In 2023, OpenAI, the company developing ChatGPT, published a list of human professions that it predicts as endangered by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). Topping the list of threatened vocations were poets. So, does a computationally optimized method for concatenating words—such as a Large Language Model—produce or understand poetry? For the Large Language Model, this may not matter as long as it output is aligned with its objectives. But as social and planetary technologies with transformative effects, Large Language Models have already entered a territory where their outputs are either intentionally or accidentally conflated with human-made art or literature.

Poets and screenwriters often emphasize embodied and situated understandings of poetics. Yet artificial intelligence points somewhere else. But where exactly? The rise of AI in art pushes—with new urgency—much older questions about experience, creativity, authorship, and ultimately, language itself. But AI answers these questions in a way that seems alien to where they once came from. Something else is at stake, more to do with math than with words. How might AI affect the future of writing?

“Is Language Wordless” consisted of talks and readings by Asia Bazdyrieva, Yevgenia Belorusets, Maxime Garcia Diaz, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Metahaven. Their work, intersecting with material culture, technology, politics, and translation, provides a starting point for the audience to engage with a larger question about the relationship, now and in the future, between computation and embodied poetics.

Speakers

Asia Bazdyrieva is a researcher and writer with a background in art history and analytical chemistry. She is currently an associate member of the Critical Media Lab Basel and research fellow at the Faculty of Media at the Bauhaus University of Weimar. She produces writing and artistic research, contributing to media theory, Science and Technology Studies, and visual culture. In recent years her focus has been on the relation between sociotechnical imaginaries and bodies and lands that are rendered as resource. From 2018 to 2022 Bazdyrieva co-authored Geocinema—a documentary-led project that explored the infrastructures for Earth observation as co-producing forms of cinema. Geocinema has been nominated for the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research (2020), and the Golden Key prize in the Kassel film festival (2021). Bazdyrieva was a Fulbright Fellow from 2015 to 2017 in The City University of New York (CUNY).

Yevgenia Belorusets is an artist and writer living and working in Berlin and partly Kyiv. She is a founder and editor of “Prostory”, the journal for literature and art, and a member of the curatorial group “Hudrada”. She works with photography and other forms on the intersection of art, literature, and social activism. Her photographic work calls attention to the more vulnerable sections of Ukrainian society—queer families, out-of-work coal miners, the Roma, people living in the war zone in the East of Ukraine. Here art works were shown in the Ukrainian pavilion at the 56th and 59th Venice Biennale. “Lucky Breaks”, her first work of fiction, was given a 2020 HKW International Literature Award in Germany. For her work on “Kyiv Diary” she received 2022 Schering Stiftung Special Award for Artistic Research and Horst Bingel Prize for Literature. She has been documenting full-scale Russia’s invasion of Ukraine since February 24, 2022.

Maxime Garcia Diaz is a poet from Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She studied literature and cultural analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her debut poetry collection “Het is warm in de hivemind”  (De Bezige Bij, 2021) was awarded the 2022 C. Buddingh’ Prize for Best First Collection. She was also the winner of the 2019 National Slam Poetry Championship of the Netherlands. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the renowned Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Metahaven is an Amsterdam-based artist collective working in filmmaking, writing, and design. Metahaven’s film works include “Capture” (2022), “Chaos Theory” (2021), “Hometown” (2018) and “Information Skies” (2016). Their books include “Digital Tarkovsky” (2018), and “Uncorporate Identity” (2010, edited with Marina Vishmidt). Their new book on the future of the beholder’s share in art is out with Verso in Spring 2025. Metahaven has presented solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1 in New York City, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Asakusa in Tokyo, Izolyatsia in Kyiv, e-flux in New York City, Tick Tack in Antwerp, and State of Concept Athens, among others. They participated as well in group exhibitions at the Artists Space in New York City, the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, the Gwangju Biennale, the Sharjah Biennial, the Busan Bienniale, S.A.C. The Arts Centre in Bangkok, and many others. Metahaven are artistic advisors at Rijksakademie, affiliate researchers at the thinktank Antikythera, and heads of department of Geo-Design MA at Design Academy Eindhoven.

Eugene Ostashevsky is an English-language poet and translator whose writing is described as “translingual” because of its focus on linguistic multiplicity and self-awareness. His “Feeling Sonnets” (Carcanet and NYRB Poets, 2022) examine the effects of speaking a non-native language on emotions, parenting, and identity. An earlier book, “The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi” (NYRB Poets, 2017), discusses communication difficulties between pirates and parrots. Its German translation by Uljana Wolf and Monika Rink won the City of Münster International Poetry Prize. As translator, Ostashevsky is best known for his editions of the Russian avant-garde, such as “OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism” (Northwestern UP, 2006) and Alexander Vvedensky’s “An Invitation for Me to Think” (with Matvei Yankelevich; NYRB Poets, 2013). His poetry and translations have appeared in “Best American Poetry” and many major periodicals, and he is a professor at New York University.