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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 #1: “HOMOPUNKT (Homo = same/one; Punct = punctuation; K = Punk): Send us work using only one kind of punctuation, and use too much of it. Is it the…. the \\\\\ the (((( the ???? or even the ‽ ‽ ‽ ‽? AI would not want you to use such crazy-excessive stuff. Use it! Em-dash to your human heart’s content!” We chose Janice Redman’s notebook page to shimmer alongside S.D. Dillon’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 Janice Redman: My whole creative world is one of using my hands… my practice is such the opposite of AI that I thought it would be fun to see what came out of it and see how the poet responded.
Writer S.D. Dillon: This was such an intriguing project, combining ekphrastic writing and the technology that is driving so much change and uncertainty. I enjoyed this opportunity to radically revise a poem that was missing something—until this project. What fun!
What role does AI play in your creative life? Your pragmatic life?
Artist Janice Redman: I don’t think AI plays a role in my creative life, other than searching for odd items on eBay that I can’t find out here, but need. AI is so entrenched into our worlds online that I don’t even realize how much it exists in my world… I am guessing much more than I know.
Writer S.D. Dillon: I am avoiding any direct use of AI in my creative life. Indirectly, my evolving knowledge of AI—specifically the language of AI prompts—has provided interesting fodder for satirical treatment. In my pragmatic life, I have been experimenting with AI tools to organize to-do lists at work and at home; for brain dumps, especially verbal ones using transcription capabilities; for streamlining and partially automating tedious tasks; and so forth.
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 Janice Redman: I love my visual journals… they keep me on track with where I am in time and space. This sketchbook was a very small one, a concertina of only a few pages; it’s a special one for me—just holes, red thread getting lost in the holes.
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 S.D. Dillon: What surprised me the most was how the poem came together after a few iterations of revisions—and my awareness along the way of how effective it was at giving new life to the poem. I use writing exercises that sometimes incorporate prompts, or elements of prompts, most frequently in the earliest stages of getting ideas out onto paper that I’ll later shape into poems, and when revising poems that I initially thought were ‘finished,’ only to realize later that they still needed something more.
What did you think a writer would pick up on from your art? Does the response make you see the page differently?
Artist Janice Redman: I loved the response that S.D. Dillon gave. I remember at the time of making the pages, they really were an emotional experience using common images to describe my emotional state.
The poem was a surprise and quite wonderful; we live in an old farmhouse with a huge garden that my husband manages as best as he can. It’s a battle. It’s crazy with all the aspects of growing, feeding, gathering eel grass from the beach to enrich the soil. The chickens that lay no eggs but create manure, the rats that eat our spring lettuce just as we take the plastic cover off… it goes on and on. So I love and relate to his poem—it makes me smile.
When you consider the full folio of work from this special feature, what questions, observations, or connections arise for you?
Writer S.D. Dillon: I would be interested to hear how the project impacted the other poets’ writing processes.
Describe your ideal “Vectorization”—where, in your wildest dreams, would you most like to see this broadside posted in the world?
Artist Janice Redman: I love where l put it, in our local grocery store. Salty Market has become our winter weekend refuge… ramen night on Saturday, taco night on Friday. Familiar community faces streaming in from isolated locations here on the outer cape… cozy, safe, community, and warmth.
Writer S.D. Dillon: Utility poles & Little Free Libraries & bulletin boards & the walls of used book stores.
If this Broadsided collaboration were a type of weather, what would it be?
Artist Janice Redman: Spring, when the work really begins.
Writer S.D. Dillon: A hailstorm in June (that doesn’t dent cars).
Do you have a favorite, generative prompt for artists or writers you’d like to share?
Artist Janice Redman: Compost.
Writer S.D. Dillon: Versions of the ladder game, pulling words from various pages of text (from old drafts and notes to junk mail), layering on from other sources and overheard dialogues, combining and attaching meaning as neurons fire, and seeing where it goes.
Read any good books lately?
Artist Janice Redman: I love the book by Pema Chodron, How We Live Is How We Die.
Writer S.D. Dillon: Satan Says by Sharon Olds; Strange Houses by Uketsu.
Seen any good art lately?
Artist Janice Redman: So much! I always find a wonderful surprise at the Museum of Art and Design in NYC.
Writer S.D. Dillon: So many artists posting photos of their work on Instagram. That might be the one redeeming quality of doom-scrolling.