This Art Exhibition Brings Allen Ginsberg’s Poetry to Life Using AI
Beginning August 10, the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles will unveil a new exhibition entitled Muses & Self: Photographs by Allen Ginsberg, featuring photographs from Ginsberg’s collection. Additionally, the gallery will preview A Picture of My Mind: Poems Written by Allen Ginsberg’s Photographs, a collection of poems created by an AI trained on Ginsberg’s literary work.
The exhibition runs until September and was developed in collaboration with the non-fungible token (NFT) poetry gallery and the digital community TheVERSEverse, with support from the Tezos Foundation . The collection uses an AI-powered camera that converts visual images into text.
“In honor of Ginsberg’s professed experimental impulses, this collaboration uses an AI-powered camera to ‘read’ a selection of Ginsberg’s photographs on view throughout the exhibition, transforming his iconic vision of American counterculture into poetic.” Translating answers simultaneously influenced by Ginsberg’s canon, its undeniable presence, inextricably intertwined with the written records of the internet and analyzed by AI,” writes the gallery in its description of the exhibition.
“Just as Ginsberg innovated with automated writing techniques and popular technologies, this collection of AI-generated poems uses the contemporary linguistic avant-garde to engage ritually, intuitively, and meaningfully with Ginsberg’s visual and poetic vernacular,” it adds.
The development of AI has accelerated in recent months due to the mainstream proliferation of popular tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT. AI tools were developed to empower artists of all genres and disciplines, from music to art to text-based designs. AI tools have also been used to reproduce the styles of certain living and postmortem artists, although there have been allegations of misusing these tools to steal artists’ work without credit.
