Machinations
Turing two years on
December 1st 2022 is when MACHINATIONS, my collaborative experimental book with Kinneson Lalor, was published by Trickhouse Press.
MACHINATIONS came about because Kinneson approached me about doing a collaboration of some sort (my first one GenderFux, had been published earlier that year) and I thought this sounded cool. At the time Kinneson and I both volunteered for Full House Literary (which, incidentally, announced earlier this week that it was back in business after a short hiatus - brilliant news! Go check them out). As our starting point, we had no idea what this collaboration would be about, or what form it would take. That open- minded exploration was one of the many things I loved about this creative project.
We threw random ideas at each other to see what stuck. This was all done remotely, I think we only met once in person during the period we worked on it (late Dec 2021 - end Feb 2022). I’d had a brief obsession with Alan Turing just prior to this, finding his life and work fascinating and this fitted really well with Kinneson studying and living in Cambridge, being in close proximity to his archives at Kings College as well as having a brilliant brain for numbers with her Mathematics PhD.
I do not have a good brain for numbers, in fact I’d discovered in 2021 I have mild dyscalculia, which explained a lot about my struggle with numbers and how that’s worsened with age/insomnia/M.E. brain fog.
So to approach one of the most brilliant mathematical minds from opposite directions really appealed to me. I didn’t even touch a computer until I did my Masters degree, but had an amateur fascination with early programming, the development of machines and robotics, and of course the ‘Turing test’ - his research in the early 1950s and the concept of the thinking machine - what we now call Artificial Intelligence. All of this was bread and butter to Kinneson, but she’d never tried to write ‘poetry’ so we were both wonderfully out of our comfort zone - a perfect combo collab-wise.
What transpired is a distant cousin to ‘poetry’, a varied experimental hybrid text that is very much based on the subject-matter: of Turing’s work post-WWII and the Enigma Machine, his papers on ‘intelligent machinery’ and morphogenesis, and also the circumstances around his arrest, criminal conviction and punishment by chemical castration, simply for being queer. We explored his life and work through a series of different techniques: cut-up and blackout poetry, Kinneson’s invented image-to-poem algorithm that created poems from black and white images via an evolving binary-phoneme dictionary where unique phonemes are assigned a seven-bit number. (I can’t claim to have really understood how it worked! But we show all our workings here, where you can also try out this algorithm for yourself.
We also used very specific prompts of Turing’s work and words in OpenAI’s GPT3, the Large Language Model that was publicly released in 2020. Its more well known and widely used successor Chat-GPT wasn’t released until 30 November 2022 (the day before our book was published).
What I did not expect, two years ago, was that I would return to the AI (ish) subject again, with another experimental hybrid text.
Five weeks ago, my latest book what are you afraid of? <The LaMDA Sonnets> was published by the brilliant U.S. publisher Querencia Press. The blurb below explains where the inspiration for this came from, a sort of ‘son-of’ MACHINATIONS, if you will.
what are you afraid of? is a sequence of de/reconstructed sonnets derived from the transcript of “interviews” between the software engineer Blake Lemoine and a colleague at Google with LaMDA (Language Model for Dialog Applications). Tasked by Google to investigate the ethics of AI, Lemoine believed that his interaction with the programme suggested it was sentient. After raising these concerns with the tech giant, he was fired and then made the transcript publicly available in June 2022, sparking global discussion about Artificial Intelligence. These sonnets are accompanied with digitally manipulated photos of the author’s deconstructed computer, and pose questions regarding the nature of human consciousness and the ethical considerations of machine learning.
More info about MACHINATIONS here: https://jpseabright.com/machinations
We recorded a whole series of short videos, available on my YouTube channel where we talk about the different techniques and their inspiration.
Here’s an interview with the experimental poet Marian Christie with more information about the ‘making of’ as well as an article we wrote published by Lucy Writers Platform.
And finally, if any of this floats you boat and you want to buy a copy, then hurry up! It was a limited edition by Trickhouse Press of 100 copies, and there’s only 18 left! (Plus, by chance, they have a Black Friday sale on right now, with 20% off!)
Oh, and what are you afraid of? is also available to buy, if that’s your thing.
Thanks for feeding the algorithm.
JP x