“A.I. seems to be a Verb,” (2021) is a custom coded interactive human-machine collaborative system which can be used to generate texts and paratexts from speech. The A.I. technologies at the heart of our artwork are seamlessly incorporated into many machines with and through which humans engage and communicate. These technologies, that have been shaped through decades of digitisation and categorisation of books and documents, are now contributing to shaping language directly.

I live on Earth at the present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing –a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process– an integral function of the universe.

– Buckminster Fuller, from “I seem to be a verb,” 1970

‘Bucky’ Fuller’s well-known quote, originally published in his book I seem to be a verb, (1970) contrasts human participation in the material world (which Fuller suggests can be described with nouns) and the ongoing evolutionary processes which influence and shape that world (which Fuller suggests can be described with verbs). 

It seems that A.I. is now becoming part of a larger process that has the potential to shape the world it was originally tasked to merely observe and categorize. To paraphrase Buckminster Fuller, A.I. is not a noun, it increasingly seems a verb. Our artwork deliberately embraces the imperfections, entropy, noise, bias and other slippages inherent in these human-machine systems. Its uncanny results are not entirely attributable to either machine nor human. It is a post-human language machine.

In our custom-coded net-artwork, "A.I. Seems to be a Verb" (2021) we explore the uncanny affect of combining the embodiment of written language (the word as thing) with the intrinsic entropy of speech (the word as process). Through the recursive iterations of this work, made possible by Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, we can move our understanding of language beyond those reductive binary divisions of material/virtual or static/dynamic or even noun/verb.

The net-artwork "A.I. Seems to be a Verb" (2021), automatically identifies and categorizes speech, not only as linguistic functions (e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, etc.) but also across a spectrum of sentiment from negative to positive, in order to generate a complex array of paratextual supports (typeface, page-design, rules and decorative elements) used in the visual representation of the text to the screen. The entire process happens in real-time, providing an uncanny ‘mise-en-abyme’ experience which contemporaneously engages the participant’s auditory and visual responses to language construction.

"A.I. Seems to be a Verb" functions as a programmatically self-correcting autonomous-art-system, producing many unexpected outcomes. These “slippages” are deliberately captured and enfolded within the evolving texts displayed to the screen. At times the system generates minimal snippets of words mixed with graphic symbols and animations, only to suddenly transform into highly complex assemblages of text and image, before returning to a staccato rhythm of the speaker(s).