NEA Tech Check: Poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

This NEA interview series will take you on a journey across the nation to learn how leaders in the arts and cultural field are approaching the intersections of technology, culture, and society. Inspired by findings from the NEA arts and technology field scan conducted in partnership with Knight Foundation and Ford Foundation, we aim to increase public awareness of creative approaches to technology that engage local communities, explore ethical issues, and increase digital skills through the arts. Here is our conversation with poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, who directs the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland.

NEA: Tell us about yourself. 

LILLIAN-YVONNE BERTRAM: I am a poet and artist who specializes in computational poetics and using AI in the composition of new works. I also direct the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland, where I teach poetry workshops, computational poetics, and more. I am the author of the books But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise, a slice from the cake made of air, Personal Science, Travesty Generator, and, most recently, Negative Money.

NEA: Tell us about a specific program (or other work) you are involved in which supports artist-driven explorations of technology. 

BERTRAM: With my colleague Carly Schnitzler at Johns Hopkins University, we co-coordinate a working group called If, Then: Technology and Poetics. The group holds monthly virtual workshop meetings for poets, writers, and creative technologists who are working in the areas of digital and computational poetics, digital art, networked performance, and artificial intelligence. In some of these sessions an invited artist leads a generative workshop on their practice. Other sessions are open mics where members of the community share their works in progress. This group started early in the pandemic as a way of bringing together the dispersed national and international community of digital poets and creative technologists.

NEA: Was there a specific interest or experience that led you to including technology in your arts practice? 

BERTRAM: I have always been at least tangentially interested in the role technology could play in an arts practice, though I did not always know how or in what way, or even what types of technology would be suitable for creative writing. I have taken cues from the history of innovative and avant-garde writing practices, where practitioners in groups like the Oulipo or Dada were using randomization–like throwing dice–to choose words and phrases for poems. Something like a dice throw or generating random numbers can easily be approximated by a computer program, allowing writers and artists to use these previously analog methods on a larger scale. My first experiments with computer coding and programming involved composing poems using randomized dice throws. The more I learned, the more it sort of took off from there!

NEA: Can you share an example of how your practice raises the public’s awareness or understanding of the responsible use of AI in the field of arts? 

BERTRAM: My writing practice and various projects have included the use of generated text in the form of Large Language Models. I began working with early versions of GPT (the architecture that underlies the ChatGPTs) in or around 2017, 2018. From the start of my working with these models, I was interested in gauging what it had “learned” about things like anti-Blackness, police brutality, and other social issues. As it turned out, it wasn’t so great at dealing with these kinds of questions and ideas and would generate cliched and biased narratives for people of color. My recent chapbook, A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content, is “written” with GPT3. It compares different instances of the GPTs as a way to demonstrate the inherent biases of the models and the limitations in the model’s ability to construct narratives. I like to think that it serves as a type of caution sign for people to be aware that while large language models seem smart, they hold a lot of bias and limitations.

NEA: Has technology always been a core interest to your work or practice? Is there a specific experience or cross-sector arts and technology collaboration that was largely influential?

BERTRAM: While technology as such wasn’t always part of my practice, innovation and pushing the boundaries have been. Long before I was able to write programs that created new ways for me to compose poems, I had been doing similar things by hand. I work with language as a material and have always been interested in the way this material can be arranged, rearranged, randomized, and permuted. Poet William Carlos Williams is known for having said that, “a poem is a small (or large) machine made of words,” and one of my first computational projects was indeed a poetry machine. I programmed a small receipt printer to print poems from randomized lines of one of my books of poetry. You pressed a button and out came a receipt with a poem on it. After that, I was hooked! I learned how to do this project by taking workshops and getting connected with what was then the local makerspace. 

NEA: How can individuals or organizations get involved with this work, if coming to it for the first time? Why should they not feel intimidated, and how can they explore these tools/activities even on a modest budget or with more limited resources? 

BERTRAM: Reach out to artist co-ops and makerspaces. An organization could take classes, learn about resources, or hold a workshop. In my experience these places can be sensitive to budget limitations and may be able to put together some specific programming for an organization. 

NEA: Are there other resources you'd recommend?

BERTRAM: Everyone should check out the School for Poetic Computation in New York. They offer in-person and virtual classes on all sorts of ways to integrate technology and art into one’s practice. 

There is also the Electronic Literature Organization, which has a lot of historical information about the history of digital poetics, interactive fiction, and a lot of web-based creative work.

Lastly, your local makerspace or arts cooperative! There is usually always someone doing something cool with arts and technology in these spaces–my work would not have been possible without the makerspace. Co-ops, artist work spaces, and makerspaces usually offer classes or demonstrations and can help orient you to the right direction and resources. Folks should first look within one’s community to make connections and explore partnerships–there is a lot going on in these spaces!

Jax Deluca oversees the NEA’s grant portfolio and resources focused on supporting the diverse ecology of film and media arts ecosystems across the nation.