User:Alessia/Final presentation
Special Issues
SI XXII
main wiki page: special issue xxii
⋆. ݁₊ D E S T R O Y - P R O T O C O L S radio show with Zuzu and Michel
pad 2(protocol 2): https://pad.xpub.nl/p/Radio_Worm_10_Oct
- exploring if we need a protocol to D E S T R O Y PROTOCOLS?? what is even a PROTOCOL??
- Leslie, Nami, Erica interviewed by me for our radio show
⋆. ݁₊ Echoes of the wasteland
Installation object prompts participants to contemplate the fragility of communication and human connection in the face of the Catastrophe. It's a collection of decay, relics from a lost era, tangled wires, vinyls, adorned with symbols reminiscent of a bygone civilisation. At its core lies a mysterious time capsule, a vessel of fading messages left by the wanderers that sought comfort inside our shelter
installation notes https://pad.xpub.nl/p/SI22-installation-notes
⋆. ݁₊ Manual for Post-apocalyptic Radio Making
I helped printing Maria's manual
SI XXIII
main wiki page: special issue xxiii
⋆. ݁₊ / Loading: feminist server.../ card/browser game
I worked with the table ┳━┳ group.
Draw a card, type the command in a browser, and receive its function, with a related feminist concept, and instructions on how to act. By playing online or in person you are serving and being served, becoming a feminist server yourself.
Rooted in feminist methods and literature, the game invites players to rethink computational terms. As they engage with the commands, new connections emerge.
https://hub.xpub.nl/chopchop/si-23-website-table/
Data centers on fire
Your data is burning. Data centers like to autocombust
Don’t put all your internet infrastructure in one basket. The internet infrastructure is fragile
Data center sector is shockingly bad at reporting transparently
There is no black box for data centers. If your data didn’t burn it will drown
Data centers don’t like people! >:( things always happen when people are around
\br|
here the link to the test: https://hub.xpub.nl/chopchop/~aleevadh/
and the dedicated wiki page: data center on fire
⋆. ݁₊ Pen plotting party and PPP
Pen Plotting Party is a Rotterdam based collective consisting of 3 interdisciplinary master students from the PZI master Experimental Publishing who bonded over pen plotters. They host events to invite exploration of these enigmatic machines, to share publishing methodologies and foster collaborative making.
[Pen_Plotting_Party]
20240504 OSP Party
[creme-de-la-creme-pen-plotting-and-dance-performances]
[random shapes generator to print]
SI XXIV
Main wiki page: special issue xxiv
During our last special issue I wrote most of my time.
During the last three months of my first year of XPUB I had a rough time trying to understand if my experience was of any value. I got in a really bad shape and I tried to have some time for myself to understand what to do.
Because of this, my involvement with XPUB was quite lower, and I didn't manage to bring to the special issue any personal project.
I helped other people with some projects, some logistic, and some social media marketing.
Reading/writing practice
What I was most focused on during the whole xpub experience was reading and writing.
I did everything I could to keep up with what we were doing in our meetings, I did start a diary (Alessia/Diary/xpubone + Alessia/Logbook). Maybe the point of making this diary was indeed aknowledge that I couldn’t always keep up with the documentation side of my XPUB journey, and to forgive myself for that.
From the SI 23 onward I began writing more, both online and offline.
“Humanisation of technology,” “games,” and “ecology” were the key themes of the second trimester. “Space/place,” “liminality,” and “countermapping” for the third.
I started collecting material on liminality (User:Alessia/liminal), which has always been a central focus of my research. Outside of the wiki, I continued to explore the topic, for example, in this piece: [Between Worlds archive piece].
Xpub helped me opening up a bit. I’m not as anxious about joining conversations as I used to be. Now I’m more interested in collective reading and writing (something I quite missed in the second year), and in collaborative writing environments like the pads or the wiki.
Thijs and I worked on the https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/WikiBabble, a revolutionary social wiki media.
One of the most difficult part of my XPUB journey was for me trying to balance writing with prototyping. Right now what I accepted is that I really like writing. And that's ok.
prototyping evolution
All things I was working on during the first year: coding+3d
From the start I had much difficulty keeping up with everything that was about prototyping. As I was from a completely different environment I tried my best to learn as fast as possible. I stopped doing whatever I was familiar with during the first year, to have more time learning anything new. While in the second year I decided to return a bit back.
Prototyping left me with more questions that any other parts of xpub, it was intense, I'll need another two years minimum to return back to everything we did. But it definitely helped me learn how to ask others for tips or help. That was something new for me, and I think it’s one of the most valuable things I learned through prototyping too.
_destroying_xyplotter.jpg)
thesis
My thesis is called "In Between Human and Machine: Poetry in the age of AI".
It explores the complex relationship between artificial intelligence and poetry.
The central question moving the research is: "How does AI challenge and reshape our understanding of what poetry is and can be?".
While I was exploring what is poetry to me and why, I was asking myself if AI generated poetry can be considered "real poetry" without human intention behind it.
I did analyse two contrasting case studies: The poem booth by VOUW and ReRites by David Dhave Johnson, bringing to the table two different viewpoint on how AI is being utlised in poetry.
Other subjects and themes that my thesis touches upon is labour and democratisation, the history of poetry and electronic literature, commodification of the arts, interactivity, liminality.
Link to check my thesis: [Here]
second year
I was sure I wanted to work with poetry during the second year.
Because of this I got an internship at Poetry International. I thought it would be a good idea to try to merge my thesis and graduation project with the internship. I joined the programming team and got involved in many aspects of the organisation, including the opportunity to communicate directly with poets, artists and people involved in different aspects of poetry's publishing.
As the meetings and lessons went on, my focus shifted from liminality and poetry to AI and poetry. The internship ended up requiring more attention from me than I had thought. Combined with a general confusion about the course structure, it became difficult to dedicate 100% of my energy to certain parts of the graduation project.
This led me to focus on writing for my thesis, and to return to writing as the core of my graduation project as a whole.
plans for publication and grad show
For the grad show I will showcase everything I did during the second year, this include my thesis and the final zine/publication with the interviews about authorship, poetry and AI as main subjects and many other things like little zines I worked on from the beginning (electronic literature zine, personal poetry booklets...)
Re://authorship
I worked on this zine using web to print tools, such as Pandoc and weasyprint.
The project include a web version, and a printed version.
As I worked on my thesis, exploring how poetry can be understood in combination with technology, I had my doubts. Doubts I slowly started to unpack, thanks to conversations with poets, artists,
friends. As my research progressed, the core question changed. Rather than focusing on how people were engaging with generative
tools, I began asking why. Why involve AI in poetry at all? Why does the question of authorship seem all present in this exploration?
Who owns the words we write?
Can a machine coauthor a poem?
What does it mean to reclaim your voice in the presence of
automation?
These questions didn’t start at the beginning, they emerged
unexpectedly, especially after my first interview with Dan Power,
editor of the AI Literary Review, one of the projects I explored in my
thesis. Through our conversation, and later with Gabriela Milkova
Robins and Alex Mazey, I began to see AI not merely as a tool, but
as a provocation. A mirror. A symptom.
In this zine, I look at my fascination with poetry, AI, and the evolving
notion of creative ownership. This isn’t a thesis chapter. It’s more
like a confession. A reflection. A documentation of curiosity
[website version]
[pdf version]