Peruvian multimedia artist Paola Torres Núñez del Prado will release her AI poetry record this month. Currently based in Sweden, Núñez del Prado was awarded a place on the Google Artists and Machine Intelligence programme in 2019.

With the help of the programme's engineers and researchers, Núñez del Prado recorded an album exploring the signs of the Quipus – an ancient string device used by the Incas and other cultures of Andean South America for data collection and archiving in the absence of an alphabet writing system – and the work of Peruvian artist and poet Jorge Eduardo Eielson.

“My residency (part of the Google Artists + Machine Intelligence programme) consisted of studying the Quipus and reviewing the possibilities of machine learning for its understanding,” explains Núñez del Prado. “I wanted the Quipus to speak again. For that, I needed a voice – not just any voice but one that would come from beyond life, from that future life that audiovisual media now enable us to maintain by leaving sound or video recordings of people already dead, for posterity, in a way allowing these to live forever.”

To create the poems, a generative AI pre-trained model was fine-tuned with texts of Eielson, Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña, and the artist's own.

She dubbed the AI system Aielson, combining the term AI with Eielson's name. Eielson (1924–2006) was a Peruvian artist and poet who presented his reinterpretations of the Quipu at the 1964 Venice Biennale. For this project Núñez del Prado set out to emphasise accent and style of speech by training two deep learning models – the voice synthesis pair Tacotron 2 and Waveglow – first with an Argentine voice, and then with the voice of Eielson.

“The machine learning algorithm that I used for poetry generation – GPT2, a ‘large transformer-based language model’, part of the Natural Language Processing branch of Artificial Intelligence – can be either seeded, that is, I could write a phrase, for example, ‘I would like this poem to’ and the system could complete it in a way that is ultimately dependent on the text that it has been trained up with [...] or, depending on the configuration I choose, it can just generate random samples.

“I have not pre-seeded any of the poems generated in the album,” she continues, “that is, they have been completely and independently generated by the algorithm. I found this rather fascinating.”

The album's title, El Tiempo Del Hombre (The Time Of Man), and its track names, were also generated by Aielson.

El Tiempo Del Hombre was created with the support of Navajo artist and Creative Technologist Holly Grimm, and is self-released on Bandcamp. An album launch will take place on 21 August at 11PM BST. Join on ZOOM: Meeting ID 833 6690 2837.

Listen to “Ciencia”:

Watch a short video about the album: