impressions (SIGNED)

impressions consists of 24 nine-line ‘portraits’ of altruistic or otherwise admirable living personalities, from Sol Escobar to Farhana Yamin. Conceived as flipping the table on the data-scraping of pirated content performed by AI companies to train their large language models, impressions appropriates and collages the source code found within art-generating artificial intelligence itself, with recognisably human free association and wit. The result is a deeply strange series of poems that use super-compressed imagery to generate backdrops to these real world figures, based on their activism and social conscience: ‘homework very supernatural / a woman in havana being yourself, mashallah’