Michael Connor: Excellent. I’m glad you were able to join in. I know that the meeting schedule moved around a little at the last moment there. Time is a flat circle.

Yngve Holen: It’s raining outside, and I was just like, yeah, it was crazy.

Audrey Tang: That’s good, good.

Michael Connor: Great. There’s two things…

Audrey Tang: Hey, here’s your headset. It doesn’t rain, the XR.

Audrey Tang: In XR, it never rains. Well, when it rains, it doesn’t get wet. [laughs]

Yngve Holen: So it’s been all of no wind.

Audrey Tang: Wow, that’s an art form in itself. A collage, a collage. We call it a collage.

Yngve Holen: This is a sculpture. This is a sculpture.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, Yngve sculpture. [laughs]

Michael Connor: That’s amazing. Let’s go through the state of play about a few things before we get into VR or anything. The state of play is that we had originally thought that we could work towards a recorded presentation today, which at one point could even have been live.

Michael Connor: As the conversation progressed, it became clear we needed more time. We are still in a planning conversation today, of course. We’ve been recording the planning conversations throughout. We can hopefully use some clips that are interesting or relevant when we have final edit to make.

Michael Connor: The conversation so far has been revolving around a few different kinds of avenues. ETOPS was a starting point with Yngve’s magazine, which is the conversation-based magazine where there are conversations around a topic that are printed without authors being identified.

Michael Connor: The conversation began with the idea of extending that magazine into a format that was facilitated by machine learning, databases, or other things. That seemed to take it too far away from ETOPS as a very conversational, interpersonal project. That was part.

Michael Connor: Through that conversation, we did come onto just wanting to experiment with machine learning in general. The update on that is that I have given a number of Minister Tang’s speeches to machine learning artist Ross Goodwin. Ross is available to jump on the call with us today to talk about some ideas for experiments around that, just to see if there’s anything of interest.

Michael Connor: I want to say that Ross, he’s got a very fast-moving mind. He has a lot to say, so maybe that should be the last part of the call. I’m not sure maybe that we need to make an excuse to sign off at a certain point. I’m sorry, this is being recorded. I shouldn’t be so defensive.

Audrey Tang: I’m fine as long as Yngve is fine.

Michael Connor: Ross, he does really have a good, thorough knowledge of using text corpuses as creative material for AI projects. He will be able to give us some insight into what the possibilities are.

Michael Connor: The other part of the conversation that was quite fun was the XRSpace part, which we all know about – of course, Yngve’s had quite a process getting his headset – the idea being some sort of encounter in XRSpace.

Michael Connor: As part of that, we came upon the idea of the background of the 360-degree cinema being a possibility for a format that Yngve could explore that might align with some aspects of his work.

Michael Connor: Those are all of the things that are on the table. It’s probably fair to say that none of them feel like a final project exactly necessarily at this point.

Michael Connor: Yngve and I had a conversation this week, Minister Tang, where we were talking about what our presentation will be like given that we’re coming to the close of our time altogether.

Yngve Holen: [laughs]

Michael Connor: It seemed like it could be of interest to have the presentation happen in XRSpace as an experience, less than necessarily like a finished project. Within XRSpace, there could be a conversation around the topics that we have discussed, the two of you talking about your own practices.

Michael Connor: Perhaps we can create some backdrops that would happen within that that we could use as prompts or just as [inaudible 5:10] material. That does leave open the possibility that, in the spring, the Kunsthall Stavanger show is still on the table.

Michael Connor: There is still the possibility that either the machine learning or 360-degree carpet aspects could be further developed by everyone collectively or by individuals within the collaboration into things that would be exhibited.

Michael Connor: There’s still the possibility of developing something further from this point, but it’s maybe good to start thinking in terms of just having an interesting presentation and less the final product. That said, we can see how today goes. Maybe we’ll get there.

Michael Connor: Is that a fair summary of everything?

Yngve Holen: Yeah. I want to add two things I thought about. I don’t even know how it looks like in XRSpace because I was on the outside. We have to find a way to record the inside in some way that looks…Maybe it’s also OK to be on the outside and look at it if we have a conversation on the inside and we have carpets and stuff, but I couldn’t see…

Michael Connor: Oh, right. That’s great.

Yngve Holen: I was outside. Now it’s like…

Michael Connor: That is a crucial problem in that. Anyway, keep going.

Yngve Holen: Maybe we could see what’s possible there. That’s why I’m excited to get into XRSpace, because I don’t how it feels like.

Yngve Holen: Second thing I’d like to…

Audrey Tang: [inaudible 6:49] go through the motion of setting up your avatar and stuff?

Yngve Holen: I haven’t. I just got it [inaudible 6:56] .

Audrey Tang: That will take a while though. That will take 10 minutes, 20.

Yngve Holen: To make an avatar?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, to make an avatar, choose your likeness, and get acquainted with the controller or hand gestures. That would easily take you 15 to 20 minutes, just saying.

Yngve Holen: Probably two hours, if I know myself. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: No, it’s fine. It’s really easier than other VR pieces, but still there’s some learning curve.

Yngve Holen: I’m excited to see that. That’s why I wanted to ask. To the AI, the machine learning part, I was thinking yesterday the AI is now fed with a set of data from Audrey Tang. With the GPT…I always forget it.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, GPT, that’s right.

Yngve Holen: I didn’t know how to ask a question. It’s a hard thing to imagine how you can move with it or play with it. I was thinking maybe I also need a set of me in there, and we can have a conversation where they just bounce back and forth like a conversation forever. There could be a conversation from Kunsthall Stavanger, basically.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, that’s right. It takes forever to prepare for the show, and the show is just this forever preparation. I like the idea.

Audrey Tang: A dress rehearsal, a hash mark day.

Michael Connor: It also solves the problem of all of the time zone coordination that we’ve had to do. If you have synthetic beings that are able to carry out your conversation for you, it makes scheduling easier.

Audrey Tang: Yes, that’s right, [laughs] exactly. Before you joined, Yngve, I was sharing with Michael a few digitally scanned assets from the Taiwan Digital Asset Library. For example, this is a famous temple, and there’s many temples like that in the Taiwan Digital Asset Library.

Audrey Tang: I’m showing you this temple only because it makes sense in the context of a very Taiwanese thing called lottery poetry. I don’t know whether you’ve heard of it. It’s basically a set of randomly generated fortune cookies writ large, larger than average fortune cookies.

Audrey Tang: You will come to the temple with a topic in mind, but you don’t necessarily have to say it loud. Then you draw one of those lottery poetry sticks, and it contains an auspicious message or something. It’s always in a cryptic form like a sphinx.

Audrey Tang: Then you pay for the service for the temple scholar to interpret that lottery poetry for you. It’s a very Taiwanese thing.

Audrey Tang: What’s the best thing about this is, of course, that it’s a pre-generated set of randomly generated poems, but it could be interpreted to mean anything. This interpretational part is like the assistive intelligence part that Michael was referring to, basically, treating me as a generator of lottery poetry.

Audrey Tang: That’s a very apt metaphor that totally works in Taiwan, but probably doesn’t work in other places that doesn’t have this culture. [laughs]

Yngve Holen: We have star signs, right? There’s horoscopes every day. It’s not so far away when my partner wants to read me my future, [laughs] “Pardon me,” I’m like, “I’m a Taurus. I’m this star sign that’s least capable of believing in star signs.” Whenever I said, “It’s not my thing,” it’s that thing.

Yngve Holen: This is very interesting. I also like the format of those papers. I also think it’s a nice way of…They almost look like bigger labels or something like that.

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right. It’s in the form of hiccup poems. It’s interesting, and it’s very conversation, interpersonal. The parts where maybe having two avatars will work. One will basically generate a poem, and the other will then interpret.

Audrey Tang: Then we will keep talking about the message generated by the prompt from the individual seeking, I don’t know, fortunetelling. Now we become fortunetellers. Anyway, that was just an idea I was introducing to Michael as he joined and just for context.

Yngve Holen: Also very printable. I could just imagine the printers somewhere just spitting out the…

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Yngve Holen: [laughs]

Michael Connor: This is really interesting. I’ve heard of other randomness-based practices connected with Taoism and Buddhism, but I hadn’t heard of this before.

Audrey Tang: The most famous one is the national fortune lottery poetry. At the beginning of every year, this Grand Temple draws out what will happen to the country the next year. It’s a thing in Taiwan.

Yngve Holen: Lottery poetry, it’s beautiful. It’s a nice…

Audrey Tang: It even rhymes.

Yngve Holen: I’ve got a last subject, just collect a bunch of interviews that I have done in the past. I think she can turn them to, Michael, and maybe that’s something. I don’t know how that works, but maybe that’s something that can generate these two.

Michael Connor: It’s definitely possible. We should get Ross on to talk through that in some more detail. There’s a lot of nuance to it but, yes, Yngve, if you create a corpus or we can create a corpus of your text, it’s absolutely possible for you to have an AI that replicates your voice in some strange way.

Yngve Holen: If somebody needs to ask the questions or direct the poems in a way, I wonder if it would also be done in that way. If I post…

Michael Connor: I wonder if we should make a decision because Kurt is available to record our XRSpace interaction. Are we deciding that I should tell him we’re going to postpone that? Or should we try and…

Audrey Tang: It depends whether Yngve already has an avatar now. From what I have heard, it’s not even set up yet, right?

Yngve Holen: Should I try to do it on XR?

Audrey Tang: You’ll have to, for example, install an app called XRSpace, pair your phone with the XRSpace headset and all that. It takes time is what I’m saying.

Michael Connor: I think we should say that’s not going to happen today. Maybe that’s a good moment before we get further into the lottery poetry/bot idea with Ross. Maybe we should just finalize our last schedule. We have scheduled in Sunday at 6:00 I believe.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Michael Connor: Which is only a few days from now. Yngve has some conflicts coming up on his side, but I think there are a couple of other windows if we wanted to try and move that meeting a bit later to give, for example, Ross more time to prepare material.

Michael Connor: I think you had another window or two, Yngve, that could work. Minister Tang, can we check with your schedule now, or do we need to have Zack on-hand for that?

Audrey Tang: I can speak for my schedule. If it’s not a Sunday, of course, it’s even better.

Michael Connor: It’s better? OK.

Audrey Tang: It’s better. I never schedule Sunday. I made an exception for this.

Michael Connor: Thank you. Yngve, you had some other possibilities?

Yngve Holen: I have to be in Berlin on the first of October. I have a plan with meetings then. After that, it’s hard. I don’t know how we can do it, but I’m down in Europe in different countries to try to do all my meetings by car. We’re like COVID times.

Yngve Holen: I will be in Berlin…It depends on how I drive down from Oslo to Berlin. I could be in Berlin the 29th, the 28th, and have full free days to do that recording. If you would do it on the 30th, it’s double as much time as we have now through Sunday. That’s two more working days, which are weekends. I don’t know. Some people don’t have weekends, some people do.

Audrey Tang: 30th, your time is the first of October my time.

Michael Connor: It would either be the 1st in the morning or the 30th in the evening, so whichever…

Audrey Tang: The first, in the morning, is easier for me because it’s a vacation day, and I don’t have anything. If we schedule for the 1st and in the morning, I can be up as early as 7:00, if that works. I can also do afternoons.

Audrey Tang: If you’re in Berlin, that would be 7:00 PM my time and noon your time. That will also work if it’s in the 1st of October.

Yngve Holen: That would be the 1st of October, that would be the 30th of September for me?

Audrey Tang: No, it will either be 30th of September for you late in the night, or it could be also the 1st of October for you around noon.

Yngve Holen: Around noon. OK, let’s see. Better for me late at night, yeah.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Michael Connor: Yngve, I think if it was 7:00 AM for Minister Tang, it would be 1:00 AM for you, which is quite late.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s actually quite late.

Yngve Holen: OK. Could we do…I have a meeting at 12 o’clock in Berlin. It’s a physical meeting, so I look at the architecture. I think I’m finished at two o’clock. Is that 7:00 in the morning to you, 2:00? That doesn’t work that way, right? Two is…

Audrey Tang: If it’s in the afternoon…

Michael Connor: That would be 8:00 PM.

Audrey Tang: …then it would be 8:00 PM for me. If it’s on the 1st, then it will work, but if it’s on the 30th, it will not. I have the entire day of 30th booked.

Yngve Holen: I could do on the 1st, I could do…OK, that’s a stretch. I think eight o’clock in the evening, right? That would be eight o’clock in the evening for you, OK.

Audrey Tang: That’s fine.

Michael Connor: That would be 2:00 PM for you, which is a little close to your meeting. You can maybe have a slightly early start or so.

Audrey Tang: I can stay longer into the night too. I’m fine. If it’s on the 1st, I’m fine the entire day.

Michael Connor: What about 3:00 PM for you, Yngve, on October 1st?

Audrey Tang: And 9:00 for me.

Yngve Holen: 3:00 PM is OK. I could do 2:00 PM. 3:00 PM would be perfect, yeah.

Audrey Tang: OK. Basically we meet at the same hour, like today, or an hour earlier?

Yngve Holen: Same as today, or earlier if you want.

Audrey Tang: Same as today. Maybe half an hour earlier if that works for you.

Yngve Holen: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: OK, so 8:30 PM for me.

Yngve Holen: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: OK, I can do that.

Yngve Holen: Yeah. Do you want me, if I then could do even half an hour earlier to let you know, or should we just…It’s easier just to say 4:30. Then it’s safe.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Michael Connor: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Are we talking about 3:30, Berlin time?

Michael Connor: 2:30.

Yngve Holen: 2:30.

Audrey Tang: I thought Yngve was saying that 3:30 would be easier for him, which is like today but half an hour earlier…

Yngve Holen: Oh, it’s so complicated. I never get this right. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: If you can do 2:30, that’s actually preferable, and still that would be 8:30 for me.

Yngve Holen: Yeah, I can do 2:30, no problem.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Yngve Holen: Very good.

Audrey Tang: OK. I am sending you a calendar invite just to make sure that we all are on the same page. Which is probably a good thing to do in the beginning of this, but now that we are toward the end of this, it doesn’t hurt. I have sent both of you a calendar invite just to make sure that we are on the same page.

Michael Connor: Thank you for doing that. That would have probably helped all along, for sure.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Michael Connor: Norway time. Great.

Michael Connor: Nico, I’m on a phone call. [laughs]

Michael Connor: …where were we? I think I’m going to tell Kurt now actually that we’re not going to make it into XRSpace today.

Michael Connor: Oh, I just realized I muted myself. I’m interested in the question of whether things in XRSpace can be scriptable, because that might bring these two ideas together, if it’s possible to create a bot in XRSpace.

Michael Connor: I have a feeling that bots create this potential for abuse and for bad language. That might be not ideal for XRSpace, because they can somehow absorb things in their training that might be not good for content purposes.

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Michael Connor: I’ll ask the question anyway.

Yngve Holen: There’s this just something completely different. There’s this one sculpture in Taipei, which is kind of like my favorite in the world.

Audrey Tang: Oh, yeah, the Meat-shaped Stone. We have a pretty good 3D scan of that.

Yngve Holen: You have pretty good 3D scan of that. Maybe that’s the one with me.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Yngve Holen: Maybe we can look at that too.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Yngve Holen: I don’t know why. [laughs] It’s a cool object, huh?

Audrey Tang: That’s right. It’s even in the Nintendo game, the “Animal Crossing.” They offer an Animal Crossing version of that.

Yngve Holen: Oh.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I’m trying to find a good resolution version, but there is none. I’ll just paste a random photo here. Basically, the Animal Crossing community in Taiwan gets a free license from the National Palace Museum to basically carry those open data from the Palace Museum.

Audrey Tang: If you’re interested in the 3D scans that are Animal Crossing resolution, here’s the open data part, right? [laughs]

Yngve Holen: [laughs] OK, wow. It’s in the back there, right?.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, that’s right.

Yngve Holen: Oh, yeah.

Michael Connor: The one next to it, I saw the one next to it but I didn’t see the meat one when I was in Taipei. I’m so disappointed myself. How could I have missed that?

Audrey Tang: Now you can import it to XR and look at it all day.

Audrey Tang: I don’t know what you do with it all day though, but it’s there for you to look at. [laughs]

Yngve Holen: Very cool. [laughs]

Michael Connor: Cool. Should I see if we can get Ross on the line now?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I think it’s a good idea.

Michael Connor: I think it’s time. OK, give me just a moment. Let me give him a quick call.

Yngve Holen: Mm-hmm.

Yngve Holen: [laughs] He is muted there.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Yngve Holen: Kind of cool.

Audrey Tang: I think he’ll join us through the Skype.

Yngve Holen: Yeah. Michael muted himself. That’s good.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Yngve Holen: Nice.

Yngve Holen: You know more how about these things work than me. I’m really new to this. We have understood from your mail that one part of the set was something that you actually used for what you call format, or structure, or how it’s going to look like, right?

Audrey Tang: That’s right. There’s a content and there’s the style. It’s technically called a style transfer.

Yngve Holen: Yeah. That’s like four lines, five lines, or like…

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Yngve Holen: I see. Two columns, one column. That’s graphic design. It’s just column A…

Audrey Tang: That’s right. It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing.

Yngve Holen: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: We get to practice our lip reading, how I try to read Michael’s lips. [laughs]

Yngve Holen: How are you?

Michael Connor: Ross to be on in just a moment.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Michael Connor: Yngve, you had sent a number of parameter of different topics you wanted the Virtual Minister to talk about, I think. I’d shared this with him. We had a chat last night about where he’s gotten up to. I think he was specking out different approaches to how to train something.

Michael Connor: Maybe one of our big conversations is about a freelance, something that can respond to live, or if it’s something that can generate texts in a more synthetic way or something. I guess he’ll give us more information when he is on in a moment.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Michael Connor: I like the idea of the two bots being in conversation as continuation of…I wonder if actually we could use the corpus of this conversation.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I actually did that in my previous job, by the way. Like literally. There’s an Easter egg that I put in my previous job, and in all the customers that installed that piece of software, there’s a special point not advertised anywhere which it recreates. If you refresh, it generates randomly again.

Audrey Tang: The real conversation that we had when making the product together in the memory of Ken Pier when he passed away, my way to mourn him was just to get all the IRC chat logs and generate this virtual conversation. If you refresh sufficient number of times, you’ll probably see my name, which is Au in the chat room, but you will also see our project manager, Adina Levin, our fellow developer, Luke Closs, our fellow QA person, Matt Heusser, and so on.

Audrey Tang: It’s almost like we’re making the product over again. It’s in all the Socialtext instances all around the world…. This is the first time I said this on record.

Yngve Holen: Wow.

Michael Connor: Was that repeating the exact scripted conversation or was it generated from…

Audrey Tang: Well, if you keep refreshing. That’s actually my first deep learning project using just character level RNN when it came out.

Yngve Holen: It’s actual stuff that’s been written to each other. It’s not developed. When you refresh, it takes you to different pages in the project. 2007 jumps to 2008.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. That’s not our actual conversation, but it could have been.

Yngve Holen: Oh, it’s generated.

Audrey Tang: It’s machine generated. It’s our avatars talking to one another.

Yngve Holen: I see. It’s based on what you all talked about, but then it’s just randomized like that. I see.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. There’s no trade secret to being divulged.

Yngve Holen: Exactly. It’s just a feeling or the…

Audrey Tang: The atmosphere of working.

Yngve Holen: That’s nice. [laughs] Can read it on for a long time. It’s cool. What is an Easter egg? I don’t know anything about programming. Is it…

Audrey Tang: An Easter egg in the software is a function in the software that’s not part of its specification. When our customer bought the software for Socialtext, they buy something like Slack. It’s a productivity software. Nowhere in its menu or nowhere in its product description says you can actually generate some lottery poetry.

Audrey Tang: It’s off menu. That’s what an Easter egg means. It’s also harmless because it doesn’t do anything bad to the product. It’s just unadvertised. One of the more interesting Easter eggs is that it used to be in the 1997 version of Microsoft Excel, you can actually open a flight simulator.

Audrey Tang: In Microsoft Word, you can open a pinball and so on. There’s games embedded in those productivity software that you can trigger if you know the right commands.

Yngve Holen: I see. It’s beautiful. I like it, the Socialtext Easter egg. Ken was the person who was passed away?

Audrey Tang: Ken Pier was the person who passed away. It’s my way to remember him.

Michael Connor: Minister Tang, I know that GPT-3 is considered a gold standard for machine learning right now and it’s the open AI version. When I spoke with Ross, one of the main topics of our conversation was that he had a number of other possible reference…

Audrey Tang: That’s right. It doesn’t have to be GPT-3. That was just this saying that if you want photo realism, something that is passable, like passing Turing test stuff, GPT-3 is where it’s at. For the chat log that you’re looking at right now, that’s just elementary software that anybody can run from a personal computer.

Michael Connor: A more simple approach could also yield good results for something like this.

Audrey Tang: That’s why lottery poetry, to me, makes more sense than, say, a five-page essay because for an essay to work, it has to be self-consistent. If it’s a short poetry, the consistency is in the readers’ minds.

Ross Goodwin: Hello. Can you hear me?

Audrey Tang: Yes. Hello. Greetings. Good local time.

Ross Goodwin: I really can’t…Great. Hello.

Yngve Holen: Hi. [laughs]

Ross Goodwin: Sorry, it’s early here. It just got light. Can everybody hear me? I couldn’t hear you for a second there.

Audrey Tang: I can hear you just fine.

Yngve Holen: I can hear you, too.

Ross Goodwin: Great.

Yngve Holen: Mic is muted. Oh, no.

Ross Goodwin: I’m so sorry. I just woke up. How late am I? I hope you aren’t waiting for a long time, but I apologize if you were.

Michael Connor: We were talking about the matters, Ross.

Ross Goodwin: Great. Nice to meet you all on a screen as we do everything in America these days, wherever you are.

Michael Connor: So glad you could join us, Ross. Let me give you a quick recap of where we’re up to with things, OK?

Ross Goodwin: Please, yeah.

Michael Connor: Yngve and Minister Tang are in the midst of their Seven on Seven collaboration, where we pair artists and technologists to make something new, as you know. Conversation has been a big theme of their collaboration and also poetry. Let’s say that those are two things that have been talked about a lot because they relate to both of their practice in different ways.

Michael Connor: Along those lines, just to give you a bit of background, we have talked about a couple of interesting concepts that might relate to a project, ultimately. One is the idea of lottery poetry, which is a randomized poem that tells a fortune in Taiwan, or in a kind of Buddhist or Taoist tradition. That’s something that was maybe one point of inspiration.

Michael Connor: We’ve also been talking about trying to meet in virtual space through the XRSpace headset.

Ross Goodwin: That’s great.

Michael Connor: There’s been some idea of virtualizing characters. It’s been a theme of the conversation so far.

Michael Connor: In relation to both those things, the idea of trying to synthesize one or more of us through text corpuses has become an idea we want to explore more. That’s where I reached out to you, and sent you some of Minister Tangs texts to start with.

Michael Connor: What we want to do with that is something we should discuss. Maybe at this point, we should weave to the side questions about the technical process that we would use to achieve difference. Maybe just talk a little about what we want to achieve with this and what you think some possibilities might be. You had yesterday really to get on board with understanding the corpora.

Ross Goodwin: I have a pretty good sense of it now. Sorry, go ahead.

Michael Connor: I guess we want to explore either generating texts in the style of this corpus or even potentially having conversational entities that you could interact with.

Ross Goodwin: There’s a lot of interesting possibilities in that arena. I guess now that I have a better idea of the media that the output’s going to exist in, can you be more specific about the XR’s headset thing that you mentioned?

Ross Goodwin: That was mostly because of the corpus. Is it you’re using that as an example of something, a place this could go or…?

Michael Connor: It’s the example at this point, but it’s something that…

Ross Goodwin: Got it.

Michael Connor: We all have the XRSpace headset now.

Ross Goodwin: What’s the venue and the intended audience for this? Is it just worldwide on the Internet? Is it a specific location?

Michael Connor: We’re going to be recording a conversation amongst the three of us. In the conversation, we will demonstrate some sketches or ideas potentially towards a larger project.

Michael Connor: This wouldn’t exist as a live piece of software for people to interact with online at this point. It might develop into that in the future as we talked about.

Michael Connor: What we’re interested in is something that we can use as a sketch or demo of an idea potentially, even if it’s like to say we tried this and it didn’t work out, we would just want to give an example through it.

Ross Goodwin: You mentioned different entities. Is that the desired direction here, that it’s like we’re showing…I don’t know. I really like the idea of working with someone who’s alive in order to represent different voices that they might write with or different types of deconstructions of a person’s writing.

Ross Goodwin: When you’re dealing with an individual, it’s quite different than dealing with a group of people, let’s say, who are all writing together or who are all writing separate work. Documents that are studied in the field I work in, I suppose, to the extent that it’s like a unified field.

Ross Goodwin: We don’t think about the fact that like Wikipedia, which is what GPT-3 is mostly trained on or the Internet as a whole is not an individually authored thing. When you reduce the number of authors, quantitatively, you end up with an interesting opportunity to…A lot is said about the way that crowds can speak and a lot of work focuses on crowds in different ways.

Ross Goodwin: There’s a lot of visual paradigms and text conversational design paradigms that have to do with speaking to an archive. If you flip that on its head in this case, which is probably the best way to go because you have relatively…Even Noam Chomsky who’s the most published author in English, you really can’t train a neural net with just his work.

Ross Goodwin: Neural net as big as GPT-3 requires the work of millions of human beings. I guess the thing is that I would love to think about how to elevate.

Ross Goodwin: Have you seen the movie “Inside Out,” or is that a popular movie where you are, with different voices inside their heads?

Audrey Tang: Of course. I refer to that movie all the time when I explain the humor over rumor strategy of disinformation fighting.

Ross Goodwin: This is just an example. I haven’t actually seen it. I’m just familiar with the overall concept of the film. I guess if the idea is to associate the individual with influences, that could be really interesting.

Ross Goodwin: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the cognitive science of parallels of just the type of deep learning stuff that’s happening right now. It’s very interesting to consider the ways in which we as individuals, we’re certainly more complicated than GPT-3.

Ross Goodwin: The question that I asked the folks I know at open AI is what about GPT-300? What about GPT-3000? At what point does it become an entity that you’re talking with on an equal footing?

Ross Goodwin: The design that reaches toward that reverence of the model or the thing that’s speaking can be a little bit treacherous when we’re dealing with one person’s voice. What I would say is that there’s some interesting routes in terms of visualizing data that have to do with isolating influences and bodies of work.

Ross Goodwin: Think about if GPT-3 in that style of model is like a tree and, at the top of the tree, you have all the work on Wikipedia and the Internet that filters down into GPT-3 or whatever. I’m using GPT-3 as an example. If you have one person’s work around them or this corpus, for example, of influences.

Ross Goodwin: I would like to do something like clustering on it to identify labels within the subject, within the corpus, prior to doing topic-based generativity in a particular mold that’s in the spirit.

Ross Goodwin: I guess the question is whether we could condense or expand this work. Are we trying to remix? Are we trying to create an alternate version of it? Or, are we trying to expand it?

Ross Goodwin: The goal, obviously, isn’t just to create a walking, talking humanoid robot of any kind. It’s like what’s the design vision beyond…I’m sorry, it’s very early and I’m still brewing coffee.

Ross Goodwin: Go ahead. Interject. Jump in.

Michael Connor: What you’re saying is synthesizing a textual entity through machine learning is limited because the entity is really being driven more by Wikipedia than by the fine-tuned data of, for example, Minister Tang. Is that what you’re saying?

Ross Goodwin: Yeah.

Michael Connor: Is that different when you do a…

Ross Goodwin: I apologize for going too deep about it. I was trying to stay on the surface, but it’s hard.

Michael Connor: Is it an advantage in that case?

Ross Goodwin: Do you all mind I brew coffee while we’re talking? I really need some coffee.

Michael Connor: Please. Go for it. We all want you to have coffee.

Ross Goodwin: I hope you don’t mind. It’s going to leave me a lot more coherent.

Michael Connor: Go ahead and brew while I ask questions. The problem is that when you use machine learning or GPT-3 or whatever, you’re bringing in all these other voices. They might be voices that are actually really inappropriate.

Ross Goodwin: Exactly. It’s like if you’re using GPT-3, then you’re putting a big Elon Musk stamp on the project, essentially.

Michael Connor: Is that problem less if you use something more simple? You mentioned Markov chains in our previous conversation.

Ross Goodwin: It means much less empirically. I would say like LSTMs, BERT is associated with Google. The truth is that there’s versions of it on GitHub that are not…GPT-3 is brand name ones. It’s all marketing.

Ross Goodwin: What you’re really looking for, part of what I was telling Michael is that part of the marketing of these models, these big models that are being sold to business interests is like, “Oh, we’re not really going to give you a name or technology, we just hope that our name becomes like the Kleenex.” It’s really annoying actually. That’s what’s happening.

Audrey Tang: Just before you joined, Ross, I was just sharing my first project with the character level RNN, and that was like five years ago, to mourn my coworker in my previous job, Socialtext. All I did is to put all the IRC logs of us working together.

Audrey Tang: On the second link is an Easter egg that I put in the product. If you keep refreshing that endpoint, you will see an endless stream of IRC conversations modeled loosely after the actual IRC conversations we had with Ken.

Audrey Tang: I took all the IRC logs and then focused the character level RNN only on the parts of Ken’s speaking and the surroundings, the contexts that prompt Ken Pier to speak.

Audrey Tang: You see occasionally my handle at the other co-workers, but the focus is on Ken and also Mac Ken, which is the nickname Ken used when he used a Mac. It doesn’t have any knowledge of Wikipedia or anything like that because it’s a small corpus and it only has character level linkage.

Audrey Tang: Still, the timestamps and all generated is quite convincingly IRC. That’s the kind of self-sufficient model with five years old technology now that we can reliably get was just to stay at corpus.

Audrey Tang: I was just telling my Michael that if you don’t want to bring in GPT-3 or BERT, that’s entirely fine. We can use even our preparatory conversations as a small corpus and still generate quite coherent stuff.

Ross Goodwin: That’s great. I love AI and working with AI interest in these tech companies. I have a lot of friends in tech now. It’s not that I have an antagonistic relationship with them in any sense. It’s more that I like actually working under the umbrella of computational creative writing more than I like working under the umbrella of artificial intelligence.

Ross Goodwin: When I can just call it computational creative writing and not AI, the audience doesn’t have expectations that are unrealistic for like, “It’s a walking, talking person and it serves you drinks” or whatever. That’s like the Boston Dynamics vision. Go ahead.

Michael Connor: Go ahead, Yngve.

Yngve Holen: The beginning of this conversation was that we were talking about the magazine I was doing which is called ETOPS, which is like a Q&A anonymized magazine on one topic. Audrey said something that we could just generate into magazine and very quickly fill out these pages.

Yngve Holen: My interest was in her job description. It’s so accurate and so distilled, and not a cumulative…which isn’t somehow also like what ETOPS is. It’s actually more going a place, meeting the person, having the conversation and just…

Ross Goodwin: Got it.

Yngve Holen: …distilling it down so you get the essence, anonymizing only because certain interview objects that you will have will have been talking about…The last one was about neuroscience, and then you talk about a famous person at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. The interview you got would be the same interview that he would have 20 times already.

Ross Goodwin: That’s an interesting idea for a XR thing we could try. Now that I have a better sense of this being a conversation-driven thing, primarily, as the concept, because that’s sort of what I was looking for, was “OK, we’re trying to represent a conversation.”

Ross Goodwin: I think what’s required here is more deconstruction, perhaps. That’s just an idea I have, sort of in the way you might present…I’m digressing too much, but what I guess I was going to say is that this…Do you watch the show “Rick and Morty”?

Ross Goodwin: They do a scene that could be represented interestingly…You know the unity episode, where Rick is walking down the street talking to everyone, and it’s all the same person?

Ross Goodwin: What if it was a group augmented reality experience where…And this is another idea. I really don’t like headsets when you don’t have to use them. I think that we’re overly reliant on screens, and especially during COVID. If the plan is to make this on the Internet, then obviously, it has to be on a screen.

Ross Goodwin: If the plan is to make this post-COVID in order to play so people can gather…I went to this beautiful skeleton of a performance once in Amsterdam that I think – it was a performance. It was just more music-based and dance-based than conversation-based. Everyone had these headphones that were all synced up.

Ross Goodwin: I’ve always wanted to do something with that media, and I think it could be done remotely or in person, where everyone wears headphones and there’s a synced set of conversations where they’re paired in spread algorithm.

Ross Goodwin: There’s a third person in each conversation that is the individual that we’re working with, his writing or his conversation. Basically, there could be a third voice in the conversation. Then I think how the voice works can be sort of opaque.

Ross Goodwin: Really, the approach that I would use, I’ll talk about with Michael if you didn’t hear about it, something called Tf-IDF summarization scoring. I would literally use sentences verbatim, and insert them in smart ways into the conversations, but make the AI part of it for conversation pairings.

Ross Goodwin: We can do some generativity on top of that if there’s a desire to have poetry or something original that is said. But grounding it in quotes is going to be important to represent the individual well in this case.

Ross Goodwin: What I don’t want is for the AI to be kind of an expressive system that doesn’t represent the seriousness of the person behind the words initially. It’s not about necessarily that they’re serious words all the time. It’s more about the AI can misrepresent tone very easily.

Michael Connor: I think what you said just now, Ross, is that it’s possible to do a slightly hybrid model where it’s largely remixed. But then maybe…

Michael Connor: Oh, are you OK? Come here.

Ross Goodwin: Is this your child? Oh, my gosh.

Michael Connor: Yeah, so I think that a hybrid approach could be good. Maybe we have to make some decisions about the format that this would occupy from the side.

Michael Connor: Maybe that’s a good point to let you go and make coffee, and get ready for your call with Germany. We can pick up the conversation with just a quick…

Ross Goodwin: There’s 10 minutes. We already had a prep for it yesterday, so I can keep talking for another five, just so I have little more direction here.

Michael Connor: Do we want to delve into this more, Ross, or do we want to quickly…

Ross Goodwin: Yeah, I could also drop off if you want to settle the question of what the media is. The venue and the audience, I think is a really important question. This is physical versus virtual, it’s totally different.

Audrey Tang: I’m sure that XRSpace will be happy just make this a permanent exhibit because they will get more users. Of course, few people in the world currently owns a XRSpace headset, so it will a really privileged exhibition. We’re looking to present the primary exhibition as something that could be easily projected in places, that is to say probably as a film-ish thing.

Ross Goodwin: That’s amazing.

Audrey Tang: I’m telling what I heard from Yngve last time.

Ross Goodwin: One idea I’ve been throwing around a lot is the idea of a movie that’s very long or possibly never-ending that anyone can be in if they just log onto a website and wait in line. It would be funny if you could do a version of that as a conversation with the minister.

Michael Connor: Sorry, what were you going to say?

Audrey Tang: A 10 years’ conversations, like a movie that’s exactly 10 years long.

Ross Goodwin: Yeah, some magical realist amount of time. I’ve wanted to do something like that for a long time. That’d be very cool.

Michael Connor: I did like the idea that someone had a few minutes ago of it being this conversation replicated endlessly.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. We just take 10 years to prepare for 7x7.

Yngve Holen: That’s a nice way of describing it. I like that. I also like the format of the lottery poetry because it’s like in blocks, right? You have these lines, it’s ready, the next one is ready, the next one is ready. It continues, it’s cumulative, but not in the…just open version it’s like…

Yngve Holen: It goes more into what you talked about, minting something in the digital realm. How do you fix something? Or, like a building block that you can’t take away. That’s what I like about the lottery ticket format, poetry.

Audrey Tang: It’s stochastic.

Ross Goodwin: Yeah. The way I talked about doing this from before, the tech is pretty simple. There was a question we reached. The first question is, “Is it in real time?” That adds complexity. The simplest way to do it is to have a system by which people are uploading clips, and then they construct it, but that’s less interesting. You lose some glitz by losing a real-time aspect. “Is it real time?” is one question.

Ross Goodwin: The next question is now much context does each speaker get? That was where I got stuck on this before. In the Web interface that everyone sees, which maybe is different for every individual person, which is pretty easy to do, there’s a bunch of unique URLs. That’s the simplest way to do it. You could have a actual Web app of some kind as well with a framework. That takes a little longer.

Ross Goodwin: The main thing is that everyone gets their own version of the site, essentially, or everyone gets the same version. Then everyone gets the version, and then Oscar Sharp and I, when we discussed it, we’re like it sort of changes the dynamic, because then everyone can see the script in real time as it goes by.

Ross Goodwin: It’s just different if you only see your lines versus you see everyone’s lines, that’s what I’m saying, or something in between. Then the question also is how far into the future do you get? Are you getting the whole script in a window, are you getting the next page, are you getting the next few lines, the next few words?

Ross Goodwin: It’s a question of how much text to give to the person. It’s a pretty simple UX kind of…

Michael Connor: Which person do you mean?

Ross Goodwin: …thing. The user, the person who’s going to be experience this installation or whomever, the audience.

Michael Connor: Right, but it might be that the script is recited by some sort of entity. It might not be…

Ross Goodwin: It’s a performance?

Michael Connor: Maybe a bot performance.

Ross Goodwin: If it’s a performance, then it’s a performance. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Back in the…

Michael Connor: Or text-to-speech.

Audrey Tang: …Easter egg, I generated 20 to 30 lines of chat log at a time precisely because that seems like the right amount of closure for each random lottery. It’s around the right number of lines to fit something on the page too.

Audrey Tang: I would be happy if, as a window in time, just like with the time stamps, that’s actually quite easy because it implicitly takes you back. We can also use the same technique, except it takes us forward to the future. You get to see a future version of Audrey-Yngve talking endlessly about possible topics to explore on 7x7 for the next 49 years or something like that.

Audrey Tang: Each time you roll the dice, you see a snippet into that window. You can, of course, also prime it with your own theme and so on. I would suggest it’s very limited. Just contribute one sentence into the conversation between me and Yngve, which we will treat as if you have introduced a conversation topic. Then we have some conversation around that slash poetry.

Ross Goodwin: That makes a lot of sense. If it’s performance-based, the vision is yours, essentially. I’m here to assist in whatever capacity. It’s hard to say.

Ross Goodwin: I’m running into roadblock in my own work, I have to be honest, at certain points these days, because the technology is moving so fast now with respect to language modeling that, as soon as one thing arrives, it’s almost like the next thing is already being talked about, well in advance of the first thing being available. That happens over and over again.

Ross Goodwin: We’re past peak AI in a way this time. That’s really kind of startling. I don’t know. These are interesting things to think about with respect to interface. I’m sorry if I’m getting too abstract here.

Michael Connor: Yngve has something to say.

Ross Goodwin: I’ll stay calm. [laughs]

Yngve Holen: I think we should get more abstract actually. I think we’re almost too much on the format at the moment. I come from a very classical perspective. I work with very, very slow medium. I work with glass and materials, high-tech stuff.

Ross Goodwin: Yeah, very slow.

Yngve Holen: I don’t know if we’re even going to be on the panel, me and Audrey, talking about the project. I think it’s almost going to be a prerecorded thing. I also don’t think it needs to be a finished project. Just going back to the poem, what interests me with the poem that was the starting point from that is that it’s basically a job description as a poem.

Yngve Holen: It’s like a misuse of format in order to say something very precise but also keep it open, which is very special. This printed, it could exist…basically the alphabet together is the materiality. Whether it’s a performance or, in one year, a printer prints it out or somebody recites it, that’s up to time.

Yngve Holen: What I understand as format now or talking to Audrey is that in order to achieve a result, we have to decide a format in terms of how many lines or how big the thing is going to be. Is it a A4 page? Is it three lines or four lines, the structure of the things. Sorry if I use the wrong words here.

Ross Goodwin: For me, at this point, it’s a question of where the boundaries are on this knowledge graph. The way to think about working with a language model is that you’re never just working with a language model. It’s always embedded in a system of some kind, even if it’s really simple.

Ross Goodwin: A chatbot, for example, that’s not just a language model. It’s also a UI. It’s got a visual element, probably, and literally just audio or whatever. If the deliverable is a document, that’s very simple if it’s a job description. My question as an artist is what’s the presentation for the job description in that case that you imagine.

Yngve Holen: I don’t know yet. [laughs]

Ross Goodwin: You don’t know yet. That’s what we’re discussing.

Ross Goodwin: Do you have a vision for that? Can you speak to that at all?

Audrey Tang: Actually, I announced my job description as a tweet. It’s set in this Front Desk sans font. That’s the canonical presentation form for my job description.

Yngve Holen: OK. [laughs]

Michael Connor: Yngve, go ahead. What were you going to say?

Yngve Holen: I understand more and more now that different corporations creating AI, language tool, whatever you want to call it. What I don’t want to is we create something which is making Audrey Tang just scanning Wikipedia, which is super boring. It needs to be the most pure, crystal form of Audrey Tang. We need to have a conversation which is real, like the poem is real. It needs to come from a real place.

Ross Goodwin: What I would say is, if you wanted to be really faithful, then it’s a question of whether the ideas represent…Work involving artificial intelligence can say a lot of different things. By default, it always says something about artificial intelligence.

Ross Goodwin: My question is, is your vision here AI scary or is it AI good? I’m not making a value judgment. I’m asking you, by default, what’s the attitude about AI? Is it positive and playful or is it…

Audrey Tang: My default attitude is assistive intelligence.

Ross Goodwin: Assisted intelligence, OK. That makes sense.

Audrey Tang: In the sense that we’re all blind and deaf in some regards when it comes to understanding a holistic topic. AIs are assistive just as assistive technologies are. Basically, it restores us to a shared reality for collaborative learning about human experience, through a plurality, on the Internet of beings. That’s what I mean by assistive intelligence. It’s also in my job description.

Ross Goodwin: I really like that ontology. That’s a nice way of encapsulating it that’s refreshing compared to what I hear usually. Engineers have a hard time encapsulating what they’re working on sometimes, even the smartest ones. I would agree with that.

Ross Goodwin: The other way I’ve heard it said or the buttress to that I’ve heard from people more inside the industry is every augmentation is also an amputation. That’s the caveat to that worldview. You’re going, “OK, if we’re going to go trans-human, then where do we stop cutting things off?” If it’s true that…

Audrey Tang: I see where you’re coming from. To me, assistive brings, with a default, like when you’re caring for someone with different disabilities. The idea is to restore human dignity, not to take away their agency from them.

Audrey Tang: The two important thing about AI, which is value alignment and accountability, goes with this assistive objective. That’s what you would expect to assistive person to a disabled person. They need to be value-aligned to them, to their agency. Also, there needs to be accountability for the decisions made on behalf of that person.

Audrey Tang: I think assistive captures the twin aspects of accountability and value alignment, for me, when it comes to AI.

Ross Goodwin: Absolutely. I always point to the example that the typewriter was originally invented as an assistive device. A lot of my work, camera stuff, has been called assistive in many ways because it’s assistive devices that are for everyone in a way.

Ross Goodwin: That’s definitely a really cool worldview on technology. I think a lot of people are waking up to that worldview, at least most of the reality, if not the whole reality. Humans have always used tools. It’s a really old story.

Ross Goodwin: Tool-making is what separates us from monkeys in a way, or whatever our primate ancestors. It’s a blurry line if you look at the science. My dad’s a paleontologist, so he knows a lot more about it than me. I think that technology’s always been embedded in our species.

Ross Goodwin: The more woke we are to that, at least the less likely we are to be harming each other with our technology and our pursuit of it. If we’re aware of what it is as a societal addiction to doing things better and better and better, in certain contexts like AI represent very dark, old urges in the aggregate.

Ross Goodwin: It’s like this idea that, “I want to be lazy. I want to have a robot do all my work for me.” Really, we have to be more collaborators with our tool systems in the end, no matter what.

Michael Connor: Ross, can I say something here?

Ross Goodwin: Yeah, go ahead. I have to go in second. I’ll let you all talk. If you have one more, if you have anything else, tell me. I’ve got to go in five minutes.

Michael Connor: The question of condensation of a less corpus corpus seemed like a crucial issue. I know that in Yngve’s work, the accumulation is less important than the distilling of something. I think a lot of machine learning, because of this training aspect…I’m just drawing out this dynamic, but I can’t finish my thought for some reason.

Ross Goodwin: That’s all right. My coffee still is not finished. It took me five minutes to press the button.

Michael Connor: We have Taipei… I know in Taipei, but where are you again, Minister Tang – in Taiwan, I mean?

Audrey Tang: I’m in Taoyuan at the moment, at a social innovation summit, and, interestingly, using 5G connection at the moment because the WiFi in hotel, I don’t have the password, but that’s fine. 5G is as good as fiber optics.

Ross Goodwin: I was going to say, if you’re on a data connection, that’s really crazy. Yeah, wow.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we have unlimited data plans. Actually, anywhere in Taiwan, even on top of Taiwan 4,000 meters high almost, you have 10 megabits per second guaranteed as a human right for unlimited data, like US$16 a month. Otherwise, it’s my fault, personally.

Ross Goodwin: I’ve never been. My close friend from MIT, his mother is Taiwanese, and he goes a couple times a year to visit her family and his family there. I’ve never been. I’ve always wanted to go with him. One of our friends who has a little more money than me does go with him to Asia sometimes.

Ross Goodwin: I’ve only been able to go a few times, but the trips I’ve gone on with him so far just to Korea. That’s it recently. I went to the Philippines a very long time ago. I’ve wanted to go, come back to somewhere on the continent. I’ve heard a lot of amazing things about Taiwan from my friend Dan, who is a close friend from college.

Michael Connor: Ross, we’ll say good-bye and thank you. We’ll send some further notes. I’ll send a recap after we finish. Good day.

Ross Goodwin: Thank you.

Michael Connor: Good morning.

Audrey Tang: Bye. Live long and prosper.

Michael Connor: Quickly to round up, [laughs] Yngve, why don’t you give us a debrief on where your head is at right now. We had an interesting concept with just continuing the Seven on Seven conversation as a synthetic entity. It seemed like we pulled back from that concept. Where are we now?

Yngve Holen: Where are we now?

Michael Connor: You’ve too much to think about, but…

Yngve Holen: It sounds difficult to use those. It sounds easy and it sounds difficult. It has to be very clear.

Yngve Holen: I’m very afraid when I hear Wikipedia, and it’s just searching the Web to randomly take content. It doesn’t sound like the right thing.

Yngve Holen: Of course, I always get very alert when people start talking about formats, performances, and equipment in the exhibition spaces because it’s a very little…

Michael Connor: To be clear, we’re looking for a format for some experiments or one experiment that we can discuss and assess in a sense. It’s like a public experiment, not a finished work at this stage. I wanted to clarify. Ross, he’s obviously obsessed with the really deep structure of artificial intelligence.

Michael Connor: If you create a character using GPT-3, it’s not that you say things directly from Wikipedia. It’s more like a style that comes across.

Michael Connor: Nico, I don’t have sausage sweetie. I have cucumber. I have sweet potato, I have smoothie.

Michael Connor: She wants sausage.

Michael Connor: I would love to be able to give Ross some kind of instruction to do some experiment. Then we can see what it’s like.

Yngve Holen: Yeah, we can do that. If I could add something, I really like the format of the lottery poetry. I just don’t know. I like it. I like even how it looks.

Audrey Tang: It’s very self-contained. I really like how portable it is.

Yngve Holen: I like that you could also potentially print it out and give it somebody. I even like the fact that you have pay for the interpretation.

Audrey Tang: [laughs] A consultation, right. The first one is free.

Yngve Holen: [laughs] I could go in that direction. When I looked at it, I also liked that some had two lines and some had four lines, some had five lines, but that’s just a graphical thing which I liked, that they’re bigger and smaller and say more, say less, but it has a max or something like that.

Yngve Holen: I think that’s something. I don’t know what it should be, if it’s you speaking or we asking a question and there’s a question-answer type thing and a thing like that. The question-answer doesn’t make sense, and maybe that’s the poetry in that.

Yngve Holen: It’s hard, but I would like the sort of thing that writes these things to be trained on Audrey’s writing and not being an intelligence that then gets a question and just swipes through Wikipedia to tell you what time it is or something like that.

Audrey Tang: We can limit the answer from my current transcript corpus, which already have more than 50k, 45k-ish speeches. That’s more than what we need. If you read through all that I sent Ross, then there’s more than enough. We don’t have to consult any other external sources.

Yngve Holen: In some way, it could be like, “Oh, there’s so much. I don’t even know how to read through it.” That was first feeling when I got that link. It’s so much, I just jump in here. I remember I spoke to my studio manager, and I said, “It’s just so confusing. It’s so much information.”

Yngve Holen: I tried to send her something that she should read, but then she was reading something completely different. We talked about half an hour, reading different stuff, talking about different stuff. Maybe there’s a way to for me ask you questions.

Yngve Holen: Then again I wouldn’t want my questions or the simple questions that I wrote in May, which was just to kick start something, to go somewhere. At the moment, I wouldn’t want that to be defining the whole programming. Then it’s programmed, and a bit like, “Oh, I don’t know enough, if that’s the right way to…”

Yngve Holen: I have a lot of topics, not so many, 10, 20, something like that. I could feed them into something.

Audrey Tang: That will work. For example, if you have a input, through very simple math like the Tf-IDF Ross was just describing, we somehow decide a lottery is the main topic of your input. Then it can very simply just run a search. Then if you click the link I just pasted to you, you will list exactly this many times that I mention lottery in my public speech.

Audrey Tang: Then each of them can be seen as a kind of lottery poetry. If the machine draws one by chance, then it may or may not have anything to do with the actual topic that you’re talking about, but at least it solves the voice problem because it actually came from one of my conversations.

Yngve Holen: But it would be a copy-pasted thing. It wouldn’t be a new combination of things.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to say is that all the different times that I talk about lottery are not, of course, the same topic. In the link, I first talk about a receipt lottery, which is electronic. I talk about sandbox application which is like a lottery in reverse. If you run just a search result and combine them into a poem-ish thing, then it actually takes a index life on its own.

Audrey Tang: The challenge is how to make sure that it fits actually the poetry lottery format. The idea is that each word or each short sentence, if you click on it, actually takes you back to a word that I actually said. The link would be at word level, not at copy-paste level.

Audrey Tang: I say this with some experience because when I was 20 years old or so, I would log into the Perl chat room on a IRC on the chat space, and I wrote a bot. Whenever it sees me type river run, it would just pull randomly from Finnegans Wake a certain paragraph and to insert into the conversation.

Audrey Tang: It’s almost like poetry lottery because Joyce always has something relevant to say. It just pull random sentence out of Finnegans Wake. The corpus that you see here is roughly at the length of Finnegans Wake, actually longer. If I can do that to Joyce, I’m sure that other people can do that to me.

Yngve Holen: Sometimes in my work, topics are really banal. Topic is about the experience of flying economy class. If I could ask, could I get something out of it…

Audrey Tang: Of course. That’s the whole idea.

Yngve Holen: That would be super cool. [laughs] That would be very fun, actually.

Yngve Holen: How do we…

Audrey Tang: Guys, do you still hear me?

Yngve Holen: I still hear you. I’m just…

Audrey Tang: With no formatting whatsoever, if you just said flying economic class, and then I just do say a search for the three words, because we were saying word level links, that the raw result will be like this, which I can read out. I can say I fly out Saturday early morning, something like that, in the free economic pilot zone. Exactly. Now, it’s just 15 or 20 per class, and that’s much easier.

Audrey Tang: It’s not quite an answer to your question about flying economic class, but it’s really random sentences that somehow combines just in a freestyle way that talks about flying in the economic and the class. This kind of software, I’m sure that Ross can very easily write.

Yngve Holen: I guess the first, I fly out Saturday early morning, something like that, is copy-pasted as a whole or it’s just put together…

Audrey Tang: Currently, it’s copy-pasted as a whole. We can also decompose it so that it’s not a whole copy-paste, but rather a sentence level thing.

Yngve Holen: In some way, the project could be asking topics and using all of the writing of yours to then generate a certain point.

Audrey Tang: Just for the record, here are the three links where the three lines came from.

Yngve Holen: I see. Now I understand.

Audrey Tang: That’s just for the record.

Yngve Holen: It’s good just for me to understand it. I never spend time programming. I understand structure in different ways. [laughs] This is interesting. Cool.

Yngve Holen: Could we link this in some way to the XRSpace? Is this something that…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, we can read it out in XRSpace.

Yngve Holen: If it’s in the cinema, we could just watch…

Audrey Tang: That’s right. We can watch with a backdrop of pretty much anything. I can perform some of my answers, I guess, with my digital avatar. You can also recreate, say in your avatar, “What’s it like to fly economic class,” and that will feel quite natural like me and you having a conversation.

Yngve Holen: That could be cool. That’d be nice to have, because we are pre-recorded and then we have something that’s we have a conversation in space. It’s already visual because we recorded in XRSpace. That takes up how it looks like. We don’t have to think so much about that, except how we look like as avatars, right?

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right.

Yngve Holen: Mike Connor will present the project as a project in creation. We just have to see how we tweak it now so it feels right, feels good, and performs what we want to. Maybe it would look like the lottery poetry on that screen. Maybe it’s pass-along.

Audrey Tang: We can definitely model that.

Yngve Holen: It doesn’t need to have an engine font like that.

Yngve Holen: It could be simpler. Cool. Is Michael still here or he left?

Audrey Tang: Michael is still here.

Michael Connor: Hi.

Yngve Holen: Hi.

Michael Connor: Hi.

Yngve Holen: Are you good?

Michael Connor: Yeah. I caught just the last few couple minutes. I was just carrying around my laptop but it wasn’t plugged in so the battery died. It sounds like you have a way forward.

Yngve Holen: I guess at the moment, it’s just this one idea that because there’s so much writing poetry that the way of interweaving, it needs to happen by some artificial intelligence. The way that needs to be something…You can probably explain it better than me.

Yngve Holen: We just went through something where if I asked the question, if would ask something, how it is to fly economy class, then there’s probably ways to use a word…What do you call it? The word prompt, the word…?

Audrey Tang: The prompt. The three words as individual prompts.

Yngve Holen: That’s going through the database. Putting it together, we’d get three sentences out of it. We probably have to work in it so it looks differently because there’s just three copy-paste happening here, taking the three words together. Every word makes a sentence, I guess.

Michael Connor: Is this going to be us doing something or no?

Yngve Holen: Is it going to give us something? I don’t know. I was thinking maybe it’s possible to be in XRSpace and just look at random poetry.

Audrey Tang: Of course, because there’s a browser in XRSpace where people can browse Web pages together. If we put it together as a Web page or as a video, we can watch it together.

Yngve Holen: Just searching for a way where we could access something like this online and already use just the XRSpace as the place where we are with our avatars. That’s the visual thing that’s pre-recorded for. If it’s a project yet, I don’t know but it’s a conversation that happens. It has somehow…

Yngve Holen: Some parameters to get somewhere at that’s…

Michael Connor: I’m just trying to make sure I understand what I need to do but I can probably watch back your conversation up to this point and get my instruction from it.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. That’s the beauty of recording.

Michael Connor: Maybe we’ll let you finally get to sleep, Minister Tang.

Audrey Tang: Sleep sounds like a good idea. [laughs] We can put it like that. We really do have something here that’s very doable and also fun as well, which is always the most important part.

Audrey Tang: It can be a very simple random numbers of pictures that we just watch together in XR, which is like that three lines formatted like a lottery poetry paper. That will be something. Generating that sort of thing from the corpus is well within Ross’ capabilities.

Yngve Holen: If we were, for some reason, to find backdrops or images to illustrate it, then I would have no problem searching the Internet with AI images, but the writing should be pure.

Audrey Tang: Should be pure.

Michael Connor: Cool.

Audrey Tang: Are we good?

Yngve Holen: Do you want to meet me, Michael, to meet in that space at some point? I know you’re busy right now but we could do it like…

Michael Connor: Yeah. I’m available most of the day today. Just a little bit distracted right now, but then I’ll be OK again for a while.

Audrey Tang: I will go to sleep. We have something red — that’s not herrings — for once. Thank you for the collaboration.

Audrey Tang: I’ll sign out here. Cheers. Bye.

Yngve Holen: Take care. Bye.

Audrey Tang: Bye.