For months we have been holding informal zoom meetings with American poet Nick Flynn, exploring together our ‘Voice Scroll‘ system that translates spoken voice into panoramic images in real-time. Nick Flynn is the inaugural artist-in-residence for the Lab’s AI as Foil program, curated by Natalie Klym.
In July 2023, Nick visited Toronto to experiment with Voice Scroll in relation to poems from his latest book, Low.
For these examples, Nick read his poems and the resulting panoramas were generated as he spoke. We explored ways of influencing the system to set overall visual moods suitable for each poem. As the result of this exploration we have since developed a fluid interface to allow a second performer to shade and shape the tone of the visual output as Nick reads the poem.
Nick Flynn is the author of five collections of poetry (all published by Graywolf), including I Will Destroy You (2019) and Low (2023). His bestselling memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004), was made into a film starring Robert DeNiro (Focus Features, 2012), and has been translated into fifteen languages. Other recent books include: This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (Norton, 2020); and Stay: Threads, Collaborations, and Conversations (Ze Books, 2020), which documents twenty-five years of his collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and composers. He is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, where he is in residence each Spring. www.nickflynn.org
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