Compasses
Congratulations to ITP alumna and faculty member, Allison Parrish for winning an award at Ars Electronica 2021!
Allison won an Honorary Mention for her project, Compasses.
Compasses
Allison Parrish pushes language into philosophical and sometimes humorous territory through a combination of phonemic embodiment and machine learning techniques. At the same time computer programmer, poet, educator, and game designer Parrish builds custom AI tools for generating concrete poetry and with Compasses pushes this poetry off the page and into the multidimensional mathematical space of a neural net. Unlike complex AI art projects, which often require long, technical definitions to be understood, the process of generating Compasses is instantly legible. With the words animal, vegetable, and mineral laid out in a triangular formation, the interpolated terms maneral and vigenableclearly evoke hybrids, between animal and mineral, mineral and vegetable. What would those look like? Having received these new terms, how might we use them?