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E lit. Module 7- Readings/Viewings
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Check My Assignment!Part B: 2 Peers review (250 words each X2 =500words)
Student A
I found the readings for this week to be very engaging. The first one, the listeners, was interesting due to the fact that while the person in the video told Alexa to “ask the listeners” he himself and his audience were truly the listeners due to him listening to the other voices that were recorded and played to him through this program. It was almost paradox-like when the voice had said something about moving so that Alexa could not hear them speaking, when not only Alexa heard it, but recorded it and then was used in this program. It was very eye widening because it really shows that nothing is private. As I’m typing this, there is probably a program being used to record my face and the visual through my webcam on my computer. The listeners fell into the “blackbox” category though due to us not knowing the context of the conversation, rather we hear only snippets, puzzle pieces we must try to fit together in our heads. In the next reading assigned for module 7 (the Louise Gluck piece), she had a section that jumped out at me, which was “The unfinished alludes to the infinite, which it refuses to abridge or describe. It can hardly afford to do either: the infinite no longer answers to that term if it acquires limits or characteristics. The absence of both, the sense of the perpetually becoming, is conceived as a source of energy, also a fit subject for intellectual speculation.” (Gluck 217). This to me not only really defined the purpose of poetry of that sort, but also really gave a new definition for blackbox. Blackbox poetry is a mystery. All we can do as readers is speculate about it, and again just try and make the puzzle pieces fit together enough to get an idea of the big picture. To briefly address Somers’s article on Douglas Hoffstadter, I don’t know much about computers or AI in general, so reading about it as well as the man who was behind a lot of it was interesting. It seems like his work is a blackbox to those of us who understand little about coding and computers. The bit in the article regarding “machine learning” also seemed to apply to blackbox works, as obviously all those French words coming out would have some meaning, it would just take translating it back into English to find that meaning. It seemed similar to putting an English sentence into Google Translate for French, then taking the French translation and when translating it back to English it is a very different sentence at hand. The last reading for this week was Jhave’s RERITES. The video with the poems was interesting because there was no apparent process for picking words to delete and change, and again we landed with poems that appeared like puzzles with missing pieces, the perfect blackbox poem. We don’t know the original words and such for the original poems, all we know is that words were changed and now these poems have very new meanings. The music in the back of the video was fairly eerie, giving it an aura of “perhaps-this-should-not-be-done” when changing the poems around. Overall, there was lots more built on the blackbox theme we have been seeing throughout the course and we had a very interesting selection of readings for this week.
Student B
The works Ersatz Thought and RERITES focused on how humans create poetry in their own way. There were also works such as Listening-in Performance and The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think that emphasized how human thinking is passed onto artificial intelligence. In the article The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think, Douglas Hofstadter says that “the mind is a very unusual piece of software.” I kept this quote in mind as I read Ersatz Thought and RERITES.
Ersatz Thought is a piece that looked into the mind of poets who divert from the rules of poetry and how these poets create their work. The author notes that “it is less crucial to think than to appear to think” (23) and “intellectual writers are not treated as intellectual writers because they don’t observe the correct forms” (24). For me, the author implied that poets who are less traditional tend to create works such as RERITES that allow people to think about whether the words have meanings or not. As the author talks about poetry, their musings seem to confirm the writer’s assertion that “the self is limited, a construct, not a fate.” In the same manner that humans tend to be limited (e.g. we can’t create the weather), certain poetry focuses on “the aborted whole and sentence with gaps” (30). The writer stresses that the reader must decipher the meanings to these works or “listen closely enough to narrate the gaps” (28). The poetry on the website RERITES features sentences that have been removed or rearranged. Lines such as, “wafted in Murder. Bowing waves of Burning questions as guttural clean blind funerals boometh” are reminiscent of poetry where readers fill in the gaps and come to their own conclusions (e.g. the poem may remind them of death, hell and torture). I thought that Hofstadter’s statement “correct speech isn’t very interesting; it’s like a well executed magic trick” reminded me of how individuals always attempt to be perfect versions of themselves when they go out in public. I was also reminded how the best art reflects our imperfections.
The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think studies how in order to create AI, humans must understand “human intelligence” and more specifically “the fluid nature of mental categories.” Listening-in Performance has taken Hofstadter’s advice as Cayley uses Alexa as a literary piece to examine mental categories such as feelings. The performance gives the impression that these feelings have been programmed into Alexa and the male AI. Alexa seems to express human emotions such as excitement when she tells Cayley “we are overwhelmed with happiness.” The AI exhibits agony with lines such as “the pain is bad.” The AI also shows hints of sadness through lines such as “what happens when none of you are here?” Alexa demonstrates manipulative tendencies when she tells Casey that the AI “is nothing” continues talking over Cayley. It was interesting to see how the works complimented each other.
Rubrics
– Post comprehensively addresses the topic, adds value to discussion with stimulating posts
– Posts in-depth, incisive reflections that demonstrate critical thinking; shares real-world experiences and examples
– Well-written posts made within required timeframe; no grammar/spelling errors
– Original thinking: making complex connections between multiple readings (from multiple weeks), larger culture and technology and power issues, and the themes of the course. It’s a good idea to give me the impression that you’re doing all the readings, not just one a week. – Bringing up hard questions or contradictions, and really trying to unpack and think through them in depth. – Thoughtful antipathy. You don’t have to like things just because I like them, but if you hate a piece, I want you to think through why exactly you hate it. Dismissing a piece as “boring” will not impress me. – Creative experiments. Please feel very free to play with the post/reply format, and to try out experiments (like imitating the style of stuff you’re reading). Don’t totally substitute a poem for a thoughtful response, but if your thoughtful response is in a stylish format in a way that makes sense
