---

I. [Mastodon Instances and Tilde Servers](#mastodon-instances-and-tilde-servers)

II. [Roadblocks Ahead](#roadblocks-ahead)

III. [Concluding Notes](#concluding-notes)

---

The evidence is mounting[1](#footnotes-1)<a id="1" />: social media usage is seemingly linked to a host of mental health issues, reduced sleep quality, and low self-esteem; our data from these platforms are continually being harvested, sold, and used against us in all kinds of ways, from bolstering the surveillance apparatus of the carceral state[2](#footnotes-2)<a id="2" /> to skewing the outcomes of international elections[3](#footnotes-3)<a id="3" />; and recommendation and engagement algorithms, built to maximize profit, amplify voices of dissent and circuits of disinformation[4](#footnotes-4)<a id="4" /> on an incredible scale, helping fast-track the fanatical fascist indoctrination of many[5](#footnotes-5)<a id="5" />.


Even at the anecdotal level, it's incredibly common to hear people going on "social media breaks" every so often, taking temporary hiatuses from their online accounts and deleting apps off their phones.
Others find themselves unwillingly, compulsorily bound to certain platforms that are used to stay up to date with organizations or social circles.
Being disconnected from the rest of the world further makes it difficult for many to keep up with the rapid pace of cultural production, which is exchanged as a dominant mode of social currency even offline.

It comes across as a bit out-of-touch, then, to suggest that people simply go off the grid, and even as someone who limits their social media presence, it would be a mistake to understate the value of the Internet as a tool for socializing, community building, and connection.
So, are we to just accept the fact that social media, for all its ills, is a necessary evil?



I've come to believe that we can— and should— forge communities in different parts of the connected web, away from the cacophony of corporate ownership.
People deserve places of safety and refuge from the noise of engagement metrics and targeted ads and terrible YouTube comments, at least sometimes.
It isn't necessarily that hours spent online is the problem (although it probably never hurts to step away).
I would argue that it's *how* we spend our hours online that makes the biggest difference, and it isn't far-fetched to assert that interfaces designed to farm users' attention and exploit users' data for profit, that are algorithmically structured to engender and amplify discordance, may not be so great.

Finding, building, and nurturing quieter, more thoughtful places on the Internet, where user interaction is more intentional and more empathetic, is one way we can work towards cultivating a healthier relationship with technology.
Rather than imbue feelings of anxiety and uncertainty, the places that we spend our time should do the opposite.

In the past year or so, I've spent a lot of time exploring these ideas, and looking for places like this that already exist.
This has included <Tooltip text="tilde" href="http://tilde.club/" /> <Tooltip text="servers" href="http://tilde.town" />[6](#footnotes-6)<a id="6" />, public Unix and Unix-like (*nix) systems meant for sharing computer space toward the goal of collaborative, compassionate community building; and <Tooltip text="Mastodon" href="https://joinmastodon.org" />, an open-source, decentralized social network based on the model of federated servers.
There are other exemplars of online spaces that foster meaningful engagement (<Tooltip text="Are.na" href="https://are.na" />) jumps to mind), but for the sake of brevity, I'll focus on the former two, which share similar underlying frameworks.

 

## Mastodon Instances and Tilde Servers<a id="mastodon-instances-and-tilde-servers"></a>

I keep finding myself returning to Darius Kazemi's instructional guide on running a small-scale social network site, based on his own experience operating a Mastodon instance called "Friend Camp."[7](#footnotes-7)<a id="7" />
He highlights the benefits of maintaining one's own Mastodon server, of having a small community over a larger one, and the control that the community holds over all aspects of their shared space, including "hyper-specific norms," software modifications, social rules and code of conduct policies, and user data.
This level of ownership is, of course, impossible when using the closed-source systems of corporate social media platforms (Twitter is the recurring point of comparison, as Mastodon is similarly structured for microblogging, but there are also options for Instagram- and YouTube-like experiences).

Likewise, tilde servers utilize *nix operating systems, and offer many of the same benefits that Mastodon does, as both are fundamentally grounded in principles of free and open-source software.[8](#footnotes-8)<a id="8" />
Both also have some basis in ideas of direct communication and server-based communities, with Mastodon instances belonging to a larger, federated universe (the appropriately titled <Tooltip text="fediverse" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse" />").
All users of a certain community live on a single server, which can then communicate with communities that live on other servers, and each server has complete autonomy over which servers they would (and wouldn't) like in their neighborhoods.
Tilde servers are part of the larger "<Tooltip text="tildeverse" href="https://tildeverse.org" />," a loose network that consists of many member nodes, each of which is a tilde server that houses its own community.
The tildeverse is thus a network of communicating servers, which use an IRC network for real-time chatting.

In terms of format, however, tilde servers differ foundationally from Mastodon instances, the largest difference being that tilde servers are purely text-based environments, with participating users logging in via ssh.
Calling to mind elements of the older web, netizens express themselves through (oftentimes clunky) handmade webpages, rather than profiles; participate in BBS-style forums; and make heavy use of designated IRC chat rooms.

![](https://d2w9rnfcy7mm78.cloudfront.net/6160204/large_5bfebdcc0e1ce72868f70fbdff113077.png?1581547916?bc=0)

 

## Roadblocks Ahead<a id="roadblocks-ahead"></a>

Unfortunately, it's incredibly difficult to fully replace the presiding players in social media.
There are many barriers that lie in the way of a mass exodus to Mastodon (or tilde-style servers).
Accessibility is one that rises to the forefront as a concern.

It is easy enough for someone to discover Mastodon, do a bit of roaming, and find a server they'd like to join— maybe.
But to truly adopt Kazemi's proposed method of social networking, to be a part of a small, almost local-feeling community using a Mastodon instance, would require someone with enough technical knowledge to set up a server and effectively work as a system administrator.
Running a tilde server poses similar obstacles, with the additional technical requirements of knowing how to move around the command line, as that's where all interaction takes place.
Due to the large difference in interface (website or mobile app vs. terminal emulator), Mastodon presents the best solution to more mindful social networking— indeed, tilde servers may not necessarily even want to classify themselves as social media in the most commonly understood sense of the term.

Regardless of whether this move is being undertaken by a small group of friends or a tight-knit community, the process will undeniably involve a learning curve (of variable steepness), and will inevitably require some effort and engagement on part of all participants.
For the de facto sysadmin, this is compounded by a commitment of time, maintenance, moderation, and dollars.
Is it worth it?
For certain people, this answer is yes.
As concerns regarding privacy, data ownership, surveillance, and general malaise regarding Big Tech platforms continue to rise, the trade-offs may not seem so daunting.

Practically speaking, though, I believe there are a lot of people who care about these issues, but may ultimately be kept out of these alternatives because the barrier to entry is simply too high.
And for a lot of people, this all may seem like overkill.
We have perfectly good group chats on iMessage.
There is the indisputable fact that a lot of people— nearly everyone we've ever even tangentially brushed shoulders with— are active, present, and easily reachable on these dominant modes of social media.
Our friends are all already on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook.
Community organizers, for example, cannot fully abandon these platforms, nor should they, if they want to reach the larger population.
And these are just some (of many) valid reasons to pause before diving headfirst into yet another online platform.

 

## Concluding Notes<a id="concluding-notes"></a>

Ultimately, I don't have a prescriptive, be-all, end-all answer, nor do I think a solution has to mean definitively choosing one over the other.
But if there is a way to stymie the dominance of malevolent entities and provide a space for people and ideas and fellowship to thrive, away from the outside noise, then I think it's worth a try.

The key idea that Kazemi advocates for in his guide is to use these alternate technologies to cultivate small communities— no more than "50 to 100 active users," and the fewer, the better fare.
If the larger, louder social media platforms are like megaphones broadcasting out to the rest of the world, then social servers can be the small, private neighborhoods we come home to nourish our close relationships and build up our communities.

I'd love to implement a Mastodon server in an educational setting, but also with groups of friends who are willing to give it a shot.
Something that strikes me as particularly important is widening the definition of what is possible by putting these tools in the hands of more people, not just the programmatically inclined, or an oligarchy of technocratic billionaires.
Artists, activists, and educators all play vital roles in world building, particularly when it comes to imagining and working toward a more equitable future, tearing down barriers of accessibility, and impacting the lives of many, among other transformative changes.
The more people who are aware of what is possible, the more we may see our online landscape reflect the interests of a wider and more conscionable population, rather than continuing to allow them to be shaped by profit-driven entities. 


---


1. Not to say that the following observable phenomena did not exist prior to mass online communication platforms.
On the contrary, the conditions that give rise to alienation, loneliness, and uncertainty, or the forces that have engaged in orchestrating regime change, architecting the modern panopticon, and spearheading McCarthyite repression, etc. remain the same as they were prior to the advent of the Internet.
[↩](#1)

<a id="footnotes-1"></a>

2. Jennifer Lynch, <Tooltip text="Clearview AI—Yet Another Example of Why We Need A Ban on Law Enforcement Use of Face Recognition Now, Electronic Frontier Foundation" href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/clearview-ai-yet-another-example-why-we-need-ban-law-enforcement-use-face" />.
[↩](#1)

<a id="footnotes-2"></a>

3. The Guardian, <Tooltip text="The Cambridge Analytica Files" href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/cambridge-analytica-files" />.
[↩](#3)

<a id="footnotes-3"></a>

4. Data & Society, <Tooltip text="Media Manipulation Initiative" href="https://datasociety.net/research/media-manipulation" />.
[↩](#4)

<a id="footnotes-4"></a>

5. Luke Munn, <Tooltip text="Alt-right pipeline: Individual journeys to extremism online, First Monday, 24(6)" href="https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i6.10108" />.
[↩](#5)

<a id="footnotes-5"></a>

6. Paul Ford, <Tooltip text='"I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds", The Message' href="https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf" />.
[↩](#6)

<a id="footnotes-6"></a>

7. Darius Kazemi, <Tooltip text="Run your own social: How to run a small social network site for your friends" href="https://runyourown.social" />).
[↩](#7)

<a id="footnotes-7"></a>

8. Free Software Foundation | GNU Project, <Tooltip text='"What is Free Software? The Free Software Definition"' href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html" />.
[↩](#8)

<a id="footnotes-8"></a>

Finding relief in the quieter spaces, or how we can foster more intentional communities online.

Social Servers

* bell hooks: "Within a culture of domination, all our political struggles risk commodification in ways that diffuse their radical intent."
* Miya Tokumitsu, <Tooltip text="Tell Me It's Going to be OK" href="https://thebaffler.com/salvos/tell-me-its-going-to-be-ok-tokumitsu" />
 - "More alarming however, is what might be termed the paradox of neoliberal social retreat: <ReferenceLink fullPath="notes/20200212-social-servers" text="although people gravitate to social media in order to feel connected, social media, and Instagram in particular, has a tendency to make people feel worse about themselves" /> ... It turns out that this kind of content tends to make viewers feel alienated—by the ever-competitive logic of capitalist emotional display, even the feel-good content featured on Instagram breeds a perverse sort of invidious malaise..."
 - "It’s also no coincidence that the politician who presided over the final triumph of neoliberalism as American social and economic common sense was Bill “I Feel Your Pain” Clinton. Clinton threw poor single mothers off of public assistance, but any cost-cutting pol can do that. Clinton’s gift was that he could make even self-identified left-liberals feel good about such punitive policy shifts, by making it appear that they were in fact helping these women help themselves. In many ways, Clinton’s sleight of hand encapsulates neatly *the narcissistic feedback loop of neoliberal positivity, which focuses on what feels good, rather than what is gracious and just*."
 - "Anxiety, and especially depression, as the late social critic Mark Fisher noted, often have social causes, but we are led to believe that we suffer individually and must struggle alone. Fisher’s point is that we are prevented from even considering such conditions as social. The treatments on offer, the most common ways to discuss recovery—therapy and pharmaceuticals—are essentially solo journeys that patients undertake. Against this *hyper-individualist vision of psychic healing*, we do well to highlight Fisher’s core insight that the tools we are given skew how we understand the world and our place in it."
 - "There is a reason why re-emergent words and phrases like “solidarity,” “class consciousness,” “mass movement,” “organize,” and “collective struggle,” sound old-fashioned and in need of a good dusting-off. They didn’t simply fall out of vogue; they were aggressively obsolesced in our everyday lives by a variety of interests—employers, corporations hungrily eyeing public assets—determined to alienate us from each other in the interest in marketizing our souls for their own benefit. In return, they bestowed to us a *self-oriented language of supposed care*, that was never really meant to liberate us from the sources of our anxiety and depression. It’s only there to blunt the pain temporarily—long enough to enable us to move on to the next TaskRabbit assignment, Uber client, or briskly managed election cycle."

Self-care under neoliberalism

## Distro Hopping

Around six months ago, at the beginning of this year, I finally committed to taking a step out of Apple's ecosystem.
I bought a Thinkpad T14s on eBay and immediately wiped it clean of Windows to install Pop!_OS.

It was a decision that had years of momentum leading up to it: alignment with the ethos of copyleft and free and open source software; annoyance at being ensnared within other closed, proprietary models like Adobe; interest in the growing right to repair movement and <Tooltip text="sustainable technology" href="https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/12/how-and-why-i-stopped-buying-new-laptops.html" />; and perhaps the paramount catalyst, frustration with the hydra-headed beast that is <Tooltip text="surveillance capitalism" href="https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours" />.

I had spent several months prior testing out different Linux distros on virtual machines and an old 2011 MacBook Pro.
First, I tried Elementary OS for its promises of MacOS-like UI and privacy.
Next, I tried Mint, another Ubuntu-based distro with considerable popularity.
Having some familiarity with Ubuntu itself (and other Debian-based distros like Raspbian), I decided to give Linux's de-facto flagship another go, this time as a prospective resident rather than a passing tourist.
The OS I enjoyed the most during this trial period was Manjaro i3, as it came with a friendly installer, the chance to learn and love using a tiling windows manager, and far less bloatware than the other distros I had tried.


Unfortunately, as Linux infamously plays poorly with NVIDIA graphics cards, I began experiencing the dreaded screen tearing issues.
The need for a decent GPU and an OS that would be able to accommodate that need, as well as the desire for ease (sorry, Arch-based distros) led me to choose a newer Intel Thinkpad model and Pop!_OS, which brings to GNOME the immense joys of keyboard-driven tiling window management – gaps and all.

## Dotfiles

Pop!_OS was a welcome relief after spending a month with Manjaro.
As a bare-bones distro, setting up and customizing Manjaro with i3-gaps was a dangerous gateway into the endless feedback loop that is Unix ricing.
Thankfully, at least some of the configuration files I had refined and tweaked and refined and tweaked ad nauseam could be put to use in my new system.

Purely for the utilitarian purpose of facilitating and standardizing the setup of a new machine, I had already been tracking my <Tooltip text="MacOS dotfiles" href="https://github.com/grcekh/dotfiles/tree/main" /> (albeit messily).
Ricing elevates this act into one that is as aesthetic as it is pragmatic, turning dotfiles into <Tooltip text="something of an art" href="https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn" />.

My <Tooltip text="Manjaro dotfiles" href="https://github.com/grcekh/dotfiles/tree/manjaro" /> are completely stagnant at this point, but include configuration files and fonts for:

* i3-gaps
* Kitty
* Zsh
* Nvim
* Polybar
* Rofi

![](https://d2w9rnfcy7mm78.cloudfront.net/9728591/original_ad3cb9cb2433e549cc282375e021618d.png?1606854304?bc=0)

My <Tooltip text="Pop!_OS dotfiles" href="https://github.com/grcekh/dotfiles/tree/pop" /> are current and actively updated, and include configuration files for:

* Alacritty
* Zsh
* Tmux
* Nvim
* Zathura

![](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grcekh/dotfiles/pop/screenshots/screenshot-stitch.png)

Although entering the vast world of Linux and ricing was a new experience for me, it brought with it traces of nostalgia (aside from having GIMP installed on my computer for the first time since I was ten).
Spending hours devoted to customizing my device was a familiar feeling, and reminded me of the lengths I once went through for a similar purpose – to make these personal machines feel a little bit more like "ours" – whether through jailbreaking my iPod Touch or rooting my early Android phones, like the Google Nexus I feverishly saved up for in high school.

In the cultural moment before streaming services and Spotify and <Tooltip text="Adobe cancellation fees" href="https://twitter.com/jensorensen/status/1381787621089669129?s=21" />, it was LimeWire and TPB that were ubiquitous, as were Cydia and WinterBoard, cracked APKs and pirated Photoshop, video game console emulators and patched ROMs.
After many years stuck in walled gardens, it is a comforting place to return to.

Linux, dotfiles, and the art of ricing

Chameleon

<EmbedVimeo index={5} />

Recreating <Tooltip text="Finger Painting from Myron Krueger's Videoplace (1985)" href="https://youtu.be/d4DUIeXSEpk?t=72" /> in C++ using openFrameworks, OpenCV, and an Xbox 360 Kinect to capture depth data.
Created as an exercise in exploring different interfaces for "reading" interaction.
Summer 2020, Recreating the Past, <Tooltip text="School for Poetic Computation" href="https://sfpc.io/" />.

CV Gesture Drawing

<EmbedVimeo index={2} />

The televangelist in my grandmother's apartment.

Datamosh

<EmbedVimeo index={0} />
<EmbedVimeo index={1} />

A series of short videos derived from procedural processes, including experimentation with various dithering algorithms, primarily ordered dithering using Bayer matrices.
All sounds from <Tooltip text="freesound.org" href="https://freesound.org/people/grcekh/downloaded_sounds" />.

Dithermosh

<EmbedVimeo index={7} />

*Forgotten Digital Artifacts* is a de facto virtual reality exhibition space that interfaces old technology with the new, allowing users to explore and interact with the digital landscape of the late 1990s to early 2000s.
For many, myself included, the epoch roughly spanning Windows 95 to Windows XP had an incredible and formative impact on how we navigate, understand, and relate to technology, computational systems, and the web.

The exhibition is comprised of three rooms, each of which engages with a different aspect of the early digital desktop experience and seeks to evoke a sense of nostalgia, frustration, playfulness, or some combination of the above.
The primary room, largest in size, is closest to a representation of a physical desktop space, littered with crumbled files, a recycle bin, folders, the Internet Explorer icon, archaic computers, and even an ominous nod to early surveillance monitoring systems– a link between past and present.

![](https://d2w9rnfcy7mm78.cloudfront.net/11731327/original_e4f3c304636f597167313063d6db4480.png?1619396682?bc=0)
![](https://d2w9rnfcy7mm78.cloudfront.net/11731324/original_7e501d20680259ca6a0ef4325921222d.png?1619396680?bc=0)

While the user is free to clean up the landscape (i.e., putting the crumbled files into the recycle bin), much of the destructiveness of the early digital world (e.g., “delete system32”) is implicitly encouraged in *Forgotten Digital Artifacts*, and made possible by the new-age medium of VR, in which the user can actively destroy the desktop by grabbing, throwing, and launching the files, folders, and objects into disarray.

The remaining two rooms immerse the user in other core elements of the early Windows experience, including the blue screen of death, seemingly indomitable pop-ups, minesweeper, solitaire, and so on.
Ultimately, the user emerges from the exhibition into a desert terrain in the middle of nowhere– a speculative and tongue-in-cheek representation of void virtual space, where old and forgotten digital artifacts can be found suspended in cyber perpetuity.

![](https://d2w9rnfcy7mm78.cloudfront.net/11731325/original_14cb8ff568d958bf102153e27e8fa275.png?1619396680?bc=0)

All sound effects are from the Windows XP operating system, while the soundtrack is a remix of a remix of a remix from <Tooltip text="freesound.org" href="https://freesound.org" />.

Forgotten Digital Artifacts

<EmbedVimeo index={3} />

*Jellyfish* emerges from explorations of analog glitch aesthetics paired with observations derived from the natural world and artificial ecosystems.
The shader animation runs endlessly in real-time and is displayed on a tank-sized CRT monitor, mimicking the setup of aquariums, thereby engaging with aesthetics of simulated vivaria and recreating biological forms at both the macro and micro level.
*Jellyfish* was on display in Norway for <Tooltip text="MEGALITH" href="https://megalith.metamerlabs.io" />, an online/offline exhibition of <Tooltip text="The Wrong Biennale" href="https://thewrong.org" /> 2019–2020.

Jellyfish

<EmbedVimeo index={6} />

*Just Visiting* draws loose inspiration from the likes of Animal Crossing, placing the user in the colorful world populated by a single bichon frise.
The work strives to use its medium– virtual reality– to immerse the player fully in both the unusual and the amusing.

As the player explores the terrain, they come across several artifacts of the space that suggests a lack of permanence, including an empty tent and campfire, outward facing lighthouse, and a lone bichon looking out at the end of the pier.
The world itself is inherently liminal– a place to visit but not to stay.
The centerpiece of the island is a statue of the town's founder, a bichon identical to the one on the pier, further engaging with the absurd and the humorous and calling to mind the social rites and rituals that guide and often dictate human behavior.

![](https://d2w9rnfcy7mm78.cloudfront.net/11731368/original_2d886738e6c98574e07e4a36653612dc.png?1619397072?bc=0)

Though at the visual and auditory levels *Just Visiting* provides a buoyant island for the player to explore, the liminality of the world raises questions about and explores the state of transience, of being between places and spaces, and whether that's such a bad thing at all.

![](https://d2w9rnfcy7mm78.cloudfront.net/11731367/original_cdd23a262a0e8defddcdd0f4923b7234.png?1619397064?bc=0)

Special thanks to <Tooltip text="Eiram Espino" href="https://eiramespino.com" /> for creating the soundtrack and <Tooltip text="freesound.org" href="https://freesound.org" /> for the ocean and campfire recordings.

Just Visiting

<EmbedVimeo index={9} />

*Poetic.computer* is an interactive web experience that utilizes machine learning, computer vision, and computational language to investigate the relationship we have with our computers, and how we can give them the language to express their side of the relationship.
The website, which lived at the address <Tooltip text="https://poetic.computer" href="https://poetic.computer" />, first presents a visualization of how the computer “views” the user– that is, imperfectly– presenting a distortion of the user’s webcam feed in a monochrome of green.
Using Constrained Local Models to track the user’s facial features, a visualization of the user as “object” of the computer’s gaze is represented by green ellipses overlaid upon the first identifiable face– tracking eyes, nose, lips, and face shape– in the live video.
Limiting the camera’s gaze to focus on only one person at a time creates a sense of intimacy
as well as flips the dynamic typical of human and object, further illustrating the objectification of the human user by the machine, the literal object.
The computer thus takes the human user, the focus of its gaze, and renders him or her into poetry.
The aesthetic component of *poetic.computer* is just as much a part of the poetics as the generated text itself, “explor[ing] a broader definition of the poetic” defined in <Tooltip text="Taeyoon Choi’s Poetic Computation: Reader" href="http://poeticcomputation.info/chapters/ch.1" /> as an “investigat[ion of] the art of computation as well as the expressive qualities of code, including its aesthetic, visual, aural, and material aspects” (Choi).



Leveraging a pre-trained MobileNet convolutional neural network (CNN) model for image classification, *poetic.computer* takes the user’s webcam input to generate its best estimations at what exactly it "sees" in the video feed.
The model is trained to identify objects, rather than living subjects, an instance of misuse that often yields comedic results such as interpreting the human user as “Band Aid,” or “laboratory coat.”
The generated output plays with key elements of traditional poetry– particularly, its use of metaphors and the objectification of the poet's muse (i.e., the "beloved object").
These keywords, of which there are three total, are then added to an array ordered by the model’s confidence, from greatest to least.
Using a library for computational language manipulation, I created a series of grammar rules to be filled with the generated keywords from the image classification model, which take the slots of nouns, and randomly generated verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and pronouns to fill the rest of the slots, thus creating a semblance of poetry.

Some examples of generated poems include:

```
Poem 3.58
---------

mumbling

pledging

wool, woolen, woollen
is to bow tie, bow-tie, bowtie

it supervised
my shower cap
```

```
Poem 5.68
---------

typing embarrassingly

I waved her Band Aid

Typing

theirs waved her wig
```

Computer vision is, in effect, a form of “machine reading,” a way in which the computer scans, recognizes, and interprets what is in its line of sight.
However, contrary to what many may believe in this age of increasingly (read: frighteningly) intelligent technology, the computer alone is not capable of programming itself (at least for now), nor is human capable of truly random generativity.
In her essay <Tooltip text='“How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine,”' href="https://www.ade.mla.org/content/download/7915/225678" /> N. Katherine Hayles writes that “the line between (human) interpretation and (machine) pattern recognition is a porous boundary, with each interacting with the other” (Hayles 73).
This interpretation is crucial to a holistic understanding of the present work; though the generated output (i.e., the “poems”) is ultimately created through computational models of learning and vision, these technologies are nothing more than an advanced form of applied pattern recognition, and there is a heavy human hand in each step of the process, with the programmer shaping and crafting the output’s final form.
Interacting with *poetic.computer* itself further requires a human hand to trigger the website’s functionality, and more than that, takes a human eye and a human mind to even call the output poetic, to understand it as poetry, apply one’s pre-existing associations and experiences, and be able to derive meaning and humor from the (often nonsensical) text.



The aspects of *poetic.computer* that make it most playful, that it “reads” the human viewer as an array of absurd objects and often generates silly output, are rooted in the work’s lack of fidelity to human-made poetry.
*poetic.computer* does not seek to perfectly imitate human poetry; indeed, as Allison Parrish discusses in her Eyeo 2015 talk <Tooltip text='“Exploring (Semantic) Space With (Literal) Robots,”' href="http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/semantic-space-literal-robots" /> “[m]ost people, when they think of computer poetry, think that the task of the computer poet is to recreate with as much fidelity as possible poetry that is written by humans.
I have no interest in making poetry that looks like it was written by humans.
I think that that’s a plainly boring task that nobody should try to attempt” (Parrish).
One of the driving forces of creative inquiry for me is a consideration of how we can misuse, and thus reappropriate, various mediums of technology for the purpose of creating and prompting new and interesting works of art, exploration, and discussion.
The fact that these models, particularly when misused, are often wildly incorrect at interpreting what they “see” helps endear the machine to us— we love AI and ML best when it fails to be perfectly human.
In a climate of growing privacy and surveillance concerns such that <Tooltip text="the city of San Francisco has just become the first city to ban facial recognition technology by police" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/us/facial-recognition-ban-san-francisco.html" />, a misuse and reappropriation of the same genre of technology strips it of its ability for exploitation.
Above all, *poetic.computer* is a playful implementation of misused technology, a work that seeks to explore the possibilities and boundaries of computational poetics, language, and aesthetics.

poetic.computer

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*Slow Burn* is conceptually rooted in the thermodynamic second law of entropy, representing a real-time visualization of the irreversible march of time's arrow.
The work depicts change through this lens, capturing the flow of time as it moves forward, singular in direction and fluid in motion, pushing the future firmly and immutably into the past at a pace almost imperceptible to those too close to detect it.
Once the change has fully overtaken the feed, the video abruptly ends in static and repeats from the beginning, further complicating its interpretation of the physics of time— truly linear, or ultimately cyclical?

Grace Kim Howard