Poetoid Lyricam: A Camera That Takes Poems

A talk from EMF 2018 by Barney Livingston

On Saturday September 1, 2018 at in Stage C

Poetoid Lyricam is a Raspberry Pi, camera, thermal printer and batteries housed in the body of a 1970s Polaroid camera. The pictures it takes are fed to a neural net which generates captions, these are then mangled and reformatted to resemble a poem, which emerges from the printer on the back.

This talk will cover how it works and why it exists. With a look at my past and present experiences with text generation, Twitter bots, AI, and possibly going back as far as Dadaism and the cut-up technique. There will likely be a demonstration, and poetry readings.

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