Do These Books Exist?
Senior Design Capstone
Date: Spring 2021
For my capstone I wanted to explore an intersection of my academic pursuits; design and computer science. I decided to do this in the form of a set of two books about art and language generated using artificial intelligence.
The first book is a collection of poems and art made using AI, intended to be experienced like a normal collection of poetry. The second functions as an “about the authors” for the first by discussing the people and algorithms that are featured, and also encourages creatives to see AI as a tool they can use in their practice rather than as a threat.
Through my design I strove to highlight a few themes about poetry, art, and artificial intelligence and to emphasize connections between how language, specifically poetry, and code are treated. Primarily these themes were the concept of input and output, the process of machine learning in which an algorithm is trained on a large data set and produces one output that is the product of many inputs, and the relationships and contrasts between digital and analogue space and man and machine made art.
Check out the Communication Design Class of ‘21 Capstone Showcase and a full pdf of my books.
Book One: This Book Is Art//ificial
Part one of This Book Is Art//ificial consists of original poetry generated by Gwern.net using the GPT-3 language model. These poems are paired with images from Art Ai, a database of ai generated artworks that are the product of multiple algorithms trained on different artistic styles and subject matters.
Part two of This Book Is Art//ificial consists of poetry for which the GPT-3 algorithm was fed the beginning lines of an existing poem, and asked to complete it in an appropriate manner. Part two juxtaposes the original poem with the completion that the algorithm came up with. These poems are paired with images from David Young’s Tabula Rasa project, in which Young’s algorithm created artwork with striking similarities to the work of various famous artists.
Book Two: This Book Is Intelligent
This Book Is Intelligent serves as an explanation of book one, deconstructing and defining the work in the first book. By following <a href> styled links in This Book Is Art//ificial, the user can find the part of This Book Is Intelligent that explains the associated work. The end pages, article headers, and section openers use spreads from the first book that have been deconstructed and reconstructed by separating their CMYK color ways.
Each of the three sections is also assigned one of the CMYK colors. Part one discusses the artists that appear in book one, part two the authors, and part three raises questions about AI in creative fields going forward. There are also yellow accent pages throughout the second book.
The use of CMYK is a demonstration of a process in which separate digital inputs are run through a machine to create one physical output, much like how machine learning works, while also playing off of the theme of digital versus physical objects.
