Completed during the first semester of the last year of my Masters, this project marked my first engagement with generative AI as an artistic genre, using it not just as a tool to critically explore intersections between text, labor, and postcolonial stylization, but as a medium, too.
During the second week of a seminar titled “Humanities in the Age of AI,” we explored different interfaces for textual output through such writers as Kamau Brathwaite, whom I took a special interest in. I aimed to synthesize his sense of poetic aesthetics with digital elements that reflect my broader research interests in decolonial frameworks and experimental literature. Looking back at the time re-working this explication of project (1 Aug 2025 @ 20:48), it was my first moment of interest in bringing my ‘creative past’ into my ‘academic present.’“The Waves Forget the Shoreline” is stylized according to ASCII and draws from my commitment to understanding how digital technologies influence and reflect cultural production, particularly in marginalized spaces. Brathwaite's emphasis on style as a form of anticolonial action that decentralies the standards and practices of traditional publishing resonated with my own practice of merging textual and visual forms adjacent to the traditional ‘text.’ Before academia this pursuit was reflected in my practice as a ‘graphic artist’ operating in DIY punk and metal circles. Amid academia, I maintain a distinctive interest in both multimodality in the classroom, and in my practice as my work balances the traditionally written paper and my emerging development of generative poems. In this early experiment, incorporating ASCII elements allowed me to further complicate the boundaries between text and design, pushing the poem toward a multimodal form that reflects both historical and contemporary approaches to electronic literature. This was as much of a familiarization process, a baby crawl, if anything else.
I recall that our readings and discussions in the second week provided a broader lens on how generative systems, like ChatGPT, affirmed my shifting view of AI not as a ‘lazy’ shortcut to productivity, but offers one avenue as a sort of phantom assistant. Then and now, I recognize this as a continuation of experimental traditions that emphasize the importance of human intervention in shaping meaningful outputs as I, like many I’m sure, are sick-tired of generative slop. My exercise in constrained generativity was not a mater of click-and-go as the generative process using ChatGPT saw me working through ten iterations of the poem and then more traditional editing strategies to refine its thematic and stylistic alignment to Brathwaite's decolonial ethos and visual innovation. I also had my own sensibilities and preferences to consider in the matter.I feel this project is important to showcase, too, because it marked the beginning of my transition from a narrow focus on medieval Irish studies to a broader interdisciplinary approach that seems more aligned to my former ‘art’ ‘work’ and cultural interests before academia. My work now increasingly engages the digital humanities, media studies, and developing my pedagogy, encouraging me to be more social with academics and creators operating outside academia to emphasize critical making.