This episode comes on the heels of the launch of a new work, LOREM IPSUM VARIORUM, currently on view at Palazzo Citterio in Milan, presented in collaboration with Italy’s National Museum of Digital Art and the historic Grande Brera. (Talk about past meets future!) Beginning with the strange pseudo-Latin of Lorem Ipsum -- placeholder text that derives obliquely from the corrupted remains of an ancient text by Cicero -- I reflect on language as visual and material form, my lifelong fascination with typography and graphic design, and this series of “impossible translations” from an unstable source. I also share some impressions from my travels through Milan and Venice, from encountering Hito Steyerl’s work at Fondazione Prada Osservatorio to listening my way through the Holy See Pavilion’s Mystical Garden at the Venice Biennale. The episode culminates with the original soundtrack for LOREM IPSUM VARIORUM, created with my longtime creative partner Kris Bones: a sonic variation on the work’s ongoing conversation between ancient and synthetic, text and image, signal and noise, translation and mistranslation.

For this episode, I'm revisiting “Ghost in the Machine,” the opening poem from my 2021 collection Technelegy (p. 14 in the paperback edition). The poem grew out of years of reading, wondering, and worrying about consciousness, identity, memory, digital immortality, and the evolving relationship between humans and technology -- questions that have become newly urgent in the age of generative AI. Through reflections on the poem and the ideas, influences, and obsessions that shaped it, I trace some of the conceptual roots of my ongoing collaboration with AI and explore why poetry remains my favorite way to grapple with life's big questions.

A few years ago, I set out to make a podcast about poetry and technology, my lifelong obsessions and the core of my work as a writer and artist working primarily with language. I was thinking about it less as a podcast and more as an extended studio visit: an auditory space in which to think with and through poems, to explore "poetic intelligence" as a vital literacy for our AI age, to talk to myself and others, to share excerpts from audiobooks, media-rich poems, live performances, and artist talks. At long last, here we go...