Mark Amerika delivered the keynote performance at the Quand l’interface nous échappe : lapsus machinae, autonomisation et défaillances // When the Interface Slips Away : Lapsus Machinae, Autonomization and Bugs conference at the National Archives in Paris. His performance was titled Fatal Error: the author as artificial creative intelligence (ACI) and was the inaugural presentation of his new digital fiction, a 3D animated avatar known as the ACI. Amerika’s overview of the project was encapsulated in this press release:
The future of AI as a medium that algorithmically generates affective forms of creative expression complicates our contemporary understanding of both authorship and the reader-writer interface. What do we mean when we discuss emerging forms of machine-learned “authorship”? How do postmodern literary techniques associated with metafiction and/or the post-structuralist theories of writers such as Roland Barthes (“Death of the Author”) and Michel Foucault (“The Author Function”) anticipate the coming of AI authors? Mark Amerika’s work-in-progress, Fatal Error, playfully challenges concepts such as originality and the “romantic author” by remixing literary modes of thought and poetic forms of personal expression into the performance of a fictional ACI (artificial creative intelligence).
Amerika’s in-progress 3D video animation features The Auto-Beatnik, a digital persona that doubles as an avatar of the avant-garde whose infinite and generative spoken word poetry performance takes on many of the critical issues that define our current technological, social, and political moment. The creation of an Auto-Beatnik is not new. In 1962, R.M. Worthy ‘fed’ an LGP 30 computer words and grammar to create the Auto-Beatnik, possibly the first computational poetry generator. Now almost 60 years later, Amerika’s latest work is being built in a multitude of software programs including Unity, 4D Cinema and Faceshift, and operates as an artistic intervention that playfully satirizes “Silicon Valley ideology” by poetically remixing the techno-jargon associated with artificial intelligence, machine learning, Instagram dysmorphia, mood mining, robot “rights” and the willful acceptance of ones loss of privacy while participating in social media / selfie culture. Reflecting on the technocultural condition that has birthed imaginary forms of artificial general intelligence (AGI), Amerika’s fictional ACI exhibits a 3D “avatar-otherness” that impersonates a dataset of unique vocals and affective facial gestures modeled after the artist’s own delivery style. Created for both exhibition and live performance/lecture, the give and take between the artist and the ACI intentionally problematizes what it means to be a poet-philosopher investigating the relationship between their innate creative process and future forms of AI programmed to trigger unconscious modes of psychic automatism.
