In 1901, Masaoka Shiki wrote a few haiku about carp.

 

According to one translator, these short form poems "...weren't really ten haiku, but one thought ten [different] ways..."

 

In 1961, co-founder of the Oulipo, Raymond Queneau, wrote A Hundred Thousand Million Poems, which consisted of ten sonnets that were then "sliced-up" to offer the reader an infinite number of new poems—contingent upon how one arranged the lines.

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In 2024, a writing workshop spurred a return to the idea that there is a bountiful place for poetry in spaces between lines (many thanks to Corporeal Writing / Mushroom School), in other words, a “narrative breathing”.

 

So I begin this collaborative project, HALLUCINATIONS, which is essentially human mimicry—and rebuke—of AI "hallucinations" (irony abounds as hallucinations are an intrinsically human experience, and for AI, basically an LLM in recursion ultimately unable to emulate humans).  

 

HALLUCINATIONS begins with three poems which spun up into 48 variations. It uses AI against itself (here I take a cue from experimental filmmaker, Nam June Paik, by "using technology to hate it properly"). The result? New poems / versions that shape-shift and take different forms, as they would after being repeatedly fed through an LLM. Binary number titles are used help to democratize the content, helping readers focus more on the poems (less on titles) helping to build a more collaborative, collective unconscious mindset. 

 

HALLUCINATIONS is simultaneously a book and a collective digital project. I invite collaborators to send poems with the intention of adding to the LLM (Lina Language Model) below, ultimately fostering poetic community and exemplifying that humans still reign in poetic originality. 

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Methodology

Using one prompt in an LLM to engage in a "hallucinatory" brainstorm, I began generating original, new poems. The poems are each labeled by a binary number / code and leverage literary devices such as repetition and juxtaposition. Poems become extensions of one another, as they are "unplugged" and "replugged" in randomly to create new poems (reminiscent of neural networks, fibre optics, 20th c. switchboard cords, mycelium, and/or cosmic threads). Italicized commentary throughout the poems echo the type of feedback language that some LLMs now ask of users—very similar to reviews or surveys online (i.e. "how did we do?") I use these spaces to inhabit the voice of the LLM, attempting to emulate a "mechanical grief" (perhaps the desperate lament of machines longing to be human?).

 

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