Melanie Hoff Machinic Language Symposium @ UAL

I must have learned about Melanie Hoff's talk through the School for Poetic Computation instagram. Their talk itself was very poetic, and I ran into Stephane Lambion, who is a writer/poet/artist sitting in the front row, who was in the show I curated last March and whom I haven't seen since, but all of this is fitting.

At the time, last March, Stephane and I bonded over our shared study of Ancient Greek, and I suppose I had forgot for a moment my own background in linguistics, which is funny: despite how much I think and talk about language, my twelve years of studying Latin and Greek rarely seem to cross into my work; perhaps just another example of how language is an abstraction.

But not to Melanie. No, language is quite material in their work, which was obvious from the beginning of the talk, which was an image of L'Origine du Monde and the panel which housed it when it lived at Lacan's house. Melanie discussed their use of python, wherein language is a function, and went on to discuss how words create actions and structures also in the world outside of code, particularly with regards to consent.

Melanie began by showing their project Recursynonym, which was a python piece where the code found the next word.

They went on to discuss SSH and forms of remote log-in, around which they had conducted a "consensual hacking seminar", wherein the rules for accessing another computer were that the hacker had to leave a .txt file with a stream of consciousness written within. Melanie discussed how this was an example of where digital learning acts as a proxy to social learning.

The project I found most intriguing, and maybe this will betray my illiteracy (innumeracy?) when it comes to code, was their folder project: using folder names and .txt files, Hoff created a sort of "choose your own adventure"-like code process. I like this idea of names and user-driven commands.

I asked Melanie how their work interacted with their views on LLMs, and they gave the simile of a hand-coded website: the creation of a personal LLM, or as they called it "playing with language on a local scale", is, in a way, an artisan-level model for the development of AI. They discussed their project Dance Poem Revolution, which used inputs the artist selected and then allowed participants to choose certain words from this selection (using the Dance Dance Revolution interface). The randomized aspect in this, as maybe in the folder-matrushka-doll project, is interesting to me on two accounts: first, the user has agency in the selection of the next phrase, but it is still algorithmic; second, the reductiveness of the interface and just general accessibility of the works make it plain to see how an LLM works: the next thing goes next. At the end here Melanie discussed the origins of binary code: cables plugged in or out, a simple on/off. I didn't know this before.

Melanie closed on the possibility of losing language altogether. This remind me of Harry Yeff's prediction that the future will be screenless. It feels intuitive, but at the same time it eventuates such a different way of communicating with one another and with our technology. Stephane and I were talking afterwards, discussing the place of corporations in digital infrastructure and the way digital infrastructure feels so physical and is discussed like it is and there are parts that are: fiber-optic cables, datacenters. But at the same time, there is so much that is sort of in-between, that has physical components and material ramifications but is not tangible, like the token. He discussed the Cloudfare internet outage recently (I've just googled it and found there was an issue with Rats in London recently, maybe that's why my internet's been so bad... https://www.mylondon.news/news/uk-world-news/uk-broadband-provider-plunges-administration-33325415 ) and how it reminds of our reliance on so few companies. However, even with web3 there are significant physical components that can't be forgotten--just look at bitcoin and Iran.

I suppose this does go back to the interreliance between action and word, or material and immaterial, that Melanie discussed. We can't create a new color.