ARTIFICIAL INTELLECTS
THE ORCHID CAGE takes its title from a science-fiction novel by Herbert W. Franke (a pioneer in the use of computer graphics). His novel depicts a team of touristic explorers from Earth, as they investigate an abandoned cityscape on an exoplanet (only to discover a robot world that nurses a race of vestigial, oblivious overlords).
Herbert W. Franke has noted that ‘poetry is undoubtedly the most difficult task of the computer in art’ — suggesting perhaps that, among the workers rendered jobless by future robots, poets might number among the last of all humans to lose their aesthetic vocations (despite any emergent evidence to the contrary).
Christian Bök has borrowed this quote from Herbert W. Franke, using it, as a prompt that causes DALL-E (an acephalic intellect) to create a work of ‘visual poetry.’ When called upon to do this ‘difficult task,’ the AI must search the ‘orchid cage’ of its own mind for the gilded glyphs of an alien argot — one that no human can yet decipher.
THE ORCHID CAGE pays tribute to the legacy of Herbert W. Franke, and 25% of the proceeds from the initial, opening sale are going to be donated to his foundation in order to raise funds so that ZKM Karlsruhe can digitize more than 1,800 manuscripts by this artist, thus making his entire corpus available freely online to the public.
THE ORCHID CAGE PNG 600 dpi 10" × 10"
Christian Bök is the author of ‘Eunoia,’ which has won the Griffin Poetry Prize.
