Ana María Caballero: Things We Are Saving to Write
Things We Are Saving to Write is a collaborative poem written by Ana María Caballero using contributions received from visitors to bitforms gallery during its Code Chronicles exhibition (NY, March 3–Apr 15, 2023), curated by Aleksandra Artamonovskaja.
Caballero created a poem for Code Chronicles called Things I Am Saving to Write, inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which the main character is unexpectedly and irrevocably faced with his imminent mortality. During the length of the exhibition, visitors were invited to submit things they were saving to write and to visualize them via a Stable Diffusion text-to-image generation station.
Caballero culled from over 100 visitor submissions to compose a new poem, a chronicle of Code Chronicles, using visitors' visualizations as well as interpreting their words to create new ones.
As a poet, Caballero uses words to generate images within people’s minds. By using the imagery of her verse as the foundation of AI prompting and then crafting a visual narrative from these images, Caballero brings our collective unconscious into direct dialogue with language’s unspoken connotations, calling forth the entanglements of meaning-making.
“Prompting” is deeply tied to poetry–writing workshops offer students prompts to inspire poems–but, here, language generates visuals in form of reverse ekphrasis. Via her image curation, Caballero evinces the wide array of emotions that stem from text, as well as the tension between the private and the public, between the mythical and the historic, between the figurative and the verbatim that hide within the layers of verse.
Caballero’s exploration of the poetics of prompts distills the materiality of language, inviting us to contemplate our visceral reactions to words and the vastness of our imagination.
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Code Chronicles | bitforms gallery | New York, New York | March 3–Apr 15, 2023
