versus.exe

Versus.exe grows out of the same soil where Carnation.exe first took root. In that earlier match, the poet and the model circled each other like two creatures sensing a future they did not yet know how to share.

The performance begins with a prompt: arrival, anger, joy, shame, or solitude. The model responds immediately; the poet takes thirty minutes. Two poems are printed side-by-side. Visitors vote with colored markers, their choices becoming “selection pressure” that influences both the poet’s and model’s future iterations.

There is a soft humiliation in losing to the machine. The poet spends half an hour crafting each piece while the model generates its response in seconds. But this dynamic is the medium itself. Fine tuning as craft. Iteration as sculpture. The work investigates how judgment transforms into learning, learning into taste, and taste into evolution.

In some sessions, the circle widens. Guest poets including Elise Liu and Theory have participated, introducing varied linguistic and emotional registers that shift audience response patterns across different languages — Arabic, French, English, Spanish.

Rather than collaboration, Versus.exe represents fine tuning as craft and iteration as sculpture. Behind the scenes, dashboards track votes, themes, and decision patterns within the model’s probability distributions. Each audience vote influences future iterations — winning human poems enter the training corpus, while successful model outputs become lessons for the poet.

Human participants experience what the artist calls “soft humiliation” when losing to the machine — spending hours crafting poetry only to be outpaced by automated generation, yet recognizing this technological dynamic as the medium itself.

Human and machine become altered through their encounter, much like a mother altered by the milk she gives.

Themes