Poetry
and other things I'm learning
Good day sinners!
On this full moon in Cancer, I only have time to write a brief note. Plus, I missed the last newsletter because it was Christmas time and I was busy keeping up appearances while engaging in psychic warfare with my mother over a frozen turkey (I’m sorry Mom! you did what you had to do! I respect that!).
This is going to be a year of learning, pretty damn sure. If you haven’t read these two articles that give some background on why Germany is being such a beta bully incapable of reflection, I highly recommend them. The second one is about Germany’s post-holocaust redemption narrative, and it sheds light on how unwilling germans are to locate this famous genocide within the framework of colonialism. It would seemingly be preferable that the Holocaust remain exceptional, so that the terms of Germany’s recovery and ensuing Staatsraison wouldn’t need questioning, and so that it could continue to back Israel in peace.
Although famous and with certain remarkable aspects, like the chillingly high number of lives mercilessly extinguished at alarming speed, the holocaust is not exceptional. There is nothing special about mass murder, but the way it gets remembered makes a big difference. The genocide in German Namibia, or Deutsche Süd West Afrika, all but exterminated the Ovaherero and Nama people and which has largely been ignored, was a blueprint for concentration camps and eugenics research.
~ I want to shout out to Zwoisy Mears-Clarke here, who initiated and guided the research we did together about the first genocide of the 20th century in Namibia. It was for a project called Geneigter that you can read about here. ~
The promotion of one German-perpetrated genocide at the expense of another has made one untouchable and the other invisible, while both remain unavailable for critical examination. The narrative around remembrance culture freezes the conversation and pigeonholes Jewish descendants into a homogenous mass of perpetual victims incapable of violence, while the Namibian descendants waited 100 years for an acknowledgement and an apology. Palestinians get frozen too, of course, into the role of the threat and perpetrator. I cannot understand how the horror in Gaza that floods my screens can be said to be images of terrorists, and not the other way around, without understanding the power of narrative.
It makes me think of that Donna Haraway quote from Staying With the Trouble:
“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”
Right now I am in Nuremberg, completing the second intensive study block of the eight that make up my master’s program. The image above was made during a module we had on digital tools in performance, in which I played around with AI text-to-image generators. The way AI like these work is by combining randomness factors with the words in the text prompt I give and applying them to a dataset made up of something like 400 million of images, and then sewing the relevant images together into one. For the image above, the prompt I gave DALL-E (the name of this particular AI) was a single word: “poetry.”
Below is a picture of one of many datasets that an AI might use. When I saw it I was like, is this a picture of God? Something about the vastness that this image suggests, or how the way images are displayed makes it look like a little snapshot of the universe reminded me of God.
I learned that poorly paid workers far away from here have cropped and labelled each image, effectively ensuring that their job will soon cease to exist. All of the faces that are used in a data set are from images we have put online. Despite how one would imagine such a massive data set to be quite diverse, AIs tend to make faces that are whiter, younger, and more conforming to gender norms - this is called AI bias.
What pictures are used to make pictures? Why did this image so easily make me think about God? Is my belief system so simple as to think big=good? It isn’t. Yet I recognize a tendency to project benevolence onto things whose inner workings are occluded.
There is a cool article about this kind of projection in virtual game spaces. I learned that the “virtual” existed before the internet (maybe in the high arches of cathedrals and in imaginations of heaven!). The author Morgane Billuart defines it as a space/moment/necessity that refers to a different environment/place where we host desires, fantasies, impossibilities. Counterintuitively, the blurry areas, visible pixels, and incomplete renderings of online gaming are helpful for the suspension of our disbelief. Our mind fills in the gap, which brings us closer. Morgane says the same thing is true in cinema, that “Both absence and imperfection are essential to selling the illusions of the cinematic landscape.”
Anyways, learning a lot as you can see. I did ask another AI, Stable Diffusion, to give me an image of “God” and I got this:
I find it really beautiful.
Okay I have to go back to studying. Please feel free to reach out, share this, consider becoming a paid subscriber, ask me questions, and engage in any and all the ways. It feels so good when I hear from you readers of 5, 6, 7, 8.
Love,
Louise