The poetry and artistic projects of the Slovak poet and researcher of electronic literature Zuzana Husárová explore various media, technologies, environments, and creative methods. In 2020, she and the sound artist and software developer Ľubomír Panák created a collection of poetry generated by a neural network they named Liza Gennart. To everyone’s surprise, their Outcomes of Origin (Výsledky vzniku, VLNA/Drewo a srd) won a Slovak national poetry prize. In this conversation, the first of our two-part coverage on Liza Gennart, the poet explains the creative process behind the project and addresses the frames within which it aims to be conceptualized.
Ivana Hostová (IH): Let me start with a hypothetical question. Would Liza like to have a body in Metaverse? If so, would she be more interested in fashion or in spreading political messages? Or would she perhaps boycott such an existence at all?
Zuzana Husárová (ZH): I believe she would boycott it. In the fictional world of Stephenson´s Snow Crash, people need metaverse (this use of the term inspired Facebook), since it provides an escape from a devastating, unbearable presence. As I understand Liza, she seems to want a bright future, not just a virtual imagination.
IH: So, who or what is Liza Gennart?
ZH: She is a Slovak poetry-writing neural network, based on a GPT-2 language model, fine-tuned on a literary corpus of over two thousand predominantly contemporary Slovak titles of mostly poetry.
IH: In the epilogue you wrote for Liza, you state that if humans acquaint the programmes with our literary heritage, neural networks might understand us better in the future. You also said that striving for a better mutual comprehension between humans and machines might have the potential to deepen humanity’s understanding of itself on the one hand and to humanize new technologies on the other. Can you elaborate on this idea?
ZH: On the technological level, the first step seems to be focusing on a relevant conceptualisation and building of a proper database for training. By that we mean a database one can trust in an ethical sense and whose results can bring defamiliarization. In that passage, I meant this acquainting more in the sense of literary thinking rather than poetry itself that could be humanising for new technologies. We are striving for a thorough rethinking of all steps one is taking in the process of working with new technologies, including the use of relevant language rather than pompous news devices and employment of ethics in all stages of working with, presenting, and promoting new technologies.
IH: Do you see your project as having radical potential or do you see it more as a way of exploring the creative possibilities that new technologies offer to artists and poets?
ZH: We see it in the second sense, as an exploration of various stages of combinations of technological tools and human sensitivity.
IH: There are several contexts with which a project like Liza Gennart communicates, ranging from experimental writing through conceptual literature, electronic literature, and artistic practices employing computers (Human-computer interaction, computer-enhanced creativity, etc.). In which of these do you as creators wish Liza to make her home?
ZH: Formally, we see it within the field of electronic literature. We have been present in that field as artists and theorists, and it has been included in the Electronic Literature Collection No. 4. The project itself definitely also relates to practices of experimental/innovative writing and conceptual literature, as do many other examples of generative literature. I would also include it within a research-based practice. Liza Gennart does not belong to computer-enhanced creativity since we have not collaborated with her, nor has she helped in our endeavors.
IH: Liza has written for Vogue, expressed thanks for receiving a prize, and wished a Happy New Year on behalf of a Slovak civil association of authors, LITA. Have you any further plans with the project? Have you considered making it available to the public, through a website, for example?
ZH: Yes, we have recently released a website, www.lizagennart.me, where you can learn about the project and obtain a multimedia version of her poems (3D animation with a reading). We have also presented this at some festivals and events as part of its performance.
IH: Your artistic portfolio and publication history are diverse and rich: they include solo and collaborative inter- and transmedia performances, electronic and interactive poetry, book-based collections, and experimentation with sound and other media. How do you situate this project among your other works?
ZH: Liza Gennart is our last collaborative project in the field of electronic literature, so we take her as a continuation of our curiosity, exploring the mutual relations of poetry and technology. In my performative and poetic practice, I try to speak in a completely different language, one that sounds rather than articulates sentences fighting to invoke sense.
IH: Would Liza perhaps like to tell the readers of Asymptote about her vision of literature in the contemporary world?
ZH: She generated this text on the key phrase, vision of literature in contemporary world:
The fragile wine uprooted in us
enjoys a trace no more
IH: Joining poetry—often understood as a space for lyric self-expression—with technologies does raise many interesting thought experiments and opens various philosophical questions concerning, among other things, the nature of consciousness and creativity, the dividing line between humans and machines, but also between humans and other animal species. What are your positions on these questions?
ZH: We consider Liza as an embrace of cyberfeminism with a salt of posthumanist thoughts that question anthropocentrism in the traditional way of thinking. However, we still highly believe in human creativity as the only possible solution to save us in the future, as well as in the present. Therefore, we position ourselves as techno-pragmatics that do not yet believe in technological consciousness but like to play with technologies to enhance the human artistic world and question concepts such as language reception. But this game of mimicry is so alluring, recalling Jacques Derrida´s The Animal That Therefore I Am.
IH: How long did it take to train the algorithm and gather data? What is Liza’s carbon footprint?
ZH: If we want to count, we trained the algorithm in approximately forty-eight hours and used a free cloud-based computer service, which assigns you a computer and is not used by anyone at that time, as it would otherwise burn energy doing nothing. We think that normal day-to-day use of a computer has a higher carbon footprint than Liza´s training.
IH: What were the reactions from the publishers when you explained why you wanted them to give you texts for Liza’s training?
ZH: One of the publishers has never answered, but the rest seemed quite interested in the project. I have explained in detail that Liza Gennart will not use their books in her text, but she will only read them. And their reactions were helpful, which we are extremely grateful for.
IH: What reactions did you expect from authors, critics, and the public?
ZH: We expected many negative reactions, but that has not happened. We were really surprised, even shocked by all the positive feedback.
IH: In his Post-Postmodernism: Or The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism (2012), Jeffrey Nealon outlines a rather bleak picture of the place of literature in the contemporary world, saying with DeLillo that “in a world of lightning-quick turnaround in news cycles, capital flows, and images, only the spectacular excess of terrorism [. . .] can overtake literature’s traditional job and slow us down, show us a glimpse of the outside.” Regardless of whether or not we agree with Nealon’s portrayal of the now, the diminishing of readerships—especially when it comes to poetry—is a quantifiable fact. A collection of poems in Slovak usually comes out in a print run of three hundred copies, for example. Do you think the employment of new technologies might make reading more attractive for young people?
ZH: We like to think of Liza Gennart more in connection with meta-modernism than post-postmodernism, but I completely understand your point. Maybe it is the effect of technologies, maybe it is a resonance with the media world of young people, but there is definitely a refreshment that the young generation feels with Liza. We also heard it when we watched young people perceive Liza in her multimedia form. One young man, around seventeen years old, said: “I feel like I’m on ecstasy.” However, I also think that the young generation is interested in poetry itself, maybe more than my generation when we were teenagers.
Zuzana Husárová is the author of experimental literature across various media, has created sound poetry, interactive digital poetry, poetic performances, and transmedia poetry. She is a researcher in the field of electronic literature, teaching at Comenius University (SR) and Masaryk University (CR), an ex-Fulbright scholar at MIT, USA (2011), and an editor of a magazine, Glosolália. She has collaborated with Ľubomír Panák on interactive literary pieces (with the use of neural networks: Liza Gennart, Kinect: Enter: in’ Wodies, I: *ttter, Android application Obvia Gaude, digital literature BA-Tale, Pulse). She is a sound poet (e.g. Energy: Sleep), has co-authored with Amalia Roxana Filip transmedia projects liminal and lucent 2012-2014 (visual poetry books, sound poetry, and live performances are at www.liminal.name), with Olga Pek an origami book Amoeba, and has collaborated on interdisciplinary performances like Phenomena Research and Souvenir. Her book Hyper (2021, Hochroth) was published as a bilingual collection of Slovak and German poems. She co-edited theoretical publications V sieti strednej Európy (2012) and ENTER+ Repurposing in Electronic Literature (2015). Her works were published, performed, and exhibited at festivals, events, and venues in Europe and the USA. Her portfolio can be found at her website.
Ivana Hostová is a critic, translation studies scholar, and translator based at the Institute of Slovak Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. She has published Medzi entropiou a víziou (Between Entropy and Vision, FACE, 2014), a book on contemporary Slovak poetry and edited, among other things, Identity and Translation Trouble (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017). Her essays in Slovak and English have also appeared in academic journals and literary magazines.
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