“View from Inside My Pattern Recognition Machine”
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 #3: “”I Am Not a Robot” Consider this phrase offered so often on websites that then ask us to identify the traffic lights or motorcycles. How can you convince us? How do you know you are human?” We chose Antonia Contro’s notebook page to shimmer alongside Angie Vorhies’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 Angie Vorhies: I need deadlines and I love Broadsided. This call helped me engage with a subject that I have strong feelings about but have struggled to write about without ranting. I was also really drawn to Antonia Contro’s art.
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 Angie Vorhies: As little as possible. I don’t actively or consciously use AI, but I realize it is built into nearly everything, so I’m resisting by taking apps off my phone, limiting screen time, etc. Research is my Achilles heel. I keep a “look-it-up-later list” on my writing desk for whenever I feel the need (hundreds of times a day) to research something on the internet. Not surprisingly, that compulsion is much less powerful hours later.
In my pragmatic life, I use navigation apps, iNaturalist, and Merlin bird ID, although I am trying to wean myself off them as well. I’m trying to cultivate my curiosity, learning to love the questions, as Rilke advised. Answers given to you are less meaningful than the answers you live.
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 Angie Vorhies: What surprised me about this poem was how much fun I had! Yes, I often use prompts, although my oppositional self resists or pushes against them. I’ll admit, I struggled at first. How DO I prove I am human? But then I started thinking about why I write poetry: it helps me understand what it means to be human–through lived experience, emotional and sensory details, metaphor.
As a lyric poet, I love language as much for its sounds as its (logical or literal) meaning. The HOMOPUNKT prompt made me think of homophones, how they surprise and give multiple meanings to words, a language skill most humans learn as children. Knock-knock.
I submitted the poem in Arial, because the first section is about the font Arial and uses a quote from the Adobe website: https://fonts.adobe.
Some of my homophones made it into the final version of this poem, primarily as the subject of each section. I debated on whether to include a title for each section (Arial, Areal, Aerial, Ariel, AI/real), but ultimately left them out, letting each section stand on its own. But they are all connected (through language, spirit, place, protecting and sustaining life). That’s the way my brain works.
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.
Writer Angie Vorhies: I wonder why my response is so technical. I first thought of computers and airplanes and drones, which is how I think of AI, I suppose. But thinking is what makes us human, along with storytelling and love–and evocative, sensory poems about gardens that stay with us long after the screen has gone dark.
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 Angie Vorhies: Seeing the full folio, I am delighted by how different and creative the responses are! And how wonderful to see two poems responding to the same image.
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 Angie Vorhies: The gate area of an airport terminal or on the window shades of an airplane. And I would love to see ALL of these broadsides posted in our city council hearing rooms as a form of public comment on the proposed massive data centers being built in our county, our country.
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 Angie Vorhies: Clear blue skies and you can see for miles.
Do you have a favorite, generative prompt for artists or writers you’d like to share?
Artist Antonia Contro: I do not!
Writer Angie Vorhies: Maybe not so much a prompt as a practice, preferably done outside, eyes closed. What am I feeling right now in my body? Hearing? Smelling? How am I connected to this place? Who is my river?
Read any good books lately?
Artist Antonia Contro: This is Happiness by Niall Williams (exquisitely written!), The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.
Writer Angie Vorhies: Yáamay: An Anthology of Feminine Perspectives Across Indigenous California, ed. Camaray Davalos, Avelaka Macarro, Rebecca Macarro; Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz; Martin Marten: A Novel by Brian Doyle; Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds, ed. Susan Rich.
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 Angie Vorhies: Sustainers of Life, an incredible exhibition at Angels Gate Cultural Center featuring the work of local Indigenous artists (including Weshoyot Alvitre, Emily Clarke, Katie Dorame). Beautiful and thought-provoking personal narratives within the broader historical context of colonialism. Powerful stories of survival and resilience that honor women as sustainers of cultural knowledge and community healing.