Posthuman Autorship: Writing Poems with AI and Other Creatures

November 20, 2024, 7:30 pm

Katholische Akademie, Herrengraben 4, 20459 Hamburg

Due to illness, this event had to be cancelled.

While nature poems have traditionally been associated with their human authors, who ponder their environment in solitude, a pluralization of entities contributing to texts can be observed in contemporary poetry. Poets are using artificial intelligence to write nature poems, thereby reflecting on our technologically mediated relationship with “nature”. Multispecies poetry, i.e., poetry written together with animals or plants, can also be found – made, for example, when beetles leave feeding traces on existing text and co-create it in this way. Such poetic experiments question conventional notions of human autonomy, instead revealing the possibilities, but also the limitations, of a post-human understanding of nature poetry.

During this Poetry Debate, we would like to discuss the following questions: What changes when humans, instead of writing alone, (co-)write poetry with artificial intelligence or nonhuman species instead of on their own? What surprises and challenges arise when authors leave part of the poetic process to nonhuman actors? What can we learn from AI and animals about the (poetic) use of language? How does reading nature poems change when we know that humans were not the sole creators? And does posthuman nature poetry change our view of our own human “naturalness” or our interconnectedness with digital technologies?

With
Berit Glanz (poet and theorist, Reykjavík)
Antje Schmidt, M.Ed. (literary studies scholar, PoetryDA postdoc, Hamburg)

Moderation: Dr. Veronika Schlör (Katholische Akademie, Hamburg) and Vadim Keylin, PhD (sound art researcher and poet, PoetryDA postdoc, Hamburg)

Free entry. Registration information will be available on the website of the Katholische Akademie.