THE MOODY CENTER FOR THE ARTS / rice university / THEY ARE FALLING ALL AROUND ME / Postcards from the Edge of Latent Space: Exploring New Sites of Creativity with Generative AI

For the past year I’ve been meeting weekly (via zoom) with Natalie Klym and David Rokeby. Rokeby has been running the BMO Lab for Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, Emerging Technologies & Artificial Intelligence at the University of Toronto since the 1990s. Klym is a researcher, writer, and producer focused on the societal implications of emerging technologies, and is based in Toronto. Our goal was to develop a collaborative performance that combines image, poetry, and artificial intelligence (AI). What has emerged is an interactive performance involving a unique real-time voice-to-scrolling image generator (developed by Rokeby) fine-tuned to a specific data set, as opposed to a “deep-learning” model (which scrapes the web for all existing image/information). This scroll of ever-changing images is in direct response to voice provocations in a live performance (in this case, a poet (me) performing their work).