Fragments of the Urban Absurd
A bunch of years ago, I threw together Sauntering verse. Based on an individual going on a walk, it uses what3words as a source for collecting words, related to the locations the person moves through, to construct poetry connected to the person’s journey. Then, the often clunky result can be cleaned up by using ChatGPT, constructing a poem that still might not make much sense, but is readable.
Because of the, typically, odd superpositions, I refer to the poetry it generates as ‘Dadaist’, quite in the original sense of the meaning of that term.
Tristan Zara, one of the founders of the Dada movement, put together instructions for creating a Dadaist poem; He suggested cutting out words from a newspaper, placing them in a bag, shaking them up, and then drawing them randomly to create the poem.
what3words’ usability is questionable, compared to the conventional coordinates system for defining latitude and longitude; you need access to a proprietary database of all combinations of three words to be able to convert from coordinates to 3 words, and back. And, because the service is commercial, there are financial strings that come attached to the service.
But, it’s also great for experimenting artistically with content creation, as it connects ‘place’ to ‘text’ in a canonical way.
I’ve also been experimenting with using AI in creative ways, either through the creation of texts, or the generation of images. Particularly Midjourney is fascinating as a tool to illustrate material that otherwise would go without illustrations, for the relatively high cost of hiring a human being.
Of course, Midjourney, OpenAI, and the like, all have huge ethical problems associated with them; they require perverse amounts of energy, and are trained on original material without the consent of many of the original creators. Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT, has gone as far as to say that, without being able to breach copyright, they could not achieve their next breakthrough.
Copyright law, particularly American copyright law, is also perverse, but Altman stating that, without breaking the law, they cannot make money, is the mentality of a maffia boss. Which of course has become the mentality of Silicon Valley bigwigs.
So, bringing these together, here’s what I tried out. Something certainly more involved than Zara’s original instructions, but very much in a similar spirit.
- I went for a walk around a bric-à-brac market in São Paulo, creating an audio recording of the walk.
- Of 10 locations on my walk, selected on a whim, I noted down the what3words combinations for these locations.
- I had ChatGPT create a psychogegraphical poem of 10 verses, where each verse had to contain the combination of 3 words of one of the locations, in order of them having been walked through. I also had ChatGPT name the poem.
- Next, for each of these verses, I had ChatGPT construct a prompt for Midjourney, to create an accompanying image, in a Dadaist style.
- The poem was then read by a ‘French’ voice from ElevenLabs.
Putting everything together, the result is the YouTube video above.
It’s… somewhat interesting. But I also feel a bit dirty for its faked creativity.