David Jhave Johnston
Artist Statement
Why is the work that the New Frameworks project is working to preserve important to you?
ReRites is a multi-year project (2016-2019) that occurred before the fever pitch interest in AI emerged. The project arose spontaneously, almost thoughtlessly, as real art often does, from an impulse and curiosity. The explorations of AI as an adjunct to literary creation will increasingly flourish in our society: ReRites is an early example of the augmented creativity power of LLMs.
What are the key ideas, issues, struggles, goals within your work?
The key idea of ReRites is that LLMs can assist a human poet in joyously exploring many vivid state spaces of language creation, accelerating output without truncating its integrity. The struggle is to let go of normative notions of authorship: the sense of I that writes and possesses is inverted. Writing occurs and is guided, carved, revealed and reveled in. The goal is to set a precedent for AI + human creation that is balanced and gently provocative.
Who is your audience?
Anyone who is interested in the idiomatic nuances of an encyclopedic sense of poetics and poetry.
Who are your biggest artistic influences?
Poetically, over decades of artistic practice, there have been so many influences, to list one or another is to risk excluding or overlooking how comprehensively every word read enters into the resonant stream. But within the domain of computer-assisted poetry, the canonical reference and influence methodologically underlying ReRites is Hartman, Charles O. Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry. University Press of New England, 1996.
Is there anything else you’d like to include in your artist statement?
Who owns language? Who owns the evolutionary tidal flow of words written by innumerable ephemeral bodies? AI challenges not just ownership but the idea of identity.
Preservation Sketch
Read how we preserved David Jhave Johnston’s work, ReRites.