On April 12th, guests experienced a groundbreaking interactive performance that explored the intersection of image, poetry, and artificial intelligence (AI). The result of a collaborative project between poet Nick Flynn, media artist David Rokeby, and curator Natalie Klym, this unconventional poetry reading hosted in the Moody's Lois Chiles Theater featured a real-time voice-to-scrolling image generator developed by Rokeby at the University of Toronto's BMO Lab. The AI program featured in this performance was fine-tuned on a dataset of writing, collages, and prompts derived from Flynn's latest poetry collection, Low.  During the performance, the program responded to Flynn's voice in real time by generating an ever-changing scroll of stunning and surreal images.

Following the performance, Flynn and Rokeby were joined by Rice professor and composer Anthony Brandt for a conversation on the ethical implications and artistic possibilities of artificial intelligence. Audience members had an opportunity to buy a copy of Low before and after the event. 

"THEY ARE FALLING ALL AROUND ME / Postcards from the Edge of Latent Space: Exploring New Sites of Creativity with Generative AI" was funded in part by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, with additional support from the BMO Lab for Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, Emerging Technologies & Artificial Intelligence, as well as the Moody Center of the Arts

About the Artists

Nick Flynn is a poet, playwright, and Professor on the Creative Writing faculty at the University of Houston. A two-time winner of the PEN award and a recent finalist for the Writers' League of Texas Book Award, among other accolades, Flynn's latest book Low was published by Graywolf Press in 2023. 

Natalie Klym is curator of the AI as Foil: Exploring the Co-Evolution of Art and Technology program at the University of Toronto’s BMO Lab for Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, Emerging Technologies & Artificial Intelligence, and the Vice President of Market Development at Radium Cloud.

David Rokeby is a media artist and director of the Bank of Montreal (BMO) Lab for Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, Emerging Technologies & Artificial Intelligence at the University of Toronto.