Generative Texts Salon

St. Rocco’s Salon at Kiddie Pool in Downtown Albany.
Chatbots and Python outputs, cut-ups and surrealist games: a variety of approaches to generative text.
With Kite, Chris Funkhouser, & more.
Games and hangout from 6-7pm
Readings will begin at 7:30pm

SCHEDULE:

Kite reading three collaborations with algorithms
Chris Funkhouser doing a “little anthology” of generative poetry, including his own work and historic works
Brian McCorkle activating computer generated poetry with motion detection
Amy Griffin reading an erasure poem written by her father
Cut-up poem by Alexis Bhagat read by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Suzanne Kite is an award-winning Oglála Lakȟóta artist, composer, and academic. Her scholarship and practice explore contemporary Lakȟóta ontology (the study of beinghood in Lakȟóta), artificial intelligence, and contemporary art and performance. She creates interfaces and arranges software systems that engage the whole body, in order to imagine new ethical AI protocols that interrogate past, present, and future Lakȟóta philosophies. Her interdisciplinary practice spans sound, video, performances, instrument building, wearable artwork, poetry, books, interactive installations, and more. Her work has been included in publications such as Atlas of Anomalous AI, Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), and The Funambulist. Her award-winning article “Making Kin with Machines” and the sculpture Ínyan Iyé (Telling Rock) were featured on the cover of Canadian Art. Kite has been working with machine learning techniques since 2017 and developing body interfaces for performance since 2013.

Chris Funkhouser is an Associate Professor and Director of the Communication and Media program in the Department of Humanities at New Jersey Institute of Technology, where he teaches Cybertext, Digital Poetry, Electronic Literature, and other courses. He has also taught courses at Naropa University (Creative Cannibalism, 2007) and University of Pennsylvania (Digital Poetry, 2010), where he is also a Senior Editor at PennSound. He is a digital poet and author of the documentary study Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995, LambdaMOO_Sessions (Writer’s Forum, 2006), and an e-book (CD-ROM), Selections 2.0, which was published by the Faculty of Creative Multimedia at Multimedia University (Malaysia), where he was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar in 2006. … and he is the host of Poet Ray’d Yo on WGXC.

Brian McCorkle is a composer, performer, and digital artist. As the co-Director of the Panoply Performance Laboratory (PPL) for over a decade, McCorkle supported the work of other artists through a performance space, conferences, and working with other organizations to produce new work, including 8 epic operas, one requiring a month of performances. The “operating manual” for this especially epic opera, Embarrassed of the Whole has been published by Ugly Duckling Presse as part of their Emergency Playscripts series. McCorkle performs regularly as a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist with Varispeed Collective and the Robert Ashley Ensemble.

Amy Griffin is the director of the Opalka Gallery at Russell Sage College.

Alexis Bhagat is a writer and archivist and a founding member of St. Rocco’s Poetry Collective.