Waves of Pixels and Word-generated Algorithms: Drone Poetry as a Collaborative Practice between Machine and Human in Waveform by Richard A. Carter

Katarzyna Ostalska

doi:10.18778/2083-2931.13.15

Authors

Katarzyna Ostalska University of Lodz https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8553-7517

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.13.15

Keywords:

digital literature, drone generated poetry, waves, computer code, multimodality

Abstract

The following article explores the creative collaborative practices in digital poetry between more-than-human agents. Richard A. Carter’s artistic project Waveform (2017–) makes one reconsider the ways in which multimodal and web-based encounters of image, word, sound and movement, and, in the case of Carter’s airborne drone, also the political and military, redefine “a literary text” via nonhuman extended perception. Drone-generated poetry challenges a human-centered (literary) perspective, raising questions about AI’s creativity and code’s generative and aesthetic, and not only functional, potential. The article, drawing upon Raichlen, introduces a comparative platform of waves’ mechanics to render the complexity of multimedial digital poetic writing. The focal analytical material provided by Carter results from the (human, machine) vision (of the moving waves) translated into words, generated by the drone, and edited by the human. The article studies the creative process in which the collaboration between more-than-human entities, as its outcome, produces poetic work of artistic value and literary merit.

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Author Biography

Katarzyna Ostalska, University of Lodz

Katarzyna Ostalska is Assistant Professor in the Department of British Literature and Culture at the University of Lodz, Poland. She is the head of the Posthumanities Research Centre at the Faculty of Philology, University of Lodz. In 2015, she published Towards Female Empowerment: New Generation of Irish Women Poets: Vona Groarke, Sinéad Morrissey, Caitríona O’Reilly and Mary O’Donoghue. She was a guest co-editor of a special issue of The Problems of Literary Genres devoted to the gendered dimension of the speculative genre (2020). Her new co-edited (with Tomasz Fisiak) collection, The Postword in-Between Utopia and Dystopia: Intersectional, Feminist, and Non-Binary Approaches in 21^stCentury Literature and Culture was published by Routledge in 2021.

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