Having a Coke with You

I completed a course on AI and art in 2021 and we were able to experiment with DALL-E. Back then, everything came back out of DALL-E looking odd, dark, and wavey. As part of the class guidelines we fed lyrics and poems into the generator, and I used Frank O’Hara’s poem Having a Coke with You.

I wanted my final project to feel like a collaboration between my work and the wavey grainy videos DALL-E was able to generate. I manipulated the generations to having vibrant bright colors and evoke the feeling of the poem, rather than the visual of it the AI tried to create. I then proposed an exhibition showing these visuals on CRT TV’s, since such a highly new and cutting edge technology was creating images that felt somehow like a dated form of technology. I created an exhibition pamphlet with the actual poem.