Total Furnishing Unit (2021) | Charlotte Geater
[Talgarreg]: Legitimate Snack, [2021]. Handmade saddle-stitched pamphlet in blank mustard wrappers, with floral flyleaves and black-and-white contents printed digitally on linen paper. 15 x 10cm. [16] pages. #22 in the Legitimate Snack series. An edition of 40 copies numbered in pencil. As new.
Here is a delightful computer-generated pamphlet by the London-based poet Charlotte Geater, author of poems for my FBI agent (2020), works appearing in The White Review, Strange Horizon, and elsewhere, and a series of digital zines of computer poetry.
In Total Furnishing Unit, Geater presents a poem by the same name, itself titled after the Italian designer Joe Colombo’s concept for a radically self-contained living space. As she explains in a note accompanying an excerpt printed in the periodical Peverse, Geater produced the poem with the assistance of a GPT-2 model fine-tuned on the language of Colombo and his contemporaries:
‘Total Furnishing Unit’ is a long poem I started after becoming fascinated by the work of radical Italian industrial designer Joe Colombo, and his visions of futuristic modular furniture in the 1960s and early 70s. Much of the text was generated using the GPT-2 neural network language model, using the language of Colombo and similar designers discussing their work as a jumping off point.
In the pamphlet, Geater’s poem unwinds across a series of discrete passages spanning eight pages, each with its own playful typesetting. At turns sullen (this dirt falling down on me & settling / in my hair like rain), wistful (every night we slept in separate houses), triumphant (floors are living spaces!), the text ultimately distills a playful, but impressively restrained, human–machine poetics:
the world that is discovered through the mobile phone
~“how to pay for things with phone?”
~“2 billion each month”
~“when all the world is connected”
dear sisters, welcome
The pamphlet itself is handmade by Aaron Kent, who has published it under his indie imprint Legitimate Snack, a new site for poetic and material experimentation. Bound in blank mustard cardstock with floral flyleaves, the poem is printed on deluxe linen paper. Though laser-printed, the texture of the linen stock has yielded ink patches and other artifacts that evoke the Risograph process. The print run is 40 copies, each numbered in pencil by Kent.
In our estimation, this is some of the best computer poetry ever written. As a frequent collaborator of GPT-2, Geater manages to produce evocative human works through artful control of the bizarre qualities that tend to permeate text produced via the model. We are so in love with this pamphlet that we have bought the remaining stock from the publisher, so that we can celebrate it here and participate in its distribution.
Due to its small size, single copies of this pamphlet may be shipped domestically for $2 and worldwide for $3.
[Talgarreg]: Legitimate Snack, [2021]. Handmade saddle-stitched pamphlet in blank mustard wrappers, with floral flyleaves and black-and-white contents printed digitally on linen paper. 15 x 10cm. [16] pages. #22 in the Legitimate Snack series. An edition of 40 copies numbered in pencil. As new.
Here is a delightful computer-generated pamphlet by the London-based poet Charlotte Geater, author of poems for my FBI agent (2020), works appearing in The White Review, Strange Horizon, and elsewhere, and a series of digital zines of computer poetry.
In Total Furnishing Unit, Geater presents a poem by the same name, itself titled after the Italian designer Joe Colombo’s concept for a radically self-contained living space. As she explains in a note accompanying an excerpt printed in the periodical Peverse, Geater produced the poem with the assistance of a GPT-2 model fine-tuned on the language of Colombo and his contemporaries:
‘Total Furnishing Unit’ is a long poem I started after becoming fascinated by the work of radical Italian industrial designer Joe Colombo, and his visions of futuristic modular furniture in the 1960s and early 70s. Much of the text was generated using the GPT-2 neural network language model, using the language of Colombo and similar designers discussing their work as a jumping off point.
In the pamphlet, Geater’s poem unwinds across a series of discrete passages spanning eight pages, each with its own playful typesetting. At turns sullen (this dirt falling down on me & settling / in my hair like rain), wistful (every night we slept in separate houses), triumphant (floors are living spaces!), the text ultimately distills a playful, but impressively restrained, human–machine poetics:
the world that is discovered through the mobile phone
~“how to pay for things with phone?”
~“2 billion each month”
~“when all the world is connected”
dear sisters, welcome
The pamphlet itself is handmade by Aaron Kent, who has published it under his indie imprint Legitimate Snack, a new site for poetic and material experimentation. Bound in blank mustard cardstock with floral flyleaves, the poem is printed on deluxe linen paper. Though laser-printed, the texture of the linen stock has yielded ink patches and other artifacts that evoke the Risograph process. The print run is 40 copies, each numbered in pencil by Kent.
In our estimation, this is some of the best computer poetry ever written. As a frequent collaborator of GPT-2, Geater manages to produce evocative human works through artful control of the bizarre qualities that tend to permeate text produced via the model. We are so in love with this pamphlet that we have bought the remaining stock from the publisher, so that we can celebrate it here and participate in its distribution.
Due to its small size, single copies of this pamphlet may be shipped domestically for $2 and worldwide for $3.
[Talgarreg]: Legitimate Snack, [2021]. Handmade saddle-stitched pamphlet in blank mustard wrappers, with floral flyleaves and black-and-white contents printed digitally on linen paper. 15 x 10cm. [16] pages. #22 in the Legitimate Snack series. An edition of 40 copies numbered in pencil. As new.
Here is a delightful computer-generated pamphlet by the London-based poet Charlotte Geater, author of poems for my FBI agent (2020), works appearing in The White Review, Strange Horizon, and elsewhere, and a series of digital zines of computer poetry.
In Total Furnishing Unit, Geater presents a poem by the same name, itself titled after the Italian designer Joe Colombo’s concept for a radically self-contained living space. As she explains in a note accompanying an excerpt printed in the periodical Peverse, Geater produced the poem with the assistance of a GPT-2 model fine-tuned on the language of Colombo and his contemporaries:
‘Total Furnishing Unit’ is a long poem I started after becoming fascinated by the work of radical Italian industrial designer Joe Colombo, and his visions of futuristic modular furniture in the 1960s and early 70s. Much of the text was generated using the GPT-2 neural network language model, using the language of Colombo and similar designers discussing their work as a jumping off point.
In the pamphlet, Geater’s poem unwinds across a series of discrete passages spanning eight pages, each with its own playful typesetting. At turns sullen (this dirt falling down on me & settling / in my hair like rain), wistful (every night we slept in separate houses), triumphant (floors are living spaces!), the text ultimately distills a playful, but impressively restrained, human–machine poetics:
the world that is discovered through the mobile phone
~“how to pay for things with phone?”
~“2 billion each month”
~“when all the world is connected”
dear sisters, welcome
The pamphlet itself is handmade by Aaron Kent, who has published it under his indie imprint Legitimate Snack, a new site for poetic and material experimentation. Bound in blank mustard cardstock with floral flyleaves, the poem is printed on deluxe linen paper. Though laser-printed, the texture of the linen stock has yielded ink patches and other artifacts that evoke the Risograph process. The print run is 40 copies, each numbered in pencil by Kent.
In our estimation, this is some of the best computer poetry ever written. As a frequent collaborator of GPT-2, Geater manages to produce evocative human works through artful control of the bizarre qualities that tend to permeate text produced via the model. We are so in love with this pamphlet that we have bought the remaining stock from the publisher, so that we can celebrate it here and participate in its distribution.
Due to its small size, single copies of this pamphlet may be shipped domestically for $2 and worldwide for $3.