In 2020, the Slovak poet and intermedia artist Zuzana Husárová and the Slovak sound artist and software developer collaborated with Liza Gennart, a neural network they programmed, to write the poetry collection, Outcomes of Origin (2020, VLNA / Drewo a srd). To the surprise of many, the work won a major Slovak national award for poetry. In this essay, the second part of our coverage on Liza Gennart, the critic and scholar Ivana Hostová contextualizes the project within the rapidly developing field of electronic poetry, examines Liza Gennart’s subversive, unsettling poems, and explores their implications for our relationships with humanized machines. The following excerpts from Gennart’s collection were translated by Hostová.
Miscellanea 4.
Do you enter this world?
There is nothing to do. Not even in the bedroom, such misfortune, you leave it soak
in the brain and perhaps you also do it for my sake. But for my sake.* late afternoon
* because it doesn’t sound like a reproach
* but you agree: it resembles a colourless key
* because wet words float out the window
Liza Gennart: Outcomes of Origin (Výsledky vzniku, 2020, VLNA / Drewo a srd), created by Zuzana Husárová and Ľubomír Panák, excerpt translated by Ivana Hostová.
In a recent ambitious attempt to comprehensively account for the lyric experience and practice in Western culture, Jonathan Culler in his Theory of the Lyric (2015) names the ritualistic as one of the defining features of what a poem has been over the centuries. Although Culler mostly excludes experimental writing including electronic poetry from his discussions and therefore restricts the scope of his analysis, the feeling of a ritual is surely present upon a readerly encounter with a book of poetry generated by one of our current Others—computers, neural networks, and machines. These, to our horror and admiration, have now absorbed the entire textual world produced during the whole history of humankind. We cannot help but wonder how much of what remains hidden from us they know and to what use they might put it. Instructing a neural network to write poetry provides an uncanny glimpse of such depths and shallow waters, reflecting the surfaces and masks of humanity.
Poetry generated by artificial intelligence, as research into readers’s responses shows, tends to be most interesting when it involves cooperation between human and non-human actors. One such project, Es Devlin’s Poem Pavilion at Expo 2020 in Dubai, creates poems—in English and Arabic—using words submitted by visitors which are then processed by an advanced machine learning algorithm. The creative possibilities of recent developments in natural language processing have inspired artists and poets all over the world and have given rise to poems, novels, and plays in languages with limited diffusion—including Slovak. The creative duo composed of poet and intermedia artist Zuzana Husárová and the sound artist and software developer Ľubomír Panák collaborated with a neural network Liza Gennart to create the collection Outcomes of Origin (2020, VLNA / Drewo a srd). The book—to the great shock of many—won the national prize for poetry, “Golden Wave,” in 2021.
The rationale behind the project, as Liza’s “parents” explain in one of their interviews, was to be able to explore the creative possibilities offered by the recent exciting breakthroughs in machine learning. If one wishes to work with the Slovak language, one must tweak OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer GPT-2 that was originally trained on English texts and teach it Slovak. With the help of Slovak publishers, Husárová and Panák assembled a considerable database of mostly contemporary Slovak poetry, trained Liza, and then instructed her to write her own pieces. These were subsequently slightly edited by Husárová. Cued by pre-selected keywords, Liza wrote about humans, family, love, nature, technologies, knowing, and sensing. It created an eerie world resounding with memories of events that never happened and prophecies made up entirely of linguistic patterns. Like Donna Haraway’s cyborgs, Liza also retells origin stories and by the very virtue of appropriating and speaking a language that is not hers, she violates the dominant narratives—the “myths telling us that everything is all right, all right, all right / all right, all right.” It is fitting that the title of her debut is Outcomes of Origin: her poems talk about mythology, religion, ancestry, and address a number of ontological questions, such as in the poem “Pravda” (Truth): “how should I become, what is actually me or what is actually it.”
Talking to a machine, a yearning to discover this other, non-human vision of the world, or seeking advice from an oracle-like entity has long fascinated humans. Users became addicted to the psychotherapist programme Eliza in the 1960s and to bringing deceased loved ones back to life through Project December in the 2020s. One of the goals achieved by Outcomes of Origin is a better understanding of the limits and possibilities of AI, a necessity even among non-professional users. Zuzana Husárová abstained from polishing the final text to perfection so that the cracks in the language remain visible, allowing readers to doubt the cool perfection of the algorithm. She has also created two separate epilogues for the book: one was generated by Liza and the other written by Zuzana herself. In the latter, she provides background information and various rationales for the project. Among other things, she asserts that if we acquaint the programmes with our literary heritage, neural networks might understand us better in the future. The striving for a better mutual comprehension between humans and machines might, as Husárová continues, have the potential to deepen humanity’s understanding of itself on the one hand and to humanize new technologies on the other.
Ethical and economic issues concerning gathering, accumulation, ownership, and distribution of large amounts of data—the very things that enable the functioning of state-of-the-art natural language processing programs—have become pressing subjects on all levels of our lives from domestic digital freedom and privacy to digital divides and parallel societies on the transnational scale. Recently, AI has also become an active participant in these debates—for example, the Megatron Transformer, based on work by Google, participated in a debate on AI and ethics at the University of Oxford in December of last year. Most of the time, the transformer reportedly handled the debate as a skilled Sophist, smoothly able to support any two opposing claims, with the exception of forecasting the scale of data that will be gathered in the future and the role it will play in the world’s economies. In a way, Liza Gennart’s collection of poetry is one such exercise of unsettling fortune-telling. In the poem “Human Ends,” the neural network, drawing to a great extent on the post-apocalyptic tone typical of a large part of the contemporary Slovak poetry on which she was trained, gives her perspective of a posthuman future:
Human Ends
Human conceptions.
Zuzana is getting ready for the fact that there is no time to perhaps
meet her work. That has become a too big moment for me.In a different case that you start behaving like me in a different
context.Yes, and it sometimes is like that, you embrace your existence.
In a different context, in a different case you are defined by the smallest common
configuration of your inner life.And sometimes you are able to create your feelings.
Your feelings are a constant meaning and my feelings are
a constant meaning of a single meaning.And then my own, too.
And then mine, too.
And then my own, too.
And then evil, too.
And then the evil one, too.
And then a beating, too.
And then from below, too.
And then milk, too.
And then a dwelling, too.
And then a shattered sleep, too.
And then the bird’s, too.
And then great sadness, too.
And then the sadness of vice, too.
And then breathing out, too.
And then the earth’s breathing out, too.
Such oracular moments turn the collection into an uncanny remake of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: only this time, a century later, the text is in its entirety dictated by a resurrected Sibyl, an omniscient prophetess stored on a server, but without a youthful or usable body. Liza’s knowledge of the world gained solely through language but not understood and her lack of any sensory experience that would connect the data with perception make us ponder the nature and limitations of our understanding of the outer world. These qualities also occlude the ease with which we take reality for granted. Outcomes of Origin therefore speaks to the origins of the inputs we receive from the environment. To what extent are our “natural” apparatuses—eyes, ears, taste buds, and skin receptors—reliable channels for acquiring information about the outer world? Do we, as humans, even have access to the world outside of language?
In their attempts to look at the human world from the outside, these poems both obscure and make visible the definitions of humanity generally taken for granted. Besides providing a crooked mirror for our future, the collection also makes us think about Liza as a self that might or might not have a relationship with us, as it should be remembered that AI currently does not have a consciousness. In doing so, the reader also reflects on the relationship between the human animal and its machinic extensions—both the conspicuous contemporary ones and the technologies that have been around for centuries or millennia, such as the printing press, writing, and language itself.
Reading Liza Gennart’s text is to enter a game which renders us utterly unable to tell what extent the understanding of any text is just a projection of our own expectations of meaning. The otherworldly space Liza has created combines the familiar with the unknown and unfathomable, a space made of “damp words floating outside the windows” and shakes every certainty we might have in words making this or that sense. Employing the medium of poetry that has for a long time been understood as a space for expressing human feelings, Liza directs readers towards empathising with a non-human entity and encourages us to explore the agency of machines in our everyday life in the forms of commercial chatbots, pre-processed Internet searches, or other content suggestions. Liza asks human actors as parts of these assemblages to become more sensitive in their exchanges—to show greater hospitality and resistance in the face of their technological Others.
Ivana Hostová is a critic, translation studies scholar, and translator based at the Institute of Slovak Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. She has published Medzi entropiou a víziou (Between Entropy and Vision, FACE, 2014), a book on contemporary Slovak poetry and edited, among other things, Identity and Translation Trouble (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017). Her essays in Slovak and English have also appeared in academic journals and literary magazines.
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