Poem Travel 2.0

AI, participatory project, data visualization, dimensions variable.

2024

National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Cheongju, Korea, 2024

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#coevolution

Slitscope’s Poem Travel offers an opportunity to write a poem with an artificial intelligence named SIA, which is presented in a meta-linguistic space collected data from more than 15,000 modern and contemporary Korean poems and fine-tuned ChatGPT, a large language model, to develop SIA. The work is set in a ‘poetic space’ that reflects the local characteristics of Cheongju. Poetic language space means a space built by text embedding, a space where poetic expressions and words relate to each other from different positions. Slitscope superimposes a map of the Cheongju region on the poetic language space, creating a universe that transcends the space of physical compartments and mediates interaction between real, AI and human. It connects to various locations in Cheongju and responds to the lives of the participants, starting poems based on their poetic hearts. Poem Travel thus becomes the invitation to a multidimensional journey. Anyone can participate in this journey — not only by engaging with the installation in the museum or by participating from the city of Cheongju, which is starting point of the work but also by accessing its website.When a participant accesses Poem Travel, a series of poetic themes are extracted according to the participant’s current location. Then, SIA composes a poem based on the theme chosen by the participant. The poem can shift, alter words or sentences at any point, shifting the direction of the poem at will. This process makes poetic language space fluid, inviting the participant to travel through the universe. The images and results of this collaborative journey between AI and humans are synchronized with the artwork in the form of a large screen in the exhibition space. The interaction between humans and AI through the writing of poetry is reminiscent of a co-evolutionary relationship. It is a relationship where individual parts complement each other and become collaborators for a singular work. With Poem Travel, Slitscope explores AI in a co-evolutionary relationship and speculates about the world that is yet to come.