Join us on March 14th from 6:00 to 8:00 PM for Andy Rappaport’s Ephemeral Poetry Generators, a closing event for Rope and Revolver: Artists Respond to Frederic Remington’s "The Broncho Buster."
Andy Rappaport’s Ephemeral Poetry Generators are devices that create new poems and images in real time in response to viewer action. The poems are generated using software written by the artist that remixes source text – a single poet’s body of work or a collection of related poems or essays -- in a manner that retains the recognizable vocabulary and syntax of the original but introduces new semantics and meaning using randomness and chance. The poems are then read by artificial intelligence “actors,” and accompanying images are generated in real-time by AI models that are fed the new poem as a prompt. The poems are spoken only once and never saved; the images persist only until the next poem is created.
The Ephemeral Poetry Generators are part of a larger body of work by the artist that explores the human compulsion to find recognition in the barely recognizable and patterns and connections in the barely sensible. Rappaport intends the Ephemeral Poetry Generators’ outputs to be transitory, so they continually confront viewers/listeners with the unexpected vs. the familiar. But the ephemeral nature is also a commentary on the state of artificial intelligence tools and art: if AI generated art cannot be copyrighted but the tools used to generate it can, then why not make copying irrelevant by using copyrighted tools to generate new art on demand?
Each Ephemeral Poetry Generator is a unique object built using adapted vintage radios and televisions, reinforcing the ethereal nature of the poems, readings, and images. So far, the series includes generators based on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Shamus Heaney, Patti Smith, Sylvia Plath, and William Shakespeare, plus a compendium of cowboy poetry, and writings by Susan Sontag, Gilles Grelet, and Frederic Remington.
