At the Phalle exhibit, I think about my mother. I think of her studio at the back of her home in Melbourne, littered with shattered plates. Her stainless steel countertop, covered in dried chips of molding clay. A menagerie of cutesy porcelain animals lining a wall-length shelf, and below them, a collection of antique tea pots. Figure heads she has sculpted from clay strewn on the workbench — cherubic faces with extra-long necks stretched to the point of severance, like bluntly cut daisies.
Outside the studio is her garden, where she has planted scarlet mandevilla, trumpet-like flowers that flare out from a creeper vine, and violet geraniums, which sag after the rain. This garden houses her finished creations: busts of fractious women, statuesque, goddess-like. They stand serenely powerful and regally adorned: Hair composed of hummingbirds and poppies and beaded undergrowth, faces of cracked porcelain and china. They have Chinese soup spoons for earrings and headpieces of layered saucers and nesting porcelain birds. Their eyes are shaded lavender and turquoise; their noses are the turned-down handles of teacups; their cheeks are dotted with flowers.
To make sense of the dizzying thought of machine writing, churning out sentences purely on the basis of probabilities, we need to understand language models such as GPT-3 not only as advances in AI and computational linguistics, but from the perspective of the interwoven histories of writing, rhetoric, style and literature too. What do probabilistic language models look like against the backdrop of the history of probable language? And what might this historical perspective suggest to us about what synthetic text means for the future of imaginative writing?
Is there an alternate timeline where America is known as the United States of the Pickle-Dealer? It seems unlikely, but there’s an element of truth to this half-sour hypothetical. Amerigo Vespucci didn’t discover the Americas, contrary to what the map-makers who named the continents believed, but his given name did end up lending itself to the so-called “new world.” And Ralph Waldo Emerson once called Vespucci “the pickle-dealer at Seville,” a derisive label that may have stretched the truth a bit, but pointed towards a very real part of the itinerant Italian’s biography.
After nearly every point, she will complicate it — probe its weak spots and limits, ask what she's not seeing, contradict herself. While she is sharp, she is rarely certain. She doesn't write, as so many people on the internet are conditioned to do, from a position of defensiveness, an assumption of bad faith readings, a desire to make her words sleek and unassailable. The result is not fuzziness but precision, a hyper-awareness of moral shading. In On Freedom, Nelson is doing what feels like intellectual echolocation: putting out calls and seeing what answers.
“Three Girls from Bronzeville,” Dawn Turner’s first work of nonfiction, uses the trope of little Black girls inventing and reinventing themselves at certain points in history to help define the era and the country. Through the stories of three generations of women, Turner has given us a tutorial of urban decay, White privilege, poor city planning and the influence of fads and digital advances on Black urban teenagers.