Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 198.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2025-11-03 09:52:15+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: poetics of the smart machine?

As you may know, interest in the digital computer was already underway
from artists, including poets, by the mid 1960s. If you're not familiar
with what was happening in these areas of practice at that time, a good
way into the subject (in the UK) is Paul Brown, Charlie Gere, Nicholas
Lambert, and Catherine Mason, eds., White Heat Cold Logic: British
Computer Art 1960-1980 (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2008); for an early
view, see J.R. Pierce, "Portrait of the Computer as a Young Artist", in
Playboy (June 1965) and Jasia Reichardt, ed., Cybernetics, Art and Ideas
(Greenwich CN: New York Graphic Society, 1971).

The publication of Alfred Nordmann and Daria Bylieva, eds., The Language
and Poetics of Machines, Technology and Language 6.3 (open access at:
https://soctech.spbstu.ru/userfiles/files/volume/2025/2025_3.pdf)
raises questions  about a shift in attention to something new from the
once prevalent desire to 'prove' the intelligence of the digital machine
by such productions as The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed:
Computer Prose and Poetry by Racter (1984), and in visual art, Harold 
Cohen's experiments, for which see The Essays of Harold Cohen 
(https://epdf.pub/essays-of-harold-cohen.html).

My question is this: does this 'new' show signs of a truly different
mode of intelligence? Racter's programming was designed to produce 
language "that is in no way contingent upon human experience". But what 
about language that speaks to human experience yet is not limited by that 
experience?

All best,
WM
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts,
   Sciences and Humanities (Berghahn); Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted
List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org
Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/
Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php