Jules Vernes had the habit of never simply calling his trees ‘trees’, but always mentioned the species name and often descriptions as well. I am one of the Junipers that populate the Lincoln Island in his novel L’île mystérieuse. From January 25 till October 25, 2020, I participated in the installation An Anthology in the exhibition Bye Bye Future at the Musée de Littérature de Mariemont.
2020, Juniper in L'Ile mystérieuse by Jules Verne
What poems would you like to include in tomorrow’s anthology? This installation allowed the visitor to generate sonnets that highlight nature elements or technologies, or neither. An artificial poet was at work. When the visitor was satisfied with the result, they could print the sonnet and take it home.
Inspiration
Each one of us is co-responsible for the images of the future that will shape tomorrow’s world. An Anthology took this as a starting point. Like human artists, this artificial intelligence learnt from other authors. It used One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems by Raymond Queneau, to write new sonnets by substituting nouns, respecting the metre and the rhyme. But of course, it made mistakes.
Sources
In order to learn a semantic field of words related to nature and technology, the artificial poet read about 1400 novels by about 100 science fiction and fantasy authors, including L’Ile mystérieuse and other novels by Jules Verne, Guy de Maupassant, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, but also contemporary authors such as Anne Rice, Haruki Murakami, William Gibson and Iain Banks.
Methods
The artificial poet analyzed the novels using a neural network that calculates the linguistic context of words in a multidimensional space. It then relied on Lexique, a corpus of phonemes, gender and number of syllables developed by Boris New and Christophe Pallier of the University of Savoie Mont Blanc. Finally, An Anthologie made the poem physical thanks to Plotto, a pen plotter from the 80s.
Collaborators
It is not very clear what other trees participated in the training of the artificial poet; clear was that there were much more mentions and descriptions of nature in earlier fictions. The human collaborators in this project were designer-programmer Gijs de Heij and tree clerck An Mertens. We created this work on the invitation of Sofiane Laghoouati, curator of Bye Bye Future! in Musée Royal de Mariemont.
Sources: https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/algolit/mariemont
A big thank you to Sofiane Laghouati, Le Musée Royal de Mariemont, Christophe Pallier, Antoine Amarilli, Open Source Publishing, Constant.