Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Bruce Sterling and the Versifier
133 Plays2 months ago
Joe and Mark are joined by the famed cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling, from his studio in Torino (Turin), Italy.
"I don't like doing the same thing over," Bruce says. "So, I don't write trilogies or sequels. I'm writing a lot of short fiction. I do some lecturing and consulting. I'm also the art director of an arts festival here in Turin, which is called Share Festival."
One of Bruce's projects is to re-create a working model of The Versifier, which was originally a 1959 short story by Primo Levi. In the story, a poet is offered the chance to produce more poetry faster with a machine AI. Bruce is assembling a polystyrene model which is the first step to creating a working replica.
What follows is a deep and fascinating conversation that also digs into the work of kinetic sculptor Alexander Calder, AI technology, and the human need to create art.
For more information, check out the show notes for this episode.
Re-Creative is produced by Donovan Street Press Inc. in association with MonkeyJoy Press.
Contact us at [email protected]
Recommended
Transcript
Living Abroad Experiences
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello, Mark. Hello, Joe, you magnificent bastard. Well, thank you very much. I hear a cold. Yeah, I've got, I'm coming off a cold. hit's I have about two a year now. That's not bad. That's magical. I have a quick question for you and I think this might relate to our guest. It's but well established that I lived in Prague for a year yeah on this on the show, and but I've also lived in the UK for a couple of years. I wondered if you have ever lived abroad.
00:00:35
Speaker
Yeah, I lived in ah France for a while, for the better part of a year, in Aix-au-Provence, one of the best years of my life. Love that. That's why you have a poster of Aix in the background there, then. Yes, exactly. yeah Yeah. And I thought our guest, the magnificent writer, Bruce Sterling, might have an answer to this question as well. Welcome to the podcast, Bruce. Thanks for having me.
00:00:58
Speaker
Yeah. He obviously has spent some time living abroad. Where are you at the moment? Well, at the moment I'm in ah Torino. I'm in Turin, Italy. i'm I'm actually in my studio here in Turin and and this is one of my home bases to the extent that I have one. But, you know, I'm a diaspora guy by my upbringing. I'm like an oil company kid from Texas.
00:01:23
Speaker
So you know but when I was a teenager, I'd like been around the world seven times.
Upbringing and Worldview
00:01:28
Speaker
Oh, wow. Yeah, i've i i I'm not a guy who actually lives abroad, and i on the contrary. And my worldview is like my place on the planet's surface is basically arbitrary. and I just really don't care.
00:01:43
Speaker
Do you mind me asking what's over the places you lived in when you're growing up like that must have been education high in India for three years. Wow. I lived in several cities in Texas. you know I've lived in and Los Angeles, in Amsterdam, Mexico City, been to Prague for a while. Used to do a lot of work, road work for Wired.
Transformation of Cities
00:02:07
Speaker
I mean, I didn't live in Moscow or Petersburg, but I knew Moscow and Petersburg. Nowadays, it's mostly Austin, Belgrade, Turin, and Ibiza.
00:02:21
Speaker
Cool. You know, Turin is on my list of cities to see that I've never seen. I feel like you should, you don't have to sell me on it, I think. like I mean, we've been here for most of a month and I would say that, you know, in in terms of areas where the wife and I hang out, they're probably like more welcoming to us in some sense, or at least they're like more willing to let us mess with stuff than anybody else. Do you have a favorite place of all the places you've been here?
00:02:50
Speaker
ah Not really, no. you know and And they change a lot with time. i mean I've known Turin for a long time. Belgrade is accelerating really rapidly now. i mean when when i When I visit Belgrade, ever since the war started between Russia and Ukraine, um it's like they're snorting adrenochrome over there. i mean I've never seen it hit them so hard. i mean and and Not that they're suffering. On the contrary, there's just like floods of black money coming through the city. wow you know Construction cranes everywhere. Los Angeles style traffic jams. Everybody just went out and bought a brand new car. so I've never seen them so materially prosperous, but it's because other people are suffering. i mean
00:03:37
Speaker
They do very well whenever there are cold wars and the Balkans. They just transship stuff. you know that's That's kind of their purpose on the planet, to rip labels off and gray market it to somebody else. And there there's so much i mean there's also the cities full of Russian and Ukrainian refugees or expatriates.
00:03:59
Speaker
right it's It's like the most antique place among the ones that I hang out, whereas Ibiza, which is considered you know a wild hippie area full of pop music and drugs, is actually gentrified quite a lot. it's It's really calming down remarkably. That must be a nice place to spend the winters like Ibiza.
00:04:23
Speaker
The weather
Life in Ibiza and Artistic Endeavors
00:04:25
Speaker
is kind of good, but nobody's weather is really good. you know there's There's a lot of anxiety about wildfires on the island and and for good reason. It's kind of a Los Angeles style shopper all. You get these heavy rains and there's like this huge growth of like grass and scrub and then like a sudden drought. Somebody can just drop a lit marijuana joint and burn down half the island.
00:04:55
Speaker
But we're not careful. So, you know, it's, I don't know. I mean, I know the Ibizans pretty well. Not as well as I know the Turides, but it's like Hawaii, you know. I mean, if you go to Hawaii and you actually hang out with Hawaiians, they've got a lot to be anxious about. Yeah. I, yeah, my only time in Hawaii, I spent on the North Shore hanging out with a bunch of surfers and they were not worried about much, except the fact that the surf wasn't coming in when it was supposed to.
00:05:23
Speaker
If you're on vacation in Hawaii or if you're you know a kid living off dad's checks while you surf, a different life. whereas Whereas if you actually live in Ibiza, people mostly fret about Spanish real estate. And the cost of, yeah. oh Exactly. Friendshipping stuff.
00:05:42
Speaker
I mean, you would think they would fret about drugs, but they don't. They have quite laid back Amsterdam attitude. There's not a lot of violence associated with the drug, so nobody much cares. So, Prusa, we had mentioned just before we started recording here that probably you don't require an introduction because- Everybody in speculative fiction knows who you are and has read your work. but One of the things that we like to do in this podcast is we like to have our guests frame their own reality. and I know that you've done a a lot of things in your in your time and in life. How would you describe yourself now? ah Well, you know i'm I'm a septuagenarian. I'm a 70-year-old guy. and you know I don't like to do the same thing over and over.
00:06:33
Speaker
And this is kind of a typical Bruce Sterling thing is like, I never write trilogies. I never do sequels. You know, I don't return to earlier kinds of work. And um I wouldn't say that I'm restless, but I'm just very peripatetic. And I am like, looking for new trends or or different kinds of things to do. So, you know,
00:06:57
Speaker
I wouldn't say that
Influence of Technology Art
00:06:58
Speaker
I'm working tremendously hard as a guy of 70. I mean, I spent a lot of time making lunch for a three-year-old.
00:07:06
Speaker
and Really a lot of time. As you know, preschool children are like trench warfare. and And know I'm living ah a family life in Ibiza, which is multi-generational. And I'm like the lone American among a family of Europeans, which means I do a lot of home repair.
00:07:28
Speaker
You're leading a very conventional life in that. Yeah. I'm writing short fiction a little bit. I lecture a lot. Sometimes I'm asked to consult for people. And also, I'm the art director of an art festival here in Turin, which is called Share Festival. And we're ramping up for our 16th Share Festival. So that means I'm spending a lot of time in the technology art scene encouraging people you know, just basically politicslitic art politics, I guess you would call it. And what is the Scherer Festival? ah Well, it's a technology art show, you know, and and and and Turin has a lot of these. I mean, that there's it's like the fifth biggest tourist town and in Italy. And while I've been here, I mean, it was formerly ah a heavy engineering town with a lot of manufacturing, but it's trending more towards
00:08:26
Speaker
tourism-friendly cultural production kind of stuff. So there are big art fairs here now, like Artissima and Paratissima. And there's a cinema museum here, a lot of cinema events, music events, and so forth. And clearly the trend is going in that direction. I mean, last year, I have never seen so many art fans.
00:08:52
Speaker
kind of littering the streets of Turin. It was it was like Florence-style levels of just stuff. Wow. Yeah. So our people at Sheriff Festival, they're about half a dozen of us. We're basically into technology art, digital art, network art, software art, electronic art, kinetic art, machine art.
00:09:16
Speaker
and robot artists. There you go. That's our wing. And also so i here in here in Turin, I spend a lot of time in basically the European tech arts. And that's kind of our segue, I guess, because our shtick is we like to talk to our guests about a piece of art or an artist that has inspired them. And you had mentioned you want to talk about Alexander Calder, a kinetic artist um and a pretty famous one, really. Indeed. Yeah.
00:09:47
Speaker
ah Yeah, well, you know, i I was just here for the Technology Biennale, which is, you know, this event that the city throws every two years. And it's, it's like an art scene, but it's basically for engineers and or or technology people. And, you know, a Calder was a ah and famously an engineer who was also an artist. Yeah, he's this American engineer. And he's kind of bumming around on steamships repairing the engines.
00:10:15
Speaker
ah
Project on AI and Cultural Impact
00:10:16
Speaker
And he ends he ends up in Paris, and i'll sort of kind of going to art school, but he's just kind of an immediate social hit there. and The French just really like him. So he's hanging out with all these French art theory guys and learning about minimalism and you know ah Marcel Duchamp and so forth. So he becomes this bi-continental guy, and he just starts inventing like new forms of sculpture. And he was the inventor of the Calder Mobile, right which is you know, a sculpture which moves. I mean, it's just, when you refine them, I mean, the Calder mobiles are mostly air. They're just like tons of wire and and and and colored panels of metal. They usually move on air currents and they're colossal hits. and mean I mean, a Calder mobile, somebody banged together in an afternoon. We'll go for a quarter of a million dollars now.
00:11:13
Speaker
That's amazing. Yeah, i I was looking him up when you when you mentioned that you want to talk. He also did large sculptures too, right? Yeah, yeah. He did did monumental yeah sort of, ah you know, a bolted steel and placements toward the end of his life because I mean, if you're if you're going to drop half a million dollars on a public statue, you kind of have to go with the gold star guy. So at the end of his life, and I mean, he lived to be out like 78. He was like IBM, and he's just like, you just go ask Alexander Calder to come put some gizmo in front of your skyscraper like he had one in the World Trade Center.
00:11:49
Speaker
But yeah, he did a lot of them. He did like gigantic stuff. And like in Grand Rapids, Michigan, there's a huge Calder statue. Some of these are like 80 feet high, you can put like urban crowd syndrome. He had a very, you know, very, very educated career. ah But he's of a lot of interest to me in that he did he did a lot of work that people didn't have names for.
00:12:11
Speaker
Like, and Marcel Duchamp is the guy who named the Calder mobile called you just like made this thing and it's like moving. And he's like, what do you might call it? and And this is a problem that at share festival we have a lot. I mean, people.
00:12:25
Speaker
are always coming in from the fringes of the digital world or the engineering world. It's like, I built this thing at my mom's basement, and you know and it like does this weird thing, and we're like, should we show this to the Italian public? I was like, can we ship this over without killing anybody? Is it going to elect me from somebody? you know And these are the discussions that we have. And there aren't a lot of people who can actually have those discussions.
00:12:52
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really but fun discussion. Every year we bring in guest experts, you know, like we're bringing in Kurt Von Minswert from nextnature.org and Amsterdam he is going to be on our jury. I mean, I don't want to name drop Kurt, but Kurt is a guy I take very seriously.
00:13:11
Speaker
So, you know, we'll we'll probably end up with like 15 or 16 things that we might have on our show. And we have to choose six, which six are we going to pull out among these 20 and like, why, you know, and like, do they fit together? And do you have one space that you show in or is there sort of like spread around the city didn move from one area to another? We were in the Torino fab lab for quite a while. Sometimes we're in the museum of natural history.
00:13:38
Speaker
Last year, we were in this gigantic abandoned building, which is an old cavalry barracks, which is being retrofitted. And we might go back into that place because it's actually typical for us to show up in buildings where art rarely would appear with objects and devices that are barely classifiable as art.
00:13:59
Speaker
through weird things. you know And recently, we got a little more ambitious, and we're starting to commission stuff from our cadre of Durinies artists. We should make objects, right? So we're making we made a monument last year.
00:14:15
Speaker
called the Crystal Light. It's this solar powered installation where people can walk up to it and it starts creating music and flashing. But it's basically and a big outdoor steel and solar panel gizmo. Now you said that you see you're writing short stories these days. Are you doing some of this other art as well?
00:14:38
Speaker
ah Yeah, you know, i I didn't want to, I kind of shy away from it, but I'm very, very interested in what people have to learn in order to do it effectively. And that's always been kind of our philosophy and share festival is that it's not enough that we get weird art and we try to figure out whether it's art or not. On the contrary, we have to enable the people who are doing this to do a better job of it.
00:15:08
Speaker
Like they need better software, they need better tools, they need better hardware. So we collect these sets of tools like art maker tools, bags of tools, and we tend to give them away to our guests. But also we do this in order to understand how things are made and to like make critical distinctions about them.
00:15:28
Speaker
So once you start getting your hands dirty in that way, it's kind of hard to stop. And I and i have to confess that I've i've got that problem. the The people can't see this video here, but I'm in my studio. There's something back there. I'm in my studio in Turin, and I'm putting together a quite ambitious project. And this is like the third in this version of it. It's a little difficult to explain, but and I think maybe once you hear about it, you'll understand why I find it of interest. Okay, and in Turin, there was a science fiction writer called Primo Levi.
00:16:10
Speaker
He's better known for writing about the Holocaust than he is for writing science fiction. But he did, in fact, write a lot of science fiction. And in 1959, he wrote a story about an artificial intelligence that could create poetry. And it's called The Verse of an Over. And of course, it's a satire. It's like a galaxy magazine thing. And he used to read galaxy magazine because was it was in print in Italy at the time.
00:16:35
Speaker
but so We wrote the science fiction story, and then in 1971, it became a television show. It was like an episode of a series of things. And, you know, at Cher Festival, we saw this thing on YouTube because, you know, the Italian television had, like, let it go. And we were astonished that this object from this Primo Levi story looked so much like a Cher Festival exhibit.
00:17:00
Speaker
We immediately said, well, we've got to rebuild this historic gizmo. We've got to make a new one, you know like Adam Savage is continually remaking old Star Wars props. OK, this is a tourney science fiction writer. He's done. It's probably the most prophetic object that Italian science fiction ever produced. And there's also a science fiction museum here in Torino, the Museum of Fanta Schinzo, which is the biggest science fiction museum in Italy and one of the biggest in Europe.
00:17:30
Speaker
So we're negotiating with them. I mean, I'm going to the book fair this weekend with the Museum of Fonteshenza, and we're going to assemble this Styrofoam, well, polystyrene. We're assembling this polystyrene model of the primo-levi versificator.
00:17:48
Speaker
in public, full-sized. It's not full-sized, but you know it's to show that we actually intend to make a museum-quality replica of this science fiction object and then put it in the local cinema museum.
00:18:03
Speaker
right You know, and that's the kind of nutty scheme that I would get involved in. I mean, I went out and I told the press about it. It's like, look, this is super important. And obviously, the tourneys need to, like, make this thing just like a personal say to mine. And I soon realized that nobody but me was probably going to actually do it. You know, I'm actually building the silly thing.
00:18:27
Speaker
He said this is your current attempt or? I mean, the tourneys find that funny. I mean, but but they think it's humorous that there's an American science fiction writer. who hangs out in Turin and likes to write basically Italian Fanta Scenza in English. but but you know But if anybody in Turin is actually going to champion this object, it's obviously going to be Bruce Sterling. Obviously. it Because it's super cyber gizmo. Yeah. I mean, in Italy, what happens is that like you make a noise about something and then somebody shows up with money.
00:19:01
Speaker
Right. I mean, that's just, you can't plan it. Like the bank will drop by, oh, we love this, you know, here go make this. And know and and i I could make it, I mean, I know a lot of guys in the maker scene, I could just hire somebody who could build one, but I think it's important that it's made in Turin by Turinese people.
00:19:20
Speaker
Hmm. And is it going to be functional? Is it going to actually spit out poetry? that's what That's why. It's going to be more functional than the original one, which is just a prop, right? Yeah. Well, it's super timely. I mean, and the original one is just hammered together by a bunch of FX guys from the TV channel.
00:19:37
Speaker
And they threw it out after it was done, right? But wait, let's let's be clear. what and But wait, what is it exactly? What is a versificator? What will it look like? Well, you need to go on YouTube and look up Il Versificatore Primo-Levy, P-R-I-M-O-L-E-V-I. You can just watch the video. It's like 30 minutes long. It's a comedy.
00:19:59
Speaker
about a poet in Italy whose customers are are are fussing at him to write more poetry than he has time to write. So he has to automate his office and come up with a poetry writing machine. So he calls up this acquaintance of his who's from an American multinational who's invented this device called a versificator, which is it's really an artificial intelligence. I mean, it's a desktop unit. It looks like something from IBM or Olivetti. It's big.
00:20:29
Speaker
Yeah, but you can see how but you can sort of peeps pieces of it there. Yeah. you know and You're across and i and we see the drill in the back. And it it can talk. It doesn't have a keyboard. It's not digital. It's like a cybernetic object. Yeah, that's that's smart, right? And you push buttons on it and you give it themes basically prompts like chat GPT. And it'll come up with prose or poetry or music and you know,
00:20:55
Speaker
it can invent different stuff it'll kind of do it so that the theme like a lot of levy stories you know it's it's it's centers around the interplay of the characters around the kind of central gizmo right very sci-fi centering in that way. here's Here's the Nova, right? The new thing. And then there's characters, ah there's the the secretary of the poet who's kind of the blue collar person. There's the poet himself who's the artiste. There's the salesman who's you know promoting the thing and basically you know acting as a commercial kind of character. And then there are the customers of the poet who are like, grumpy and crazy.
00:21:37
Speaker
I need robot poetry. That's what I need today. It's quite a funny thing. But when you look at it, it's like really just a cool Italian invention. And and in terms of its sci-fi qualities, it's like it's got these glass tubes. It kind of glows. It makes weird synthesizer noises. It catches fire at one point. Obviously, we don't want it to catch fire, but we can fake that if we had to.
00:22:04
Speaker
I mean, I don't know if we'll make it or not, but our intention is to make one that is much more solid than the prop, which will last as long as Primo Levi's literary reputation lasts. And he's been dead for many years, but he's still in print and very famous in Italy and and really the rest of the world. He's one of the most famous writers Turin ever produced.
00:22:28
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't know he wrote science fiction. i A monumental version of this author's sci-fi invention, you know, in order ah for it to be part of Italian media history. And it's it's really impressive. I mean, it's prophetic that Levy was able to realize that there would be poetry writing desktop machinery before the Apple II was even
AI in Art and Society
00:22:53
Speaker
invented. Yeah.
00:22:54
Speaker
That's what strikes me about it is that it's, it's not prophetic anymore because it's, well, it was at the time, but it's here now. Like, I mean, some of the stuff. Wern is prophetic, you know, like with the Nautilus submarine. Okay. Once you're prophetic, you're prophetic. I mean, you're old fashioned, but you can you predicted the past, but you know, you did, you did predict this thing.
00:23:16
Speaker
I don't know. I wouldn't say I'm in an epic struggle to do it, but I'm like kind of fiercely determined to do it. And I think it's actually going to happen. Well, it looks like it is happening from judging from what's behind you. Well, you know, I built several models. I built little ones. I built a Christmas tree light for the thing, you know, like just a tiny Christmas ornament. We're thinking about making chocolates out of them.
00:23:42
Speaker
that's great toys kids you know maybe t-shirts I don't know fridge magnets but you know I think it's kind of the um it's probably the destiny of share festival and our colleagues here in current actually make one of these things happen I could spend a lot of money and just hire it done but I think we really need to engage with it i I was going to jump in there. I said, because I read that that piece he wrote, or I guess it wasn't, it was a speech that you gave recently on utopia and Calder of course comes into it. um So, but our listeners won't have read that probably. And I think I can see, I could see how there's a direct correlation between Calder and what you're doing, which is the, I found it fascinating that you had that slide of the forks that he made. im the poster Yeah. And Yeah. The toaster. Yeah. Could you tell us about that a bit?
00:24:35
Speaker
Well, I made one of his coffee cups recently. ah yeah ah just you know i'm I'm hanging out in my studio in Ibiza. And I'm like, I wonder how you actually make this coffee cup. So I just went out and I got the wire and I like made a replica of this Calder object. It's probably the first one that's existed in 72 years. And know and I've like got it on my desk. And I was just like this Calder gizmo.
00:25:01
Speaker
ah you know and and i do that i mean I did that as a hobby, but also I did it and like promoted it on our blog. like like You can just get the pliers out and make one of these. You don't have to like wait for permission, just go ahead and make it. yeah and and That's the attitude we we try to promote among people in our creative community here.
00:25:25
Speaker
And I think eventually we're going to get together a set of sponsors and working artists and technologists who will, in fact, build this thing. And then we'll just all go our separate ways. But it's it's something that the city of Turin actually needs. Right. Whether they realize they need it or not.
00:25:49
Speaker
Well, you know I think that once they see one working, they're going to take it to their hearts immediately. and you know When you see one on display, I mean, they're big, okay? They're big and they do weird electronic stuff. And and I mean, Shira Festival has been here for 16 years. We're actually kind of popular. I mean, the tourneys like gadgets. They like art gadgets.
00:26:13
Speaker
they're they're I wouldn't say they're ferociously devoted to of them, but they're more tolerant of them than pretty much anybody, any other city in Europe. I mean, maybe Berlin or Amsterdam are a little bit more gadget happy, but the tourneys are super into this. I mean, they really like gadgets. and they You know, I don't know, they're very brainy here. Is that related to their industrial past or is it more connected to, you know, how the city got made? There's always been some art in Turin and Turin has even created some schools of art like Arte Povera, which should have showed up in the 50s and 60s, which was this kind of beatnik art of making
00:27:00
Speaker
installations out of stuff that is basically industrial garbage. Just kind of really abject stuff like ferro concrete and burlap. and I saw one today. I was out at a painting show today and they had some R. Day pover stuff and it's just like You know, a kind of epic wall painting like a meter across that's made entirely of iron rods and ferro cement. Wow. And it's just like this huge thing with these rusty spikes sticking out of it. And you're like, well, it's gonna last quite a while.
00:27:38
Speaker
so I hope the city has really good liability insurance with all of these. You would think that would be the case, you know, I was like, ah but um yeah I've never known anybody killed by one of these. but We do fret about it. We don't want to electrocute anybody or now and catch fire. But like I say, we've been at it for a long time and um we don't seem to be slowing down. I mean, every, every year somehow they managed to fund us.
00:28:07
Speaker
Now you had talked about um trying to determine whether or not something was appropriate for the show, whether or not it was art. Have you guys come up with the definition of what is art and what isn't? Metaphysically, no. But in terms of like what we want to display, yeah, I think we're...
00:28:24
Speaker
we actually have a pretty good idea of what's going on. And there's a long history of it. It's like, ours, Electronica, and Lynn's is like the world capital of Electronica. They distribute the gold at Nica and so forth. So you know it's it's really rare for us to be absolutely surprised and puzzled by something that shows up for Cher Festival. I mean, generally, we know what it's like. We know other artists who were doing this. We know more about it than the artists know about it.
00:28:55
Speaker
you know We've read the books. We've like had the panels. We've had these discussions. ah We know the trends. We know where things are going. We're kind of ahead of the curve. Actually, typical of the tourneys aren't seen generally. I mean, they've done they got way more brain power than is actually necessary.
00:29:15
Speaker
that's but that's There's a tradition of that. I'm thinking DaVinci. He was capable of making stuff as well as painting stuff, yeah. Yeah, you get a lot of special effects, Da Vinci. yeah you know and if if you look after I mean, they sell a ton of Da Vinci in Italy now. yeah these They just sell the paintings, but now you look by like they have little Da Vinci robot kits, but like the one Wind-Up Lion. yeah yeah And he did a little bit of painting and the painting survived, but when he actually made money, he was basically an effects artist for Royal Courts.
00:29:50
Speaker
He would show up on Milan and just make weird gizmos like he would invent musical instruments that looked like horse skulls. and He would put on he would put on parades with carts and floats and costumes. Yeah. Yeah, he he was even ah he was an FX guy and and nobody preserved the effects stuff.
00:30:10
Speaker
Yeah, I went to a little museum in Florence once that had a bunch of his drawings and they tried to make wooden models out of the drawings to give you a sense of what they were like. no i'd say fun and He's coming into his own as a kinetic artist. It's like these, you know, imaginary war machines that he was always sketching. A lot of those have been built in 3D, like the Da Vinci bicycle or, you know,
00:30:32
Speaker
various kinds of automated like floats or but the the tank that looked like a turtle. right these things These things suit the tenor of the times much more than like some oil painting of a Madonna, which basically does nothing for contemporary culture. i mean just you know There's this kind of no there there for us, but as gadgets go, um it It interests me a lot how ductile the guy is. So is this is this kind of engagement you have with ah sort of kinetic art and art art world? Is that and like informing a lot of what you're writing in terms of your short fiction these days? or oh yeah i would I would say that it does because you know here's like a book. i
00:31:15
Speaker
sort of more or less accidentally published. Yeah, that looks okay. Robot artists and black swans. And it's got a lot of functions of writing, which is set in Italy. But there's also really a lot of discussion literally about robot artists.
00:31:32
Speaker
was kind of like technology art and what to do. And you know there's a particular story in here, which is called Robot and Roses in which to the hero is literally a 22nd century European art critic. he's He's following this wild robot, which got loose and is like creating spontaneous artworks. And he's trying to figure out what kind of intelligence it has. I mean, what's the nature of its creativity?
00:31:59
Speaker
say this is one of my better efforts. And later in my life, I mean, it's, it's very theory driven. It's like super brainy thing. It's not like a cyberpunk story with lots of street samurai laying each other out. Yeah. its not doesn't have The aspects of a thriller novel, but people who read it are like disturbed by it. But gosh, you know, I never kind of thought that through. And I'm like, yeah,
00:32:24
Speaker
Oh, that's good. That sounds really good. Actually, I'm sorry, I haven't read that yet. We can we can promote that with the show notes, because I think that would be interesting. It's not going to set the world on fire that I'm might writing in short stories in English. But I do write Italian short stories in English, actually, and I hang out with Italian science fiction people quite a lot.
00:32:44
Speaker
And what's your take on where we're at? I'm sorry, go go ahead, Joe. you had to than I don't know. Cause I'm just like, we're at this moment where, you know, these tools are becoming real. I had an experience just a couple of days ago where I had just posted about Cobra chickens, ah Canada geese. And I thought it'd be funny to have a little song about Cobra chickens. And then someone just happened to send me a link to Sono, which is a, an AI you can plug in.
00:33:09
Speaker
you know, a prompt and you can pick it. And so it took me 30 seconds. it just a nice song for you yeah It writes a nice little rock pop anthem about, you know, Cobra chickens hissing. And I just was like, it took him, it took me 30 seconds to write the prompt. Maybe a minute later, the song popped out actually two different versions of the song. For me, it was a mix of wonder and horror at the same time. Yeah.
00:33:37
Speaker
Well, you know, last year in Chair Festival, we had our AI-centric show. Yeah. We got a ton of AI art from a year ago. And yeah, I'd have to say I'm rather up to speed on that.
00:33:53
Speaker
could probably bore people silly because they've heard nothing but AI propaganda for like three or four years
Turin and Cyberpunk Culture
00:34:01
Speaker
now. And I was like, AI is the universal solution to everything. And of course, it isn't. But this gizmo we're building here is, in fact, a prophetic AI that was like dreamed up in 1959. And it's not an accident that we're making it. No. And it's also not an accident that we're trying to make one that might last for 60 or 100 years.
00:34:24
Speaker
We're trying to get past the you know the hype of the majors and the VC hype and actually understand how this fits in and the structure of, like, Turinese society, Italian society, the European art scene, you know the European literary scene, science fiction. All these things have they have a look in, but the the trick of it It's not just to like blog about it and have it get lost in the haze. The trick of it is like an intervention which stays. Yeah, I like that. It's something that's like cultural staying power. So to to refresh myself with your work before we spoke today, i I read one of your most famous short stories, Bicycle Repair Man, which you wrote in the mid-90s.
00:35:13
Speaker
and you're you know you're heavily into AI agents in that story, the MOOCs. Everybody has a MOOC, which is an AI that just hangs out doing your social interactions for you. Yeah. I mean, it was it was a terrific story. It was that Jan packed with. Won the Hugo Award. I don't know what the hell you got the shelf in here, and I was like, funny. Yeah. I mean, they're talking a lot more impressed by Hugo Awards than Americans are. you oh so I just wanted to ask though, but where do you sit on an AI today? like what What is your stance on? Well, you know it's going to end in tears because they're just throwing bales of VC cash at it. and I've seen that happen a lot of times.
00:35:56
Speaker
and i I mean, there's there's too much money being thrown at it for the technology to be able to support. So you're going to see basically a dot com crash style dynamics, and you're going to see just weird shit go down like crypto mania or NFT stuff, right? Because that's what our society is like now. I mean, it's ah it's an important and interesting technology and like deep learners and machine learners are important and They have applications that people don't understand very well that are going to be the ones that turn out to be genuinely important. But right now, you've got this very typical social media nutcase thing where the investors are basically behaving like people from QAnon. and It's just not going to work out well. you know it's just It's going to go nuts. And in the meantime, there's going to be military applications for it, you know crime applications.
00:36:56
Speaker
stuff across the board, chemistry is going to be ah maybe a big deal. I don't know. I mean, I knew it was, I knew it wasn't kidding around when I saw AlphaZero play chess.
Personal Reflections and Family Dynamics
00:37:10
Speaker
Yeah. And AlphaZero is a deep learner. It's not a conventional chess engine at all. Their chess engine's around with 70 or 80 years of sustained development. And this thing is just like mopping the freaking floor, the state of the art and early chess devices.
00:37:26
Speaker
It just made you know it made things that made human chess players look like infants. It just crushed them. Wow. So yeah, it's with with what when it comes to the artistic side of this, I'm so i i'm like, well, we're where do humans fit in this? I mean, yeah you know because it seems like such an important and central thing to a human. yeah You really need to talk to a guy named K. Alado McDowell, who's like the AI specialist at Google Arts. Yeah.
00:37:55
Speaker
and I happen to know K. Alado McDowall. He like sends me copies of his books. He co-wrote this book with GPT-3 about three years ago that was the only novel length AI text that I think I've ever read and actually enjoyed and finished. wow okay you know i I read a lot of generative text. That doesn't bother me at all. I mean, I've been reading it for 50 years.
00:38:19
Speaker
A difference engine, the book that William Gibson and I wrote is supposedly written by an AI. right yeah This is not like a new concept for us, 30 years old. But it's rare to meet one where you want to turn the page.
00:38:37
Speaker
like youre You this AI to make up a story about a Canada goose and it immediately made one. But it's kind of like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. I don't think you're going to want 100 of those little songs. No. No. And and my my reaction was, this is OK. Like, this is an OK song. It's not great. Yeah. Well, I was experimenting with it. And I know people who are are doing experiments with AI art. But they're not about doing commercial illustration cheaply. There's stuff like asking it to draw things that the human being just couldn't draw. Right.
00:39:17
Speaker
Like, show me the nature of ultimate despair. you know and yeah And you'll get some output, right? And it doesn't look like anything that you would see posted on Tumblr. And so those are the yeah era areas of AI expression, quote unquote, that I actually find interesting. it's I mean, it's like looking at other forms of generative art, like code art, which has been a big favorite of share festival for a long time. You want software to make art. You don't want it to imitate Mondrian like a screen saver. We actually want it to produce imagery that a human being can't produce. It just has some other kind of effect on the human sensorium and something you can sit down and do with a ruler and triangle. So then it adds value. Yeah.
00:40:09
Speaker
Well, yeah it's more it's just more it's a more artistic application of the device or system than trying to get it to mimic human activity. I mean, I draw pretty girls, and I want it to draw a pretty girl faster so that I can undersell the guys who draw pretty girls, because that's not a particularly artistic pursuit. It's like making art with a copy machine.
00:40:36
Speaker
And there are guys who used to do that. I mean, in Italy, there were people who were kind of experimenting with copy machines. Yeah. And the way that you would experiment with a camera is like, how do you take an artistic photograph? Is it just turning on the camera and looking at the stills it took and picking one out and framing it? So do we need to get over our fear of AI taking away jobs and work? No, because there are people who actually want to take away the jobs and the work.
00:41:06
Speaker
I mean, they're not kidding about it. They actually want to employ people, and and they do. I mean, Google, they didn't fire K. Alado McDowell yet, but they don't hesitate to fire 12,000 people at a time.
00:41:18
Speaker
Yeah, the company who promised to do no weasel. Yeah, of course there are people who are hanging out in the C-suite talking about automating the labor force and getting the same effects out. I mean, try talking to a bank. When was the last time you picked up a phone and talked to a bank teller? not They're not coming back, okay? They're not going to be there. yeah know And there are efforts to do it that don't work like self-driving cars.
00:41:46
Speaker
that crash into stuff, okay? ah yeah The effort in self-driving cars is not that they're safer. The idea of self-driving cars is that you stop paying people to drive cars. Yeah, it's here in Canada, they had one of our um grocery chains recently decided they don't want to have the automated tellers anymore. Yeah, they don't work. Yeah, because they don't work. They people, you know, work yeah I mean, people just stand there. It's like, it can't scan this milk carton. I did it yesterday. I know. I mean, there's a lot of edge cases and these scanning things. They just don't work anymore than self driving cars work. Yeah.
00:42:20
Speaker
I mean, they'll swerve out of the way to like miss a cat and then they'll like run over a raccoon. and but was a database what What was that raccoon doing to you? doing And I was like, killed a few people, not as many as drunk guys kill, but they're, they've got a problem. And, you know, and billions, really literal billions were. Yeah.
00:42:40
Speaker
but done that well thought it would be easy Yeah, it does seem like it might be a bubble. Yeah. AI winter. I mean, there's an AI winter in self-driving cars. Yeah. I mean, no matter what.
00:42:53
Speaker
you Elon Musk is saying this week to prop up his cell driving cars are not going to self drive. Yeah, the complaints about the cyber car just make me laugh. I feel like ah bringing up a AI, i'm bringing up something that you were dealing with 30 years ago. So we're like 30 years behind you.
Italian Politics and Governance
00:43:12
Speaker
It's interesting to have this historic historic dimension to it.
00:43:16
Speaker
But you know i I actually doff my hat to Primo Levy, who said I had this figured in 1959. I was five years old then, OK? That's quite a while. Yeah. That's impressive. So you told us about a a short story that you've just ah written recently, and and obviously your work with the the show. What are your other preoccupations these days? Well, I travel.
00:43:41
Speaker
you We're maintaining kind of multiple households. and i was like It's interesting. I mean, we we have um ah a multi-generational family life. We've got like, you know, mom, dad, the tot, and the grandparents. And I'm among the grandparents. So, you know, grandparenthood is a thing of a lot of interest. And also, it's just kind of very time intense. Yeah. But it's also just kind of cool and interesting to be 70 and like have somebody who's three, who's around.
00:44:11
Speaker
who does all the things three-year-olds actually do, like tell me a bedtime story. it's like you understand like You understand why people find that kind of endearing.
00:44:23
Speaker
and know And also, the price of childcare in the modern era is so insanely high that if you look after the child for an hour, you're actually saving the family more money than you would if you like went out and worked on an assembly line. It's kind of fantastic.
00:44:45
Speaker
ah So yeah, I would, you know, family life preoccupies me. Is that your first grandchild, the three year old? It is, yeah. This is the, ah to date, the only grandchild I have. ah We'll see. I mean, I don't think I'm going to end up with eight. and answer not not Not in the cards in the 22nd century, but. um Maybe one will do for now. that's like More passports than I do. I mean, she basically has three nationalities. That's interesting.
00:45:15
Speaker
Well, she's very contemporary European in that way. And especially that's pretty much the case in Ibiza, where a lot of people internationally have settled. And you see a lot of these polyglot European families, or even polyglot Asian South American families and and abiza because in because the population is something like 20% emigres and descendants of emigres. Wow.
00:45:42
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's an interesting place. And I was like, um, I mean, it was very open to tourism for a while, sort of less so now, but it's just interesting. It's interesting to witness that up close. Now I'm assuming you get back to the States every once in a while. Yeah, we're there for, you know, green card reasons and to go do business and so forth. and But you don't miss it. Lecture or teach. And then we'll go show up in some area in the USA.
00:46:11
Speaker
I mean, I don't mind it, but you know, the USA has been in better condition than it is now. I find that when I go there, it's depressing. Fair enough. Yeah. Sorry to break it up. It seems good that depressing from our point of view. We're very worried about you guys down
Cultural Significance of Versificator Project
00:46:25
Speaker
there.
00:46:25
Speaker
yeah yeah well you know I'm not going to. give the Canadians any kind of trouble, but there's a lot more instability in Canadian politics. Oh, yeah. well there' it go We have our own problems. Yeah. In that case, people loose on the loose in Canada, you know. They are. Yeah, we're not immune. No, and I wasn't saying. I just think, yeah, yeah the states. Guys robbing stuff blind. There are a lot of official corruption. Things you wouldn't expect from Canada, but you know, these are unexpected times in a lot of ways.
00:46:59
Speaker
mean I mean, Italy has very disturbed politics, but they don't disturb me much because I'm not an Italian political. I'm sorry, when has Italy not had disturbed politics? Exactly. you know part of but If you talk to them, they're like, they're pretty upset about it, actually. The cities are rather well governed in Italy, but the nation, the national government is kind of the despair of everybody.
00:47:24
Speaker
and has been since like the 1860s. It's just never never quite worked, and that's a source of grief to them. And it's a younger country than Canada, interestingly. It is, yeah yeah. It's younger than the Republic of Texas. But not the cities. The cities are much older, so it does make sense that they would be better at or governing the cities than the whole country. There's some yeah well you know that know I know them is to love them, I guess you would say. and i you know i find I mean, I was asked to come to Turin. I didn't like volunteer to go to Turin. The Turinese wanted me to show up and participate in their art scene. So I was here for a year doing that pretty heavily. And after I'd lived here for a year, I had just like an apartment and a place to put my shoes. And I thought, OK, well, you know I'm going to knuckle down on this.
00:48:16
Speaker
And now I'd say that you know I'm kind of a ah gray eminence in the city, i mean much more so than I would be in, say, Austin, Texas. If I go to Austin, Texas, I'll, well, yeah, that's the cyberpunk raider. But they would never ask me to actually intervene. right and all they wouldn't They wouldn't want me to like build objects or you know put on shows or or um help design buildings or, you know. So do you feel boxed into that identity a bit of the cyberpunk writer?
00:48:47
Speaker
Yeah, I would I would say so. I mean, you know, anything is a box. I mean, I hang out with design people a lot and they're always talking about doing stuff outside the box. And you can't do stuff outside the box. But the problem is, it doesn't make a lot of sense a lot of the time, like Alexander Calder making a toaster with his hands. Yeah. A wire. OK, that's an outside the box object. It's not really a very good toaster.
00:49:14
Speaker
It doesn't look safe either. No, it's very dangerous, but clearly that was part of the appeal. I think he plugged it in and he used it. I think he probably showed it off to guests, actually.
00:49:28
Speaker
Like, look, I made this thing, it costs nothing. I made it out of scrap, and it plugs into the wall, and like, it look, you can toast this French bread. People are like, yeah, Andy, that's a hell of a thing. For him, it makes sense. and I think it's an entertaining toy, and also that he took a lot of interest in just the the engineering problems of making one. So he's showing how imaginative he is. you know And in that extent, I'm like a super imaginative guy.
00:49:56
Speaker
I mean, even if I'm hanging out with a bunch of industrial design people, and they say, well, you know, nobody's thought outside the box on this, I can usually do it right on the spa. And I'm like, what the living hell? That's what makes you a great writer, too. that' my eye number of What? And I'll say, yeah, I mean, to that extent.
00:50:18
Speaker
Well, part of what I love about your your project, that youre you know the the Primo Levi project, is that it's it's incarnate and it's specific to a geographic locale. There's a real strong connection to where you're living and night that's very cool.
00:50:35
Speaker
Well, the thing I like best about it is that eventually there's an exit strategy. You don't actually complete one that's like museum quality, right? And I give it to a museum. I'll never have to touch it again.
00:50:50
Speaker
Whereas being like a cyberpunk, there's not really an exit strategy for that. It's like being a beatnik. Are you still a beatnik, Mr. Burroughs? Well, no, I'm not the American arts and letters thing. and Mostly I hang out in my ranch in Kansas blowing up paint cans with the shot.
00:51:07
Speaker
yeah That was burls, okay? yeah but Are you a beatnik while you're blowing up the paint can with the shotgun? No, I just kind of like shotguns and paint cans. To some extent, I'd blow up paint cans with shotguns. i mean i'm not I'm not a great art critic. i mean I'm a better design critic than I am an art critic, but I'm just working in an area where not a lot of people know what's going on.
00:51:34
Speaker
I mean, I know so much about really obscure forms of art that in some areas I'm actually, well, I'm an authority. I mean, this this kind of I'm a judge. I mean, there's kind of nobody else to do it. but And I know that because people ask me.
00:51:50
Speaker
Like we're putting on a robot show in Switzerland. Could you please please write the introduction? to a platform Yeah, I guess I will. Yeah. ah to Who else? You know, I do it. They're grateful, you know, and also they ask. Yeah. That's it. It's nice to be wanted. You know, yeah it is, you know, it is actually. Yeah. Yeah.
00:52:14
Speaker
I mean, it's tedious to do things you know how to do well and have people say, well, that's another one. Not quite as good as number 10 and you know not not as energetic as the early funny ones. Well, I liked your i liked your speech for that reason that you started with Thomas Moore and Utopia. That was like, oh, this is nice. That's an interesting. part or That speech is something I've told attorneys again and again. yeah just that Eventually, they have to rebuild historical buildings which have been to completely destroyed. I like that idea, by the way, that there's no reason why you can't rebuild a building. of doing it In fact, they're almost kind of doing it. They go out and they find these things that are just heaps of rubble and they restore them. I'm like, look, quit kidding around. Just rebuild stuff that's not there at all, okay?
00:53:04
Speaker
and you know And there are fantastic things you can build to look better than anything else you can put on that piece of real estate. And it's like the fate that you should actually be doing. And I suspect that maybe they'll start doing that, not because I say it, but because it's going to spread through the tenor of their society.
00:53:26
Speaker
Like, Turinese society is very, very cyberpunk, but not because everybody hangs out reading cyberpunk novels. That's right. Not everyone's running around with Katanas, right? It's just a very technical society with a kind of strange counterculture thing going on, and they're just very friendly toward it.
00:53:47
Speaker
They really like cyberpunk novels, but they also like cyberpunk movies. And they do cyberpunk stuff themselves. ah They do all these Fermeti comics, with which are cyberpunk. And they have you know an Italian language computer network system and so forth, which is very cyber. And they're just, you know, Italians just kind of take to that like ducks to water.
00:54:09
Speaker
And I don't have to explain any of that to them. I mean, that's not what we fuss about, actually. When we're meeting and having these discussions, they're really much more on an artistic and cultural level. And I would say even a philosophical level. That's cool. Because there are a lot of famous philosophers in Italy. And they kind of clutter up the landscape. And people take them seriously. And they're like, on TV.
00:54:37
Speaker
OK, what is the meaning of the meaning of this meaning? You know, I kind of bear to wait for Calvino. And you know, and I can I can talk to those guys and I actually derive some benefit from hanging out with them. That's great. So you've you've landed in the right spot, it sounds like to me. I know you can say that. I mean, I'm kind of adapted to it in some ways, but you know, I think I mean, what's important is like not the kind of solar punk idea that like, okay, we need to write work that cheers people up, kind of banishes our dystopian demons. What actually helps, you don't preach to people to feel happier. People get happier if they have something to be enthusiastic about. right So I think people will be eventually very enthusiastic about this primo levy object.
00:55:33
Speaker
I actually think it's something that has deep cultural meaning for the city, more so than any of the other gadgets that we've worked on in our show, which are tend to be, frankly, kind of you know rabbit in a hat kind of tech tricks. It was like, oh, I didn't know a computer could do that. Yeah. Well, we'll have to have you back on when you have the object made. I don't know. I mean, we're goingnna we're probably going to make a bunch of them, quite frankly.
00:55:58
Speaker
I don't think we're going to make one. I mean, right now I'm trying to come up with the stats for it, you know, just like the proportions of it. writing the software for it, what kind of noise it makes, what kind of components it has, a bill of goods, i like a construction lading for it. And that's actually more important than the real one. If you make one and somebody blows it up or it catches fire, but you have the archives to make another one, you can simply make another one. Yeah, replicate it.
00:56:28
Speaker
Yeah, and you know, and the original thing is actually supposed, it's not an artwork, it's supposed to be an industrial desktop machine, like something from our IBM. So if you wanted to build an Olivetti Selectric typewriter, you wouldn't ask for an artist to do it. You just like ask for the technical specs, right? Like what kind of metal does it have? What does the wiring look like? What's the diagram? What's the extrusion process? You know, you want the industrial assembly stuff. So I'm trying to do that. And ah this is the first full scale model I built of the thing.
00:57:01
Speaker
I built a quarter scale one, I built a half scale one. This is the first one that's full size. You can come up and photograph it from various angles and kind of see if it looks like the thing on the TV. so once Once I've got that settled, and I'm pretty close, and I'm within striking distance, then I have to wire it up. yeah I've actually got to get it to perform like the gizmo on TV. Yeah, exactly. yeah Well, that I want to see for sure. so I think actually getting it to perform is not the hard part. The hard part is getting it to perform for 60 years without blowing up. yeah yeah Yeah. But I think that's also doable, actually. yes Ideally, you want people to be able to use it, right? Yeah. yeah Well, I wanted to do what the thing did.
00:57:52
Speaker
Yeah, I don't want to just, you know, make the rubber replica like the blow up doll version. Yeah, I wanted to do what it did. You know, and if that works, I mean, there are people that move font, they're talking about and the Museum of Font de Chienza. They're talking about doing a contest to remake it for the year 2024. Like what would a modern versificatory look like? Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah.
00:58:19
Speaker
OK, that would be good, right? Because then you've got the historic one, but then you've got like kids or high schoolers or whatever kind of showing up in blue sky about it. It's like, OK, given that we have it, what would it be? OK, yeah. How would you make it? Yeah, that's but that's what you want. You don't want it to just gather dust in the vitrine. You want it to be this kind of cultural talisman that people can gather around and really look at and know the way you would the way you would look at, ah you know, Jules Burns Nautilus or, you know, um uh, you know, early moon rocket notions or, or, you know, Star Wars light seepers. And it it needs to have that kind of techno artistic charisma flying cars. We're getting them tons of them. Yeah. I mean, every year there's a new flying car. Yeah. They never earn out. Nope. They never, they never
00:59:13
Speaker
I mean, they're very hard to in ensure. for i get I just, yeah. when insurance quicklying You don't want to get within a light year of those things. Especially self-driving flying cars. He was at one that he went with a 15th floor window at 80 miles an hour. Yeah. Who's going to pay for that? A little tough. Yeah. Yeah.
00:59:39
Speaker
Yeah, so well, we've we've passed our our remark and we appreciate your. Yeah, yeah, there's lots more we can. Yeah, yeah, lots more. Back to work here. I'm actually showing it. I'm showing this model at the book fair. We're having the Fiera del Libro, which is one of the biggest book fairs in Italy, that takes place every year in Turin. It's me and my friends from the Fanta Shenza Museum. They're showing off their historic Fanta Shenza collection, which includes a bunch of Bruce Sterling books, by the way. And we're going to demo the first book at all. Yeah. Well, break a leg. Break a leg at the at the book fair. but flat We're going to put it together with light styrofoam and wooden bags. Fantastic. Going back together several times. And then when we're done, we throw it away.
01:00:30
Speaker
Well, thank you very much for being on our podcast Recreative today. Thank you so much, Bruce. That was a real pleasure. listen
01:01:04
Speaker
Recreative is produced by Mark Rainer and Joe Mahoney. Technical production of music by Joe Mahoney, web designed by Mark Rainer.
01:01:13
Speaker
Show notes and all episodes are available at recreative.ca. That's re-creative.ca. Drop us a line at joemahoney at donovanstreetpress dot.com. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening.