Poetry Debates II: “Poetry and Technology” – a review

20 December 2022

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The complicated relationships between "poetry and technology" were the subject of the second series of "Poetry Debates" held this fall. Three public events brought together poets, performers and scholars to debate different positions on this topic. The series was conceived and curated by Vadim Keylin in collaboration with Claudia Benthien.

The first event dealt with contemporary experimental poetry that is produced and designed with digital media. Heike Fiedler opened the evening in the fully booked Nachtasyl space of the Thalia Theater with one of her audiovisual live performances, in which she combines multilingual poems (in German, French, English and other languages) with moving images and kinetic texts, sound effects and sampling. It was followed by Marc Matter’s scholarly talk on the role of media literacy in poetic craftsmanship in the digital age. The panel discussion dealt with both possibilities and limitations of digital media as a means of production and compositional tools.

The second debate at the Literaturhaus Hamburg was dedicated to the controversial question of AI creativity. Poet and artist Zuzana Husárová presented the poetry of Liza Gennart, an artificial neural network poet created by herself and software developer Ľubomír Panák. Liza only exists in virtual space but has already published a book of poetry. In her presentation, the literary scholar Wiebke Vorrath, who researches digital poetry, also used automatically generated texts from an AI, which 'wrote' the first few sentences of the talk. Although, according to Vorrath, this automatically generated text did not correspond to her personal style, the AI nevertheless created a surprisingly appropriate introduction, which even the audience would not have immediately recognized as non-human in origin. In the discussion that followed, Husárová gave insights into the process of creating the poems and talked about the aesthetic surprises that Liza Gennart's AI poetry kept giving her. In addition, the role of authorship of the AI-generated poems was discussed.

Unfortunately, Nora Gomringer had to cancel her participation the third event "Live Poetry as Resistance Against Technology" in the Catholic Academy for personal reasons. The event has thus been provisionally rescheduled for spring 2023.

The last debate took place in the Warburg Haus and dealt with the topic of "Poetry and 'Hard Sciences'". The psycholinguist Stefan Blohm gave an introduction to empirical poetry research and such methods as reader surveys, eye tracking or goosebump measurements to examine the influence of poetic text structures on its reception. The poet Daniel Falb then read a small selection from his volumes of poetry CEK and Orchidee and Technofossil and talked about the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to adequately describe the humanity’s condition in Anthropocene, as well as aspects of immediacy that can be found in both poetry and can be found in the 'hard sciences'. The debate ended with the panel discussion, in which the lyrical perspectives on science - as well as scientific perspectives on poetry - were discussed.

All events were recorded. The links to the videos placed on the Lecture2Go portal can now be found in the Audio and video material section of our website.

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The next Poetry Debates series will take place in fall 2023, once again at Universität Hamburg and at selected event locations in the city. It will ponder the question “To Whom Does Poetry Belong?” Information will be published in due course on our website.