Paper short abstract:

This paper presents an example of a co-mingling of creative agents, where the creative process is an entanglement of human and human-machine logics. I argue that framing creative processes as sympoetics productively decentres human agents and expands the possible futures of human-AI creativity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents an example of a co-mingling of creative agents. A short video essay-poem is used as the starting point of an exploration of GoogleTranslate/GoogleLens as AI-based creative agents. These current artificial intelligence-based technologies are used to re-render ancient maps; where mapping is understood as a socio-historically embedded practice. Translations are then incorporated into a video-art based poem. Through experimentation and haphazard poetics, a co-mingling of creative literary agents bound up in human and human-machine logics emerges. Using this example, I argue that rather than symbiosis, this creative process can be framed as sympoesis (Haraway 2016); and that AI-human creativity (understood as sympoetics), allows for a decentring of the role of human agent in creative work. This in turn, opens up for the disavowal of technology as merely tool, and expands the possible futures of human-AI creativity.