shklovski or Shklovsky considered textsin general but especially poetic texts to be machines. They are tools, surely, butones made up of series of speech acts (reference Judith Butler on gender here). Best wishes, Will
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20170531/0360128c/attachment.html>