“In the Garden”
Note: This collaboration is part of our “Signs of Life: Artists and Writers Respond to AI” special folio (click to see them all!). The original call for submissions is here. We asked four artists to provide images from their notebooks–that deeply human dream-draft-drift space. We then provided four prompts. This writer responded to prompt #2: “Only I can see ___” What can only you see? Is this dream? Memory? The specific angle of light today?” We chose Antonia Contro’s notebook page to shimmer alongside Beth Feldman Brandt’s poem. You can see all collaborations from this special Broadsided Responds folio at the link above and the links to the left.
Collaborators’ Q&A
What inspired you to participate in this special folio engaging AI?
Artist Antonia Contro: My art works and projects are often collaborative in concept and form, drawing in artists from a variety of disciplines. I created an art/poetry book, Theorem, in collaboration with Elizabeth Bradfield, which was published by Candor Arts as a limited fine art edition in 2019, and a trade edition by Poetry Northwest Editions in 2020. The experience of working with a poet (and Liz in particular) was impressionable. I’ve wanted to submit an artwork to Broadsided for a long time and was excited to submit an image/page from one of my art notebooks that addresses the provocative and timely subject of AI.
Writer Beth Feldman Brandt: I took the opportunity to write the anti-AI poem. It feels like AI keeps butting into my business where it has no business being. AI can never have the true emotion or empathy that propels authentic creativity, or, when I last checked, grow a summer tomato.
What role does AI play in your creative life? Your pragmatic life?
Artist Antonia Contro: AI floats in an ever present and liminal space in my pragmatic daily life (interpreting complex medical reports into layman’s language, gathering factual information in nanosecond time, exploring subject-based issues, etc.). Relative to my creative life, I use it minimally—mainly to research ideas, materials, opportunities.
Writer Beth Feldman Brandt: Creative life: None. Pragmatic life: I have an upside-down/inside-out compass for my sense of direction so I appreciate a good GPS.
We asked you to choose a page from your notebook for this folio. Why this page? What is your relationship to notebooks as an artist?
Artist Antonia Contro: I chose this page because in an abstract and not overly representational way it suggested code or large language model mapping (new territory), and it is visually rich. Notebooks are foundational in my practice. I am compelled by turning one page to work on the next, having many works related by both theme and physical connection to each other. The art/works in my notebooks are, in total, visual stories that the viewer can parse and pace at/in their own time.
We offered prompts for this folio—what surprised you as you worked on the poem you sent us? Do you often use prompts in your writing practice?
Writer Beth Feldman Brandt: Antonia’s image conjured up an aerial view of my neighborhood with its side-by-side, attached houses, each holding stories and secrets that are undiscoverable. (AI is telling me that’s not really a word but it is if I say it is.)
I am not the gardener in my house although I appreciate the harvest. As I wrote, I uncovered the sensory memories that live in my body — the singular scent of a tomato vine, the muted pop as it releases from the vine, the flood of taste. Things AI can research and (maybe) report but not feel.
I often work with a text or a theme which is one big prompt with lots of side alleys to investigate – a gazillion-page text of herbal remedies from 1633 was the spark for “Sage”.
What did you think a writer would pick up on from your art? Does the response make you see the page differently?
Artist Antonia Contro: I hope that the writers were motivated by the visual and sensorial qualities above all; also the conceptual proposition.
When you consider the full folio of work from this special feature, what questions, observations, or connections arise for you?
Artist Antonia Contro: I need to study all the works included more than I’ve been able to do to date to offer a meaningful response to this question, but overall I am awed by each writer’s and artist’s depth of work, sensitivity, and dedication to the project.
Writer Beth Feldman Brandt: Every poet and artist saw something unique in the prompt. What I love most about poetry is the ability to find the universal in the very particular. There are moments in each collaboration that made me catch my breath with recognition.
Describe your ideal “Vectorization”—where, in your wildest dreams, would you most like to see this broadside posted in the world?
Artist Antonia Contro: The Maricana Library, located in St. Mark’s Square, in 1603 proclaimed the Official Library of the Republic of Venice, offering the public one of the greatest collections of classical philosophy, as well as Latin, Greek, and far eastern manuscripts.
Writer Beth Feldman Brandt: There is a big fight in a neighboring town to keep an AI data center from being built and devouring all the water and other resources. For other towns that are not so lucky to avoid the encroachment, I would devise a billboard broadside of this collaboration on the side of every AI data center.
If this Broadsided collaboration were a type of weather, what would it be?
Artist Antonia Contro: Early spring—brisk, sunny but with dramatic cloud play surrounding.
Writer Beth Feldman Brandt: This one is easy. A steamy Philly September afternoon.
Do you have a favorite, generative prompt for artists or writers you’d like to share?
Artist Antonia Contro: I do not!
Writer Beth Feldman Brandt: I love ABC poems—one line for each letter of the alphabet. It makes you search for unusual combos of words for 26 lines while it propels itself forward.
Read any good books lately?
Artist Antonia Contro: This is Happiness by Niall Williams (exquisitely written!), The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.
Writer Beth Feldman Brandt: Heart the Lover by Lily King.
Seen any good art lately?
Artist Antonia Contro: The Yoko Ono exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, a compelling merge and mix of the visual, performative, written/poetic, emblematic of Ono’s radical self/art; the Simone Leigh show at Art Institute, which paired diverse works from the Art Institute’s collections of African, American, and European art to explore the relationships between these objects, and in their influence on Leigh’s own aesthetic/work; Patron Gallery’s (Chicago) current group show of the artists they represent which is thematically based on the gallery’s name, patron, meaning a person chosen, named, or honored, that presents art that has been acquired by institutional collections and individual collectors, and that shows the impressive depth and aesthetic of their artists.
Writer Beth Feldman Brandt: Antonia’s image!