In celebration of our online exhibition, After Ginsberg by theVERSEverse, we had the pleasure of speaking with the artists, technologists and organisations who have made this ongoing literary experiment on the blockchain possible.
theVERSEverse is a pioneering poetry collective, dedicated to exploring how technology expands the bounds of language and literature. In September 2023, they launched After Ginsberg, an ongoing partnership with the Allen Ginsberg Estate that creatively combines the textural and visual legacy of the American poet with the resolutely modern world of web3.
As we present the poems that constitute phase one of After Ginsberg – collectively titled A Picture of My Mind – we discuss the project, computational poetry and how generative technologies can transform word and image without losing sight of the past.
This conversation took place on X, between Kenza Zouari from Unit London; Ana Maria Caballero, Sasha Stiles and Elisabeth Sweet from theVERSEverse; Nicholas Fahey from Fahey/Klein Gallery, LA and Charlie Middleton from fx(hash).
You can find highlights from the conversation & the full transcript below.
Highlights
“This is an opportunity to have discussions around what it means to bring poetry into this new age. That’s been so important for us, giving it new life and exploring it with new tools.”
– Elizabeth Sweet
Sasha Stiles: At its core After Ginsberg is a collaborative poetic passion project about how and what we learn from the great writers who’ve come before us, the writers whose writing stays with us and has become really essential to the human record. And it’s a project about inspiration and influence, which to me is really at the heart of a lot of the conversations we’re having right now about things like AI and Generative art and web3.
It’s a project about Ginsberg. It’s a project that involves technology, AI and web3. But really, it’s about more than that.
It’s about influence and canonical literature; how we can use technology in meaningful ways, combine it with heart and soul to engage much more deeply and intentionally with some of our favourite and most important human writers.
It was an interesting way to think about what The Beats have contributed in terms of experimental writing approaches and conceptual writing practices, and to think about how that leads us to where we are now, in terms of theVERSEverse playing with technology and experimental approaches, that challenge conventional understandings of poetry, in a way that is very much inspired by The Beats and poets like Allen Ginsberg.
Part one is called a Picture of My Mind: Poems Written by Allen Ginsberg photographs. In a nutshell, it’s a capsule collection of six AI generated poems that are really ekphrasis responses to six of Allen Ginsberg’s most iconic black and white photographs.
The text of these poems were created in response to these photographs, powered by a custom AI model that we’ve trained on Ginsberg’s own writing, specifically trained on Ginsberg’s poems, but also on the text that accompany his photographs. There’s a really beautiful collection of handwritten captions that Ginsberg applied to his photographs of his famous friends in the Beat Movement, and also folks who are part of interesting art and counterculture movements from the fifties onwards. He would photograph these folks and then he would jot down handwritten captions on the photographs as little markers of moments in time, as little corollaries to his poetic practice.
I wanted to read a few excerpts from Ginsberg’s own writing on this process, from a book called Snapshot Poetics, which is a collection of Ginsberg’s photographs that was published in the seventies. It starts with a quick overview which is helpful to shed light on the project.
“Poet, mystic, buddhist, teacher and spokesman for the Beat Generation, Ginsberg also photographed his friends and lovers over the years. He made albums of these photos with elaborate handwritten captions. His photographic memoir of The Beat Era captures intimate moments with many of the leading writers, poets, and artists who emerged in the 1950s and the 1960s.” [ from Snapshot Poetics ]
Ginsberg says: “I didn’t really get into picture taking until 1953 when I went to a Third Avenue second hand store and bought a Kodak Retina for $13 and began taking several rolls of film at a time. It was small, it fit into my breast pocket and it didn’t seem like such a big deal. We were all just fooling around, photo sessions that never lasted more than five or 10 minutes.”
“The photos that I took in 57 and 61 have the character of occasional and intermittent epiphanies for me. As a matter of habit, I carry a camera where I used to carry a notebook. I’m finding that I write less and less in my notebook now. I do my sketching and my observing with the camera instead. It’s beginning to displace writing a bit, not the poetry, but the peripatetic notes I used to take.” [ from Snapshot Poetics ]
Though we tend to think of Ginsberg very much as a poet, he really had a poetic eye as well. We want to use this project as an opportunity to look at the relationship of the aesthetic, the visual, the cerebral and the literary.
Nicholas Fahey: The important thing to realise with Ginsberg is that the camera was such an interesting observation tool in the same way that so much of his poetry was this kind of pure observation. But it’s also important to think about the levels of seriousness that he was with his photography. So much of the early stuff, the late fifties, even some of the early sixties, was really just focused on where he was, almost snapshot geography, this historical record of these people, in this time, in these places which, in retrospect, is amazing.
The project was really exciting for me, to modernise and create a new perspective of how people saw what Allen was seeing, and what Allen thought was important enough to photograph.
Sasha Stiles: It’s been such a joy working with your team and it’s been really quite impressive honestly to see how much you’ve embraced the web3 and blockchain world. You come from the traditional contemporary photography scene and it’s been really nice how at New York Photo Fair and then at Paris Photo, you’ve embraced this project. I would be interested to hear about how you experience the public asking questions and what they’re curious about when it comes to this project.
Nicholas Fahey: I’ve probably talked to hundreds of people about this project after going to two art fairs with it and have received a 1% negative reaction. I’m sure everybody can imagine that negative reaction often wasn’t anything that was really thought through, but just somebody wanting to hate on technology. But once I’m done explaining it and peeling back the layers of those onions, it’s amazing to watch people evolve within the conversation from “oh, this is an AI Allen Ginsberg project, oh no” to “wow, that’s how it should be done. This is how people should be working with AI”. For me, and I hope for everybody else involved, that means success – that’s a huge success metric for me because technology can always be used for good, and it can always be used for evil, but it’s people who are using it and establishing best practices and educating people by doing, as opposed to telling, is awesome. I feel like people are having a lot more of an open mind talking about technology and art.
Sasha Stiles: At the heart of this project was a wish to think through how technology can be used in a way that is meaningful and not necessarily being spoken about or practised right now, ideas that are outside the bounds of the obvious.
I’ve been using AI to write poetry for many years now and, for the most part, a lot of what I see is creating bots that generate poems. That’s interesting to an extent, but it’s a pretty limited use case. What we really wanted to focus on here is, not the idea of creating a Ginsberg bot or resurrecting a dead writer, which is something that we’ve heard – it’s not actually about generating new poems that are like Ginsberg’s, that’s not our intention at all. It’s about using generative tools – which can do a lot to augment our ability to read and think about a text deeply and make intertextual connections that we might not be able to make on our own – and to lean into its power as a pattern recognition system, and to think about the ways it can help us organise vast archives like Ginsberg’s which is incredibly sprawling. He’s written many poems, but also captions, and has all these photographs and so much more. It’s really a way of looking at how we can use generative tools, not just to generate new stuff, but really to go back and engage more deeply with the things that are really important, the things that we want to carry forward as exemplars of human literature and artistry.
When I’ve talked to people about the project, that’s something I like to sort of clarify. At the same time, I lean into the fact that this should be a debate; it should be something that sparks conversation and it should elicit a lot of questions and confusion. That’s the point: we want to lean into these areas that deserve a lot more unpacking and need a lot more nuanced and engaged conversations.
It’s amazing to be able to do this in collaboration with so many parties like Fahey/Klein, Ginsberg and Unit London, who are actively facilitating these conversations and debates with a broader audience outside of web3.
Elizabeth Sweet: It’s an honour to exhibit this collection with Unit London, because transacting Ginsberg’s work for the first time on blockchain is no small deal.
Kenza Zouari: This is such an incredible project and we’re honoured to be the ones to present and mint it on the blockchain.
It’s been almost three years since Unit London’s initial venture into digital art. Although our web3 branch has expanded enormously, our underlying commitment remains the same: to unify artists and collectors across communities. It’s always been extremely important for us to embrace new technologies and introduce them to our more ‘traditional’ art community, to ultimately help bridge the gap that exists between physical and digital practices.
We see technology as a tool, not as something that’s cannibalising the arts. theVERSEverse have worked with technology to illuminate Allen Ginsberg’s legacy in such a delicate and incredible way, introducing poetry to new audiences, and demonstrating what can be done when new technologies are brought into play.
For us it’s a historic move to mint these works.
As Sasha said earlier, it’s not about rewriting history, rather it’s about providing new perspectives. It’s also about nurturing the historic works and ensuring they benefit from what blockchain technology has brought us: transparency, traceability and ownership.
The way theVERSEverse has worked with a multitude of partners on this project is a beautiful image, an example of how we should all work together in the arts. In this way, the project is also about creative collaboration, how we can write and preserve new narratives together.
Charlie Middleton: This harmony between ancient practice and one which feels incredibly modern, in the case of ‘After Ginsberg’, is achieved by traversing an existing body of work from a historically significant poet whose work may only be known to those initially interested in the medium or more specifically the genre of beat poetry. By using modern generative practices, we can bring a new light to them, start new conversations and create new critical practices which engage with history, innovation, and boundary-pushing modes of creation.
Sasha Stiles: Part one of the project is really an artefact or marker of the very first phase of this ongoing ‘After Ginsberg’ project, which is going to continue over the next few years.
We’re going to continue using this foundational model that we’ve begun to train, which is essentially a language model that is being fine tuned on very curated elements of Ginsberg’s text corpus and his photography.
With Part One, we started creating the first phase of this model by bringing together a text corpus of Ginsberg’s selected poems and his handwritten photographic captions. We used those as the training material to generate and curate these first six poems.
We then gave this initial set of information to Ross to continue working on as he began to create his concept for the fx(hash) drop. He’s added to this language model, and he’s going to continue shaping it with us over time. As we continue into future phases of the project, the goal is to continue adding, in a very curated and research-oriented way, to this training data set to be used for this language model in order to continue turning it into a really comprehensive, robust and interactive resource, that can hopefully be used in lots of different ways to engage with the text and learn more about Ginsberg’s life and work.
This is the very beginning of something we’re really excited to continue experimenting with. Together we will see how this continues to change over time, as we evolve the underlying model, especially as the tools that are making these projects possible continue to advance everyday. These first two collections are going to become increasingly special as markers of where it all started.
Katie Dozier: How do you think Allen Ginsberg would feel about all of this? I personally view it as a total continuation of what the beat movement was all about.
Sasha Stiles: I actually had the great good fortune of meeting Ginsberg in person when I was a student. There was this one very formative conversation we had where he actually helped me workshop some of my poems and I still have those pieces of paper where he crossed things out, and said “this is bad” or “this is good”, “let’s do more of this.” So in many ways, I would not be here without Ginsberg. To echo what Nicholas said before, one of the reasons why we really felt this was appropriate is Ginsberg and his cohort were very interested in using technology in different ways. I remember when I went to Ginsberg’s apartment and met him, one of the things he did that shocked me was he took out a tape deck and played a cassette of a poem that he had just recorded. He was really excited to show this multimedia version of the poem. He was a wonderful performer, one of the most amazing spoken word poets around. So, being able to use technology like tape recorders and cameras was very important to his practice.
Folks in his circle like William Burroughs who famously used techniques like automated writing and cut ups, were doing a kind of early version of what we’re now doing with AI-powered generative text. Having discussed this extensively with Peter Hale from the Ginsberg Estate and others who were close to Ginsberg, I think it’s fair to say that he would be somewhat sceptical of this new technology and of the ways that we’re using AI to engage with his work. But I think he would also be very open to the experimentation, he would actively encourage us to experiment in this way. That’s what poetry is for: experimentation.
For us to come in as newer and younger poets, and push back against the conventions of what is considered canonical literature, and what are considered traditional approaches to poetry, is exactly what we’re meant to be doing.
So I hope, and I think, we’re honouring that mindset of his and proceeding in a way that is respectful of the Estate, respectful of Ginsberg and really just playing with the idea that all of us as poets are being influenced and inspired by all these different forces at all times. We’re really just continuing to do what poets have always done, with some new tools that just happened to be at our disposal right now.
Full Transcript
Elizabeth Sweet: Thank you everyone for being with us here today.Hello and welcome to the launch of After Ginsburg with Unit London. My name is Elizabeth Sweet and I’m the community manager at theVERSEverse first and on behalf of all of us at theVERSEverse, we’re thrilled to be here today with Fahey/Klein, Unit London and fx(hash), three truly incredible partners and collaborators who have made this project with the Allen Ginsberg Estate an absolutely joyful adventure.
Now, we’re happy to be joined today by Nicholas Fahey from Fahey/Klein, Kenza Zouari from Unit London and Charlie Middleton from fx(hash). And I’m really proud to be here today with our co-founder Sasha Stiles and Ana Maria Caballero will join us later. Unfortunately, Kalen will not be able to make it, but she is definitely here in spirit.
Now, before we jump into, After Ginsberg: A Picture of My Mind, the collection launching today on Unit London, I’d like to give a brief introduction on who theVERSEverse is. We are a poetry collective of poets and writers who exhibit poetry and literature as works of art, founded in November 2021 on this simple statement, poem = work of art.
We’ve had the honour of exhibiting works in galleries and festivals across the world. In May of this year, we opened a seminal exhibition in Paris called POEME OBJKT/SBJKT, which was shortlisted for The Lumen Prize. That was a major moment for us and we are so grateful to the poets and artists who contributed their work. There’s more to come with POEME OBJKT/SBJKT, so stay tuned but right now, we are thrilled to talk about the Allen Ginsberg Estate in our collaboration with them called a Picture of My Mind in a larger collection called After Ginsberg.
Working on this collaboration, and on this project, has really been kind of like a dream. I mean, it really has felt like a dream. Ginsberg’s work has been hugely influential for all of us, long before this remarkable opportunity to bring his work to blockchain.
I’d love to pass it over to Sasha Stiles to dive into the project which explores the spaces within and between Allen Ginsberg’s poetry and photographs with generative tools and blockchain.
Sasha Stiles: We have a lot to unpack with this project and I’m really excited to dive in. I’ll give an overview on how the project came to be and then dive into what the project is and how we see it continuing to unfold over time.
At its core After Ginsberg is a collaborative poetic passion project about how and what we learn from the great writers who’ve come before us, the writers whose writing stays with us and has become really essential to the human record. And it’s a project about inspiration and influence, which to me is really at the heart of a lot of the conversations we’re having right now about things like AI and Generative art and web3.
It’s a project that is also about the interplay of word and image, which of course is really near and dear to our hearts here at theVERSEverse and has also become a really important consideration when we look at a lot of the text to image tools that are coming to the forefront right now – all of which require that we move back and forth across this liminal zone of poet and visual artist, which is something that theVERSEverse has really been fascinated by for a long time.
It’s a project about Ginsberg. It’s a project that involves technology, AI and web3. But really, it’s about more than that.
It’s about influence and canonical literature; how we can use technology in meaningful ways, combine it with heart and soul to engage much more deeply and intentionally with some of our favourite and most important human writers.
Getting a bit more into the weeds, the nuts and bolts of it, I mentioned that After Ginsberg is a collaboration so I want to walk through how it came to be, and who’s involved.
None of this would have happened without the brilliant Valerie Whitacre, who, as many of you know, is part of the Tezos and the Trilotech ecosystem. She has been a very strong advocate of literature on the blockchain for a long time. I remember having numerous conversations with her about the possibility of exploring blockchain as a printing press, to explore the ways that writers could really harness a lot of these tools and protocols to do interesting new things both as writers and readers, and lovers of literature. Valerie also has a background in photography and fine arts. All these things sort of came together when she was in conversation with our friend Nicholas here from Fahey/Klein, a really wonderful photography gallery in Los Angeles that deals with a lot of Ginsberg’s historic photography. I think Valerie and Nicholas had been in conversation about this treasure trove of Ginsberg’s photography, and thought it would be really interesting to maybe throw some poetry into the mix and see what we might be able to cook up together.
So theVERSEverse has been in conversation with Fahey/Klein and the Allen Ginsburg estate over the course of this year, thinking through the ways that we might be able to honour Ginsberg’s legacy, shed more light on his photography as well as the grand scope of his work, which goes far beyond the key poems that everybody knows.
And really just use this as an opportunity to look at how collaboration and technology, and generativity might be able to help us do new things in terms of scholarship, readership, archives and preservation of important information.
When we launched the project, we came right out of the gate with a focus on generative text with our series dedicated to introducing writers and artists to AI-powered tools that would allow us to look at the ways in which natural language processing and large language models are offering us new ways to think about authorship and originality and creativity.
We really wanted to kind of unpack those possibilities and put that into conversation with the automated writing experiments of the Beat generation, which of course Ginsberg was one of the leading figureheads of, and to look at the different ways in which generativity and aleatory writing – the idea of using automation and algorithm – have actually been part of a much larger and longer literary tradition.
It was an interesting way to think about what The Beats have contributed in terms of experimental writing approaches and conceptual writing practices, and to think about how that leads us to where we are now, in terms of theVERSEverse playing with technology and experimental approaches, that challenge conventional understandings of poetry, in a way that is very much inspired by The Beats and poets like Allen Ginsberg.
With, After Ginsberg, we are offering an insider peek into our process of thinking through how we as writers continue to engage with some of the great minds and great texts that have come before us. We’re using a lot of interesting creative techniques and platforms to be able to do that.
With this project, we started by talking to one of the members of theVERSEverse, Ross Goodwin, who is an incredible data poet at the forefront of AI literature. He has a long standing interest in connecting word and image, which I’ll get into a bit more later on. He’s done a bunch of interesting projects that involve portraiture, AI and text, and has done a lot of work that involves investigation of the Beat Generation, specifically, the writings of Jack Kerouac. We thought it would be really fun to put heads together with him and come up with an idea to bring all of these different elements together. That brings me to part 1 of our ongoing After Ginsberg project, which is really what we’re here to celebrate today.
Part one is called a Picture of My Mind: Poems Written by Allen Ginsberg photographs. In a nutshell, it’s a capsule collection of six AI generated poems that are really ekphrasis responses to six of Allen Ginsberg’s most iconic black and white photographs.
The text of these poems were created in response to these photographs, powered by a custom AI model that we’ve trained on Ginsberg’s own writing, specifically trained on Ginsberg’s poems, but also on the text that accompany his photographs. There’s a really beautiful collection of handwritten captions that Ginsberg applied to his photographs of his famous friends in the Beat Movement, and also folks who are part of interesting art and counterculture movements from the fifties onwards. He would photograph these folks and then he would jot down handwritten captions on the photographs as little markers of moments in time, as little corollaries to his poetic practice.
I wanted to read a few excerpts from Ginsberg’s own writing on this process, from a book called Snapshot Poetics, which is a collection of Ginsberg’s photographs that was published in the seventies. It starts with a quick overview which is helpful to shed light on the project.
“Poet, mystic, buddhist, teacher and spokesman for the Beat Generation, Ginsberg also photographed his friends and lovers over the years. He made albums of these photos with elaborate handwritten captions. His photographic memoir of The Beat Era captures intimate moments with many of the leading writers, poets, and artists who emerged in the 1950s and the 1960s.” [ from Snapshot Poetics ]
I want to just read a few of Ginsberg’s own words published as part of this collection.
So Ginsberg says: “I didn’t really get into picture taking until 1953 when I went to a Third Avenue second hand store and bought a Kodak Retina for $13 and began taking several rolls of film at a time. It was small, it fit into my breast pocket and it didn’t seem like such a big deal. We were all just fooling around, photo sessions that never lasted more than five or 10 minutes.”
“the photos that I took in 57 and 61 have the character of occasional and intermittent epiphanies for me. As a matter of habit, I carry a camera where I used to carry a notebook. I’m finding that I write less and less in my notebook now. I do my sketching and my observing with the camera instead. It’s beginning to displace writing a bit, not the poetry, but the peripatetic notes I used to take.” [ from Snapshot Poetics ]
So those are Ginsberg’s own words, pointing again towards the liminality of word and image.
Though we tend to think of Ginsberg very much as a poet, he really had a poetic eye as well. We want to use this project as an opportunity to look at the relationship of the aesthetic, the visual, the cerebral and the literary.
The last thing I want to read from this opening salvo to Snapshot Poetics is a little snippet again of Ginsberg in his own words, talking about a class that he taught with Robert Frank in the eighties and nineties. This class that he taught was called Photographic Poetics. He says, “I trace the origins of the imagistic ground of poetry that I had learned from Williams [William Carlos Williams] and its relation to photographic practice.” Then he cites Williams’ poem, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’, from which I’ll read a couple lines:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
[ William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow” from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939, edited by Christopher MacGowan ]
Ginsberg says of this poem, “it’s just like a photo in a sense, writing poems and taking pictures have been too discreet but very closely related activities, and what I, Ginsberg, teach my poetry students in terms of Snapshot Poetics these days, might also serve photography students, as you might see from the slogans that I put down for my class at Naropa [the Napa Institute]. Those words, our ordinary mind, includes eternal perceptions. Observe what’s vivid, notice what you notice, catch yourself thinking. Vividness is self selecting. First thought, best thought. Subject is known by what she sees. Others can measure their vision by what we see. Candour ends paranoia.”
All of which is to set a tone here, and shed some light on what we see as the connection between Ginsberg’s photos, poems, and his writing, to tease out some of these very nascent explorations of text to image, and the way that poems and photographs – and poems and images – really work together.
At this point, I want to hand this over to Nicholas to talk more about Ginsberg’s photographs.
Nicholas Fahey: I think you said it wonderfully early on – the important thing to realise with Ginsberg is that the camera was such an interesting observation tool in the same way that so much of his poetry was this kind of pure observation. But it’s also important to think about the levels of seriousness that he was with his photography. So much of the early stuff, the late fifties, even some of the early sixties, was really just focused on where he was, almost snapshot geography, this historical record of these people, in this time, in these places which, in retrospect, is amazing.
But, the thing that’s really interesting is later on when he started to create relationships with people like Berenice Abbott and Robert Frank. They pushed him to do it seriously and actually learn how to use the camera, and think about what he was doing with his composition, his exposure and how that could alter the image. The thing that’s really interesting about that is a lot of people talk about what a gearhead Allen became, in the sense of really getting into the tech and getting the new cameras, trying the new films, really pushing this idea of technology. I think few people talk about art and technology, and how important technology is to pushing and evolving art. Although Allen didn’t talk about that as much, it’s just so evident to me that it was this thing of finding new tools, using new tools to explore creativity and continuing a practice of observation.
The show for us was a lot of fun because in past exhibitions at the gallery we’ve represented Allen since the eighties, and they were always focused on the historical record of that time, far away, long ago. Now, it was really fun for me to reinvigorate and get excited and look at other pictures with Peter Hale at the foundation and just see things that had cultural resonance now, such as pictures of Jello Biafra, Philip Glass, and Ai Wiewei. That was really exciting for me, to modernise and create a new perspective of how people saw what Allen was seeing, and what Allen thought was important enough to photograph.
Sasha Stiles: It’s been such a joy working with your team and it’s been really quite impressive honestly to see how much you’ve embraced the web3 and blockchain world. You come from the traditional contemporary photography scene and it’s been really nice how at New York Photo Fair and then at Paris Photo, you’ve embraced this project. I would be interested to hear about how you experience the public asking questions and what they’re curious about when it comes to this project.
Nicholas Fahey: It’s hilarious explaining this to people. I’ve had to hone this theatrical pitch, so to speak, something that does credit to everybody who was involved and talks about how complex it was. But at the same time, really simple and succinct so that people can digest it, understand, and ask questions.
I’ve probably talked to hundreds of people about this project after going to two art fairs with it and have received a 1% negative reaction. I’m sure everybody can imagine that negative reaction often wasn’t anything that was really thought through, but just somebody wanting to hate on technology. But once I’m done explaining it and peeling back the layers of those onions, it’s amazing to watch people evolve within the conversation from “oh, this is an AI Allen Ginsberg project, oh no” to “wow, that’s how it should be done. This is how people should be working with AI”. For me, and I hope for everybody else involved, that means success – that’s a huge success metric for me because technology can always be used for good, and it can always be used for evil, but it’s people who are using it and establishing best practices and educating people by doing, as opposed to telling, is awesome. I feel like people are having a lot more of an open mind talking about technology and art.
Sasha Stiles: That’s really interesting to hear. I think all of us know how significant AI is across the board, not just within the worlds of art and literature, but as a seismic technology that is changing in real time how we live and communicate. It will change how we think and how we behave. It’s almost impossible to overstate how important it is. At the same time, it’s really important to understand the challenges and potential downfalls, and all the reasons why it might not be good for certain things.
At the heart of this project was a wish to think through how technology can be used in a way that is meaningful and not necessarily being spoken about or practised right now, ideas that are outside the bounds of the obvious.
I’ve been using AI to write poetry for many years now and, for the most part, a lot of what I see is creating bots that generate poems. That’s interesting to an extent, but it’s a pretty limited use case. What we really wanted to focus on here is, not the idea of creating a Ginsberg bot or resurrecting a dead writer, which is something that we’ve heard – it’s not actually about generating new poems that are like Ginsberg’s, that’s not our intention at all. It’s about using generative tools – which can do a lot to augment our ability to read and think about a text deeply and make intertextual connections that we might not be able to make on our own – and to lean into its power as a pattern recognition system, and to think about the ways it can help us organise vast archives like Ginsberg’s which is incredibly sprawling. He’s written many poems, but also captions, and has all these photographs and so much more. It’s really a way of looking at how we can use generative tools, not just to generate new stuff, but really to go back and engage more deeply with the things that are really important, the things that we want to carry forward as exemplars of human literature and artistry.
When I’ve talked to people about the project, that’s something I like to sort of clarify. At the same time, I lean into the fact that this should be a debate; it should be something that sparks conversation and it should elicit a lot of questions and confusion. That’s the point: we want to lean into these areas that deserve a lot more unpacking and need a lot more nuanced and engaged conversations.
It’s amazing to be able to do this in collaboration with so many parties like Fahey/Klein, Ginsberg and Unit London, who are actively facilitating these conversations and debates with a broader audience outside of web3.
Elizabeth Sweet: Something that everyone’s touching on that makes me remember our inaugural unveiling of the project back in September at Loom studios, New York, is watching Bob Holman – who’s an iconic New York poet and one of Ginsberg’s friends – have this evolution of thought in real time that Nicholas was describing: coming in, being really sceptical of the project, but then walking out saying how much he appreciated and wanted to learn more about it, and almost verbatim saying, “this is how you use AI with poetry”.
This is an opportunity to have discussions around what it means to bring poetry into this new age. That’s been so important for us, giving it new life and exploring it with new tools.
I would love to turn to Anna Maria who has joined us today. Anna has a very special collection called ‘Poems in the Private Domain’, which is a riff on ‘Poems in the Public Domain’, which is an fx(hash) project that she produced last year. ‘Poems in the Private Domain’ has much to do with Ginsburg, using his poetry as a form of annotation to gain a better sense of our relationship with his work.
Ana Maria Caballero: It’s really wonderful to be here and to see so many people showing up for poetry, we can’t express how incredibly special it is for us to be working with the Ginsberg Estate.
There’s a component in this ongoing collaboration that seeks to be really educational. Something we’ve been interested in, is not only transacting Ginsberg’s poems (as much as we value digital provenance and the ability to transacted poetry via web3), but bringing us closer to his work.
‘Poems in the Public Domain’ took 30 poems that are in the public domain and annotated them generatively; it’s an entirely code based project. Now, we’re working with the Ginsberg Estate to present, and generatively annotate, one of Ginsberg’s poems. This is a surprise, but it’s going to debut on Unit London’s website and will involve audience participation. We will ask visitors to the website to submit their own annotations, which will be incorporated into the poem via an algorithm. In this way, we are able to communally annotate, and engage with, this one particular poem which is really, really special.
At the end of the exhibition, we will share this via social media. It will represent a combined readership and engagement with Ginsberg’s poetry.
It’s important to note that this poem is not in the public domain. It’s very much in the private domain. It’s by special permission that we are able to annotate it using the algorithm of Poems in the Public Domain.
Elizabeth Sweet: It’s an honour to exhibit this collection with Unit London, because transacting Ginsberg’s work for the first time on blockchain is no small deal. I’m wondering how it’s been for you and your team working with us as poets.
Kenza Zouari: This is such an incredible project and we’re honoured to be the ones to present and mint it on the blockchain.
It’s been almost three years since Unit London’s initial venture into digital art. Although our web3 branch has expanded enormously, our underlying commitment remains the same: to unify artists and collectors across communities. It’s always been extremely important for us to embrace new technologies and introduce them to our more ‘traditional’ art community, to ultimately help bridge the gap that exists between physical and digital practices.
We see technology as a tool, not as something that’s cannibalising the arts. theVERSEverse have worked with technology to illuminate Allen Ginsberg’s legacy in such a delicate and incredible way, introducing poetry to new audiences, and demonstrating what can be done when new technologies are brought into play.
For us it’s a historic move to mint these works.
As Sasha said earlier, it’s not about rewriting history, rather it’s about providing new perspectives. It’s also about nurturing the historic works and ensuring they benefit from what blockchain technology has brought us: transparency, traceability and ownership.
The way theVERSEverse has worked with a multitude of partners on this project is a beautiful image, an example of how we should all work together in the arts. In this way, the project is also about creative collaboration, how we can write and preserve new narratives together.
I think theVERSEverse has done an amazing job including emerging voices, very new and young artists. This is something we value at Unit London: finding new voices, working with them and always being mindful of other narratives that exist.
This project has been very important for us, bringing more value to our community and enabling us to educate at the same time, because education has been at the core of what we’ve been doing so far.
Elizabeth Sweet: It’s been wonderful working with your team. This project has brought so many people together to explore the voice of Ginsberg, but we’re all adding our own voices through a collaboration, so thank you.
fx(hash) has been a longtime partner of theVERSEverse and we’d love to hear a bit more about the upcoming part ‘After Ginsberg’ with Ross Goodwin, launching on fx(hash).
Charlie Middleton: Thanks so much for having me on behalf of fx(hash). It’s an honour to be here among such a fantastic cohort, pushing innovation in blockchain-based modes of creation in an array of really fantastic ways.
I’m Charlie, the creative director at fx(hash). It’s been a consistent pleasure to support the work of theVERSEverse and to help bring their poetic visions to life.
At fx(hash) we get really excited about multidisciplinary uses of our platform, progressive art forms which unlock dynamic and unexpected outcomes. Part of the process of long-form generative art, is the foundational autonomy being partially handed off at the point of finalisation. There’s a possibility for outcomes which are entirely unexpected, even to the author of the work. This process – which is a necessary requirement within our paradigm – is a practice that echoes that of releasing oneself to total control found within other art forms such as painting and literary forms, and presents them in a new contemporary light. This allows new audiences to interact with and experience forms of expression that they previously weren’t exposed to.
This harmony between ancient practice and one which feels incredibly modern, in the case of ‘After Ginsberg’, is achieved by traversing an existing body of work from a historically significant poet whose work may only be known to those initially interested in the medium or more specifically the genre of beat poetry. By using modern generative practices, we can bring a new light to them, start new conversations and create new critical practices which engage with history, innovation, and boundary-pushing modes of creation.
Our goal at fx(hash) is to provide tools that equip artists with ways of achieving these kinds of ends, within the paradigm of code based generative art. This is such a fantastic opportunity to showcase the historically driven, critical and contemporary artwork.
I implore everyone to look at other works produced on fx(hash) by Ross Goodwin and other VERSEverse poets, as well as theVERSEverse – Thanks to theVERSEverse team, Ross Goodwin and Unit London. I personally believe this to be such an important project in the lineage of generative art practice.
Sasha Stiles: As Ross couldn’t be here, I have a few words I want to add, both on that project and to explain the trajectory from today’s launch to the (fx)hash launch.
The project that Ross has been working on that’s launching on (fx)hash is the next iteration of theVERSEverse’s Gentext series, which is the series we started two years ago that is all about empowering poets and artists to use text-based AI in different ways.
What we’re doing with Ross is a bit different to what we’ve done with Gentext before, coming organically out of Ross’s practice. For those who may not know, Ross is actually one of the reasons I initially got involved with AI-text. He really opened my eyes to the potential of AI for writing, and has consistently been at the forefront of this movement. Early on he did a really interesting project called ‘One The Road’, which was inspired by Kerouac on the road. For this he basically outfitted a car with an AI-powered text generator that used data from his driving to write a story in real time. This unravelled on a scroll of thermal paper as he was driving. That was a pretty seminal moment for a lot of us, who early on were keen to learn more about the possibilities for poetics and AI.
He then worked on a project called ‘word.camera’, which was incredibly influential for ‘After Ginsberg’. Word.camera is essentially a project where Ross jury-rigged a camera from different components, equipped that camera with AI-powered object recognition, and attached it to a language model. He basically created a device that allows you to use a camera to write words. So you take a photo with the camera and it uses AI to translate the image into keywords. It then translates those keywords into prompts and the prompts become a piece of text.
You can probably understand why that is so relevant to our project that is all about the connection between Ginsberg’s photographic portraiture and his poetry. Ross is kind of riffing on various projects, including word.camera and other activations that he’s done over the years, to create something new for fx(hash), which I think is really going to be something special. So stay tuned for that.
There’s another important project that Ross was involved in called ‘Poem Portraits’, which was spearheaded by the amazing artist and set designer Es Devlin. This was back in 2018 and came out of Google Arts and Culture. Ross helped build this machine that used a combination of a portrait and a single keyword to generate unique poems. This became another pivotal moment in the history of generative poetry. So Ross is really an iconic writer, a seminal writer in this movement and I am really proud and honoured to call him a friend, and to know he’s part of theVERSEverse.
His launch next week is a long-form collection. We want people to have fun with it, mint lots of them if you can and want to, and really have fun playing with what it brings to the table, which is something very new within the ecosystem.
Part One of the project that we’re launching today, the capsule collection of the 6 limited edition poems, is really an artefact or marker of the very first phase of this ongoing ‘After Ginsberg’ project, which is going to continue over the next few years in partnership with the Ginsberg Estate, Fahey/Klein, and other cultural institutions and universities.
We’re going to continue using this foundational model that we’ve begun to train, which is essentially a language model that is being fine tuned on very curated elements of Ginsberg’s text corpus and his photography.
With Part One, we started creating the first phase of this model by bringing together a text corpus of Ginsberg’s selected poems and his handwritten photographic captions. We used those as the training material to generate and curate these first six poems.
We then gave this initial set of information to Ross to continue working on as he began to create his concept for the fx(hash) drop. He’s added to this language model, and he’s going to continue shaping it with us over time. As we continue into future phases of the project, the goal is to continue adding, in a very curated and research-oriented way, to this training data set to be used for this language model in order to continue turning it into a really comprehensive, robust and interactive resource, that can hopefully be used in lots of different ways to engage with the text and learn more about Ginsberg’s life and work. We want it to be an educational resource.
This is the very beginning of something we’re really excited to continue experimenting with. Together we will see how this continues to change over time, as we evolve the underlying model, especially as the tools that are making these projects possible continue to advance everyday. These first two collections are going to become increasingly special as markers of where it all started.
I also want to mention that we have a very special edition of The Tickle coming out in December, featuring crypto poets from the community celebrating Allen Ginsberg!
Before we wrap up Kenza, I’d love to know if there’s anything else that you’d like to add about the exhibition, which is now live on Unit London’s website.
Kenza Zouari: Well, it was a pleasure, first of all, hosting the space and listening to everyone, and it’s been an honour to work with everyone included in this project. You can now mint the works on our website, and become an owner of a beautiful piece of history.
Ana Maria Caballero: I wanted to add something: I think web3 definitely has a documentation issue. It’s moving so fast that you don’t always know what’s getting written about. So, I want to elevate the fact that the Unit London team has worked so hard to create a beautiful home on the internet for this collection. So, even if you’re not minting today, I encourage you to visit Unit London’s website, because they’ve gathered everything we sent them into one beautiful cohesive hole, and I’m so happy it’s going to live there and that we will always be able to ‘flip the page’ back, so to speak, and see what ‘After Ginsberg’ looked like when it began.
Thank you all so much, this is a dream!
We’re going to take some questions now.
Katie Dozier: Hi, everybody. I’m really excited about this project with the verseVERSEverse, and I’m a huge Allen Ginsberg and the Beats fan. I probably wouldn’t be a poet without them. So I have a fun question: how do you think Allen Ginsberg would feel about all of this? I personally view it as a total continuation of what the beat movement was all about.
Sasha Stiles: Thanks Katie. We’re all such huge fans as well, I actually had the great good fortune of meeting Ginsberg in person when I was a student and beginning to figure out how to be a writer. I would not be a poet if it were not for that. There was this one very formative conversation we had where he actually helped me workshop some of my poems and I still have those pieces of paper where he crossed things out, and said “this is bad” or “this is good”, “let’s do more of this.” So in many ways, I would not be here without Ginsberg. To echo what Nicholas said before, one of the reasons why we really felt this was appropriate is Ginsberg and his cohort were very interested in using technology in different ways. I remember when I went to Ginsberg’s apartment and met him, one of the things he did that shocked me was he took out a tape deck and played a cassette of a poem that he had just recorded. He was really excited to show this multimedia version of the poem. He was a wonderful performer, one of the most amazing spoken word poets around. So, being able to use technology like tape recorders and cameras was very important to his practice.
Folks in his circle like William Burroughs who famously used techniques like automated writing and cut ups, were doing a kind of early version of what we’re now doing with AI-powered generative text. Having discussed this extensively with Peter Hale from the Ginsberg Estate and others who were close to Ginsberg, I think it’s fair to say that he would be somewhat sceptical of this new technology and of the ways that we’re using AI to engage with his work. But I think he would also be, and this is what Peter said, he would be very open to the experimentation, he would actively encourage us to experiment in this way. That’s what poetry is for: experimentation.
For us to come in as newer and younger poets, and push back against the conventions of what is considered canonical literature, and what are considered traditional approaches to poetry, is exactly what we’re meant to be doing.
So I hope, and I think, we’re honouring that mindset of his and proceeding in a way that is respectful of the Estate, respectful of Ginsberg and really just plays with the idea that all of us as poets are being influenced and inspired by all these different forces at all times. We’re really just continuing to do what poets have always done, with some new tools that just happened to be at our disposal right now.
Sasha Stiles: Thank you so much for the question, Katie. I’d love to move to TheDigitalCoy to ask a question.
TheDigitalCoy: Hi everyone. This is wonderful, I love that you’re bringing poetry to the forefront of contemporary art. My question was actually about if there was a chance you might bring this show on a tour to different cities?
Ana Maria Caballero: We’re actually in the process of applying for and hopefully acquiring in order to do precisely that. We’re looking to team up with the right partners, both educational and historic – from galleries to bookstores – where we could share works that we create in places that are really meaningful to the history of Alan Ginsberg and poets today.
It’s worth noting that the pieces have already been on somewhat of a world tour with Fahey/Klein in LA, New York [for New York Photo Fair] and Paris [for Paris Photo].
DEVSPOETICVS: Thank you very much for the excellent space. I would like to hear more details about the technical and generative aspect of this project. I would love it if you could recommend something for me to read.
Sasha Stiles: That’s a great question. First of all, the website at Unit London has some information on this. There’s a curatorial essay we’ve written as an overview of the project that gets into this a little bit. But in a nutshell, the text of these 6 curated poems were created using a technique that’s inspired by what our friend Ross did with word.camera. It also takes a cue from things that we’ve done at theVERSEverse, first with our Versa project and our Gentext project, and some of the work that I’ve been doing with personal AI and curated data sets over the years.
We began with a very curated training data set. It actually started with just 400 handwritten captions of Ginsberg’s own words from 400 of his iconic photographs. We pulled those from historic resources and collated them into a file. We then broke them down, and prepared them as training material for the very first iteration of this project. We wanted to see what would happen if we used keyword object recognition with AI to go back and forth between the photos themselves, to reassemble poetic captions or poetic responses to the photographs. We then ended up evolving it by adding some of Ginsberg’s own poems to that first training model. So it really is underpinned by a generator that knows Ginsberg’s key poetry and photographic captions. We extracted keywords from the 6 photos that are at the root of these 6 poems. We used those keywords as prompts for the generator, and played around with generating poems. For the most part, the outputs have not been edited. We’ve made a couple of tiny little formatting or punctuation changes here and there. But really the only work we’ve done at this stage as human editors is to curate our favourite outputs, the ones we felt were really evocative of the photo, and the project overall. These are the poems that are represented in these final 6 artworks.
Over the course of the year, we were using open AI and GPT as it was evolving, so early experiments were done with versions of GPT3 and 3.5. We used that as our base layer, and then added our customised model as well as Ross’ brilliant word.camera to translate back and forth between the image and the word.
TheDigitalCoy: I was curious, are you using open AI’s API or something else for the language model stuff?
Sasha Stiles: I personally tend to use Open AI, so when I was doing first iterations, I was using open AI’s API. Ross is using something a little different for his fx(hash) launch, which he can probably shed more light on when we get closer to launch. But we’re going to keep looking at different models for different aspects of the project, and use it as an opportunity to explore the differences in the models; the differences in the approaches that these companies are taking, and also with regard to the interfaces they’re offering. But ultimately we’ll be using a custom built API that is calling from one, or more, of these underlying models.
This has been fantastic, thank you everyone: Fahey/Klein, Unit London, fx(hash), and of course, the Allen Ginsberg Estate, really none of us would be here without you.
So truly, thank you all so much.