Compasses

Beschreibung

Compasses is a collection of poems written with a machine learning model of spelling and phonetics. The model invents new words in negative spaces between supposedly discrete categories. I trained a machine learning model with two parts: a “speller,” which spells words based on how they sound, and a “sounder-out,” which sounds out words based on how they're spelled. In the process of sounding out a word, the “sounder-out” produces a fixed-length numerical vector, known as a “hidden state,” which is essentially a condensed representation of a word's phonetics. The “speller” can then use the phonetic information contained in this hidden state to produce a plausible spelling of the word. The hidden state, like any other numerical vector, can be modified: translated, multiplied, blurred, averaged. Each of the poems collected here results from a computer program I wrote that performs the following steps: (1) use the “sounder-out” to find the hidden state for a set of words, drawn from a hand-authored list (these are the words on the “points” of each poem); (2) find the vector halfway between the hidden state vectors for each pair of “point” words, and predict a plausible spelling for these halfway vectors with the “speller”; (3) find the vector of the midpoint of all eight vectors produced in (1) and (2), and likewise predict a plausible spelling for this vector. The words from steps (1) and (2) are then programmatically arranged in the form of a compass rose. The word resulting from step (3) is placed in the middle. Compasses was first published as part of Andreas Bülhoff’s “sync” series. Links: http://portfolio.decontextualize.com/#compasses Category: Artificial Intelligence & Life Art Year: 2021 By: Allison Parrish

Eckdaten

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Award-Eintrag

Land

AT