Dueling Rain
Steve DiPaola
I love walking in the rain. It frees me, it always has, but thinking of impending climate change – droughts, floods, mass migration – I realize my precious rain is dualistic: life affirming and life taking. Since childhood, I always leave my home and just walk on a rainy day. So, life-affirming but juxtaposed with life taking – climate change rain causing massive flooding leading to people walking from their homes in mass migrations, to never return. I created a series of (8) AI-generated poems on ‘rain’ that moves between these two extremes. Via my reworking code of two ‘state of the art’ AI systems (not made for poetry), each poem series receives as a seed phrase from a line in a poem above it, recursively back and forth through 4 layers (the AI dueling – back and forth) where I first started it all off with my love of the rain by using the prompting phrase “love rain over me”. The poems are placed on an axis from life-affirming to life taking rain in this recursive AI poetry installation. All poems were AI-generated completely from the seed prompts. I use our visual AI system to produce the works as spoken word poems.
About the Artist
DiPaola, working as both a scientist and artist, uses computational models of creativity-based cognition and artificial intelligence to model painterly and narrative generative art systems. He often explores the uneasy interplay between what it means to: create & emote; as a human (the ghosts in) but paradoxically doing so in the form of computational models he writes (the machine). DiPaola’s computer-based art has been exhibited internationally including the AIR and Tibor de Nagy galleries in NYC, as well as museums including the Whitney Museum, the MoMA, the MIT Museum, Cambridge University’s Kings Art Centre and the Smithsonian.