Cirrus@Austlit

'‘SYSTEM_ERROR’ is an interactive generative poem which explores the fracture of digital selfhood in a time of global crisis. With the aid of generative text software library Tracery, the speaker is presented as an unstable AI speaking to the reader via dialogue boxes reminiscent of operating system pop-ups, which invoke ongoing existential threats or “system errors” for humanity including pandemic disease, media propaganda, technocapitalism and the collapse of global ecological systems. The generative and interactive components of ‘SYSTEM_ERROR’ seek to complicate notions of a divide between the real and digital worlds. While the traditional action with a dialogue box is to close it, each attempt to dismiss the speaker produces more laments, questions and accusations. The subversion of expected agency over pop-ups recalls the struggle to escape reminders of real-world crises within digital media environments. Blending first and second person pronouns in the fragments also suggest a growing entanglement between the digital world of the artificial speaker and the physical world of the reader. Readers are trapped in an endless loop of existential terror – if left unattended the speaker eventually acts without prompt, deteriorating into an incomprehensible stream of text.'

(Publication abstract)