Black Ocean Books and City Lights celebrate the publication of

I Create Like the Word: Poetry in the age of Machine Intelligence

Curated by Jesse Damiani, promptcraft by Alexander Reben

Published by Black Ocean

A new title from Black Ocean’s Undercurrents series.

As AI grows in utility and cultural presence, so do questions surrounding the human role in how our art is made.

What does the rise of artificial intelligence mean for creative industries?

As digital technologies in language modeling and generative visualization become increasingly sophisticated, questions about originality and the role these emerging tools play in art and culture take crucial positions in not just today’s discourse, but for generations to come.

In a collection of essays and interviews from Jesse Damiani, I Create Like the Word explores these topics through expert panels of AI developers, poets, artists, researchers, and curators — as well as through an ekphrastic process where original art and poetry weaves an exchange between human and machine, emphasizing the relationship between prompt and craft.

This places us at an emerging trailhead of poetics that asks us to face the role computers have within our own very ancient, very human traditions: the role of the poet and sublime expression.

This title has received a grant from OpenAI, who also provided the underlying generative technology used in the creation of the book.

This event is arranged in three sessions:

11 am PST / 2pm EST - Material Histories: The Long View on Language Models, Intelligence, and Poetry (40min) Moderator: Nick Montfort with Jesse Damiani and Dennis Y.T.

(BREAK) (15 min)

12:15pm PST / 3pm EST - Poetry Readings (60 minutes)

K Allado-McDowell

Mark Amerika

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian

David “Jhave” Johnston

Sasha Stiles

Lillian Yvonne-Bertram

(BREAK) (15 minutes)

1:30pm PST / 4:30 EST - Is AI The End of Poetry (Panel Discussion - 40 min)

Participants to be announced.

Jesse Damiani is a writer, curator, and advisor in new media art and emerging technologies. He is Senior Curator and Director of Simulation Literacies at Nxt Museum; Arts and Culture Advisor for Protocol Labs; and the Host of Adobe’s Taking Shape, a hub for 3D art and design. An Affiliate of the metaLAB at Harvard and Institute for the Future, his essays and interviews appear in Architectural Design, Big Think, Billboard, Flash Art, Forbes, NBC News, Quartz, Right Click Save, The Verge, and WIRED. He was Founder and served for many years as Series Editor of Best American Experimental Writing (Weselayan University Press), and his poetry appears in numerous publications. He formerly served as Editor-at-Large of VRScout, XR Curator at the Games for Change Festival, and Director of Emerging Technology and Insight at Southern New Hampshire University, where he led the Future of Work initiative. He is the founder of Postreality Labs, a strategic sensemaking studio and consultancy based in Los Angeles, CA.

Participants bios to be posted soon.

This event made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation