I Ape E.D. ~ DeepAI

Medium
Book board, ribbon, Cave paper, chiyogami, kozo, sewing pin.

Dimensions
Open: 5.5″ x 9″ x .125″
Closed: 5.5″ x 4.5″ x .3″

Year Completed
2021

Description
This magic-wallet structure honors Emily Dickinson’s fragments of paper that survived to become a revered body of work. The booklet contains the text that an artificial intelligence app suggested to complete a poem that was written on two scraps of paper. Variable edition of 5.

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I ape E.D. ~ DeepAI honors Emily Dickinson’s fragments that survived to become a revered body of work.

Emily Dickinson connected two fragments of a poem with a sewing pin. I wondered how an artificial intelligence (AI) language generator would finish the poem if the two bits of paper had been separated?

I typed the first half of this poem into DeepAI.org’s text generator, which claims to intake a sentence and predict subsequent text from the given input. Five pages of giggle-worthy drivel followed. I tried another AI text generator. The following was generated by InferKit, a commercial AI service’s “state-of-the-art neural network.

The poem begins:

We never know we go
when we are going —

We jest and shut the Door —

Fate – following – behind us
bolts it

InferKit believes that this follows:

open— Telling us to sleep and that things will be alright. But I fear that I will wake up in a very different place. Like the parallel lines of a road—that even though it looks straight to the human eye, the level changes at regular intervals. Like we are on a giant rollercoaster that never seems to end. It has been a hectic week. The anniversary of two years of being in the army has been on my mind. I’ve had a flashback to the first time I was deployed and the time I was blown up.

Emily Dickinson finished it:

and we accost
(we know [or] no more)–