Cangjie’s Poetry
Humans and machines are in constant conversation. Intelligent machines today are not only observers of the world, but they also make creative decisions. If A.I imitates human beings to generate a symbolic system and actively communicate with us based on their own understandings of the universe, to what degrees their messages and meanings will recontextualize our coexistence?
VIDEO DOCUMENTATION [ 2 minutes ]
Cangjie’s Poetry is an intelligent multimodal system designed as a conceptual response to the future semantic human-machine reality. Inspired by an ancient Chinese legendary historian, Cangjie (c.2650 BCE), who invented Chinese characters based on the characteristics of everything on the earth, we trained a neural network that we call Cangjie, to learn the constructions and principles of over 9000 Chinese characters. After successfully training, Cangjie can interpret images through the lens of Chinese characters and produce new symbols constructed by Chinese strokes. Meanwhile, we implement a pre-trained model to simultaneously generate localized descriptive sentences of images in natural language to create meanings for this symbolic system.
In the art installation, the Cangjie system captures surroundings using a camera and transforms the real world streaming into a cluster of ever-changing new symbols in real-time. Those novel symbols made of Chinese strokes tangled with the imagery captured by the camera in the installation are visualized algorithmically as an abstract pixelated landscape. The landscape dynamically moves, evolves, and writes poetry based on the image data of the live streaming captured by the camera. We project the visualization of the semantic landscape on the wall in the exhibition space as the first projection. In the meantime, Cangjie also generates descriptive sentences of surroundings based on its interpretation. Those sentences are designed as flowing poetry written in ink, assembled with real-time captured imagery fragments as the second projection in the space.
Canglie’s Poetry transforms the machine’s interpretation of surroundings into an interactive semantic experience. It constructs conceptual and futuristic communication between humans and machines. This work is not only a conceptual response to the tension and fragility in the coexistence of humans and machines but also a conceptual expression of a future language that reflects on ancient truths, a way to evoke enchantment in this era of artificial intelligence. Like the legendary historian Cangjie did nearly 5000 years ago, the Cangjie system continuously writes poetry with humans collaboratively as long as the real world exists.