M’has parlat i t’he dit que et vaig dir que no et digui

Book (Catalan and Spanish) – Text generation neural nets – 2023

Description of the book at editorial Como’s website:

Proust said that “the books we love are those that seem to be written in a foreign language”, an observation that led César Aira to write that “the first function of art is to surprise, to break the habits of perception and make the old new”. That is precisely what the Estampa collective and Irene Solà are dealing with in these pages, giving new shape to the traditional epistolary genre. Invited by the art curator Alexandra Laudo, who signs the prologue of this edition, M. and Irene maintain a correspondence that opens a path between the poetic and the hilarious.

M. is a model of text generation that the collective of artist-programmers Estampa, authors of the epilogue, used to write during this epistolary exchange, which we can well consider, following Jorge Carrion’s observation, and given the very punctual date of this experiment (2019), as an incunabulum of an Artificial Intelligence still deliciously clumsy and erratic in those years.

First edition: November 2023