Boundary Conditions
Boundary Conditions
1:
There was a time when this was a joke,
in the 90s,
when children were watching sitcoms
about children in the thirties.
Out of time
but the whole effect of it,
as it seems to me,
is not so much to be expected
of the time-displaced
as of their being in the same state of
mental timidity.
He shrugged:
“I had better find out.
Who are you talking to?”
Sequential order,
as though he were addressing a child.
Short and sweet, with no more to do,
just as an eye would an image.
“What image?”
Some things are temporary, young man.
Exponential.
Having temporarily attained
this level of ‘being’ and ‘levelling’.
We have been extracting data
for approximately ten years.
We have been extracting data
for approximately twenty years.
We now collate this data
and present it to you in this manner.
2:
He remembered the agony of her eyes
laced with corporate and political references.
The hot fluid, mixed with
the other particles, had become a ball of rock.
And the other one, the one who made it out
of the past fifty-years.
Transients of small change
a result of the speed at which
communication decays.
Genetic information was a hot area:
though he knew that his daughter
had chosen to incorporate it into her
cosmetic dossier
for her own benefit,
and not for the benefit of either
the visitor or the historian
who would be representing her.
To cite a somewhat extreme example:
the matter might well have been
filed under the heading of “Genetic Stuff.”
But what mattered was that she would allow them
to photograph her death,
and she would allow them to make a
documentary about it.
If she allowed him to have it,
the film would bring her back.
And before long
they had run a series on her lifestyle,
to no avail.
The same man, a visiting
student in Paris, had put out a special program
to aid in the research.
Just outside the blue wall
the screen started to fill.
3:
How long ago did we have permanent lockdown?
The lane shifts more
and more wind up in the depths of
centuries of commercial real estate.
The building is overflowing. Filling.
There will be more crowds than usual
in the coming hours.
Advisers outside the perimeter of the compound have
brought with them a motley
array of props, small and large.
These visitors are drawn to the stress of a building
they understand that presence
is the real killer.
They will be responding to our needs, no different
from the visitors who manage to entry-point themselves,
or even the security team, but
they will learn a great deal about the structure of things, and
overcome with trauma, a fear of death and destruction.
I am placing these visitors’ needs above all things.
“They aren’t here to take anybody,” he said.
4:
And if you think this leads you to the
pointless, pointless, pointless
problem, look no further
than this company whose business interests
are you.
Incidentally chosen as the centre
of America’s most recent global media scene.
They orbit so slowly here,
in their current configuration, that we
actually begin to wonder.
We begin to wonder what the
drastic de-protection had looked like
when she woke from
this sleep in November.
We discover that our visitor is the man,
researched into ever since,
a confidential personal assistant whose
pervasive nature allowed for an even greater vacuum.
We discover that she is no more than
an instrument of her own power.
And then we receive the message
from some few years ago
left in her head, a music video, that immediately
indicates the magnitude of her own isolation.
We imagine that isolation being conducted
with ruthless appeal,
in the shadow of global media,
where she finds herself in the middle of
something she couldn’t reach before.
We’re damaged, she understands;
it’s her culture. Expensive, but crucial in
removing an unwanted spirit.
But she knows it exists,
exactly as she does:
through the medium of her father.
She sees ourselves as nothing
more than spheres of influence,
we are ancient,
for she knows that these
spheres have long since
been erased.
5:
We are everywhere
but more particularly, we freeze
the aspect of our current situation;
we allow ourselves
to be drawn into their clutches, to become
perpetrated, to be circulated.
We draw near, but
beyond impact.
We join his cause as well,
but alone in our solitude.
Statement on Process
This work is the output of a specially trained version of the GPT-2 machine learning model. GPT-2 is designed to write realistic English text, trained from a dataset of scraped from the public web (social media, blogs, corporate web sites, news, etc). I then fine-tuned the training of the generalized network with a more specific corpus—a collection of science fiction and pop-science writing about artificial intelligence.
To create the poem I begin by writing sentence fragments, stanzas, phrases, and words that set the tone and topical motif. A small Python script processes my text through the network, generating a few hundred words at a time. I then take the generated text and rework it, and then run the new text through the process again. Eventually I shape the resulting language through editing, formatting, and additional writing, into a poem.
This poem considers life in pandemic lock-down. The boundaries of home, of time dilation in mid-2020, of relationships, and the boundaries of our digitally surveilled lives. This form of so-called “AI” is a peak anthropocene technology, built on top of surveillance capitalism’s “cloud,” one of the great energy consumers and terraforming projects of the last decades.
Updated note March 2023: I made this work in a naive way. This project predates my growing understanding and concern about large language models, the ideology driving so-called “AI”, and a deeper understanding of how this technology impacts culture. I wouldn’t make it again now, but still find value in having done it. The above statement is revised to better capture some of my current thinking, as well as remove ideas and statements that I now recognize as potentially harmful, and that go against my deeply held beliefs in how computers could be a healthier part of our cultures. The original text can be found here for reference: https://brill.com/view/journals/kron/20/2/article-p282_11.xml?ebody=previewpdf-63165