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Dear Everyone,
I was hoping to catch on to the tail end of the conversation during this
week-long event with an email in response to some of the wonderful ideas I’ve
encountered through it, just before the week concludes.
Mark — you wrote: “But like the poets of the past, our machine dreams do not
extend us seamlessly into some chrome-plated future. // These machine dreams,
not quite nightmares, but haunting impressions. // It is not a raceless,
egalitarian utopia. Nor is it a Platonic ideal on some frictionless,
unblemished grid.”
Beautiful words that I agree with whole-heartedly! I remember first hearing
your work on chatbots long ago at a conference at USC. All these years later,
your ideas about how the echo and the glitch and the variation that really
demonstrate the essence of humanity still ring true. It takes a human to
appreciate the beauty of the otherness of the machine, to recognize both its
non-human machine-ness and the constructedness that carries human ideals. As a
figure in the literary, these places of disturbance, turbulence, variation, or
instability prove so very fruitful!
You also wrote, “All of this leads to some questions: what does gender add to
our sense of the robot? How is the concept of robots already gendered? “ These
are such important questions. In many ways they are very much at the heart of
what I am exploring in my poetry project, too. So, I don’t know that I have a
short answer…in some ways, the entire project is an effort to find such answers
to similar questions. How do we create a robot, and how to we gender it? If we
do so, what does it say about who we are and what we value? We can think about
the “robot” as the agent or the site of labor, the codex that carries our laws
for being (or the terms that suggest what they are). As you can see, I always
prefer the questions to the answers. But, in short, there’s something
interesting about the ways in which even our robots are sexualized, fetishized,
and romanticized in art or literature or culture; The Terminator is
unmistakably male, and Lisa of “Weird Science” is unmistakably female — in very
particular, heteronormative, cisgendered ways, but…does that actually apply to
these nonbiological, nonorganic entities? What about Wall-E and Eva, who are
not physically sexualized, but gendered anyway? I don’t think that anyone sees
the Netflix DVD management robot in terms of sexual desire. And, the Mars Rover
isn’t sexualized at all! Anyhow, there’s something interesting about the
gendered and sexualized representations of robots that is worth exploring, as
is the distance between how those fictional robots are depicted and how real
life robots are depicted!
Keith Wilson — Your piece on the Uncanny Valley is one of my favorites, in part
because of my own interest in the idea of the Uncanny Valley, but also because
it is a remarkably salient demonstration of something deeply important to our
own conditions and circumstances as artists and as scholars who examine issues
of activism, justice, beauty, or humanity in our work with the machinery of
thought and ideation. Pain is important, and so is the act of confronting what
is monstrous and how we define it as such. Desire and politics are both driven
by passion, both subjected to laws and not contained by them, love and
grief…seem to have a different relationship to what we recognize as law, as
social code, and as certainty. The space between the bullet and the body is
small, limited, but it is a chasm that raises question after question after
question like an abyss, like a loop, like facing what is impossible and
unavoidable. Fascinating work.
Margaret, you wrote, “i would love to hear your's and Mark's thoughts on the
role of literary and the digital in opening up these worlds?” Just a few things
I’d like to say about this for now, but I really love the question! I think
that the literary opens up these worlds by inviting a sense of the lasting
impact or effect of literary art. Words seem to carry a sense of authority,
certainty, and finality in them, but also a sense of possibility and change.
They are hope-filled pockets, they are structured in ways that imply scientific
precision and deep analysis, and they seem like they will be here long beyond
us. For this reason, I think that the literary exploration of robots and
machines, whether from the perspective of the writer or the scholar, invites a
sense of daring that comes from this heaviness or this seriousness. By implying
that we are doing serious inquiry, we are freed to dream with all the colors
that make up the palette by which we will express the results of that inquiry!
As for the digital, I think its immediacy creates intimacy. The analog is a
commitment to time and blood and sweat and tears, but the digital flirts with
our joy, with our pleasure, and with our adventurousness; these things are
important in any work, but they are necessary to a work that seeks to
synthesize the free-spirited ecstasy of the dream and the product-centered
lawfulness of the machine, the balance between the licentious and the license.
So much more I wish I could say in response to these wonderful threads of
conversation, if only there were enough time! I do hope that another Symposium
might afford us all the opportunity to connect again! In the meantime, I am
really enjoying reading this zine and learning about the works and the writers
— and engaging, again, with ideas that are intimately valuable as well as
collectively significant.
With my best wishes for you all — and my hopes for more discussion in the
future,
Saba.
> On May 25, 2017, at 2:47 PM, Margaret J Rhee <mr...@uoregon.edu> wrote:
>
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> Continuing Mark and Saba's generative comments and reading of the Zine, and
> cyborg/robot poetics, I'm so pleased to introduced Keith Wilson and Sun Yung
> Shin to our conversation.
>
> This week, we will be introducing different contributors to the Machine
> Dreams Zine throughout the days.
>
> In particular, Keith Wilson and Sun Yung Shin are both incredible poets and
> writers transgressing robot poetics by way of intersections with Keith's work
> on Black history, resistance, and visuality, and Sun Yung's work on Haraway,
> Adoptee issues, and Korean Diaspora.
>
> Their contributions can be found on page 62 and 65, for Keith's powerfully
> visual poem on the horrifying untimely death of Emmett Till,
>
> and Sun Yung's enchanting short story of clones, and glitches, found on page
> 53. Their bios are below, please check out their work here:
>
> https://issuu.com/repcollective/docs/machine_dreams_issuu
>
> https://machinedreamszine.tumblr.com
>
> Sun Yung and Keith, perhaps to begin, can you talk a bit about your
> contributions, and how it may differ or build upon your larger body of work,
> and what is your approach grappling with robots poetically, and as Mark
> writes, and issues of difference such as race, gender, and sexuality?
>
> -----
>
> Keith S. Wilson is a game designer, an Affrilachian Poet, Cave Canem fellow,
> and graduate of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. He serves as
> Assistant Poetry Editor at Four Way Review and Digital Media Editor and Web
> Consultant at Obsidian Journal. Keith has received three scholarships from
> Bread Loaf as well as scholarships from the Millay Colony, Poetry by the Sea,
> and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He holds an MFA in poetry from
> Chicago State University.
>
> 신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin was born in Seoul, Korea, during 박 정 희 Park Chung-hee's
> military dictatorship, and grew up in the Chicago area. She is the editor of
> A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota, author of poetry collections
> Unbearable Splendor (winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for poetry);
> Rough, and Savage; and Skirt Full of Black (winner of the 2007 Asian American
> Literary Award for poetry), co-editor of Outsiders Within: Writing on
> Transracial Adoption, and author of bilingual illustrated book for children
> Cooper’s Lesson. She lives in Minneapolis.
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
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