A workshop with Joanna Krenz to discuss two papers she authored:

Programmer as Translator: The LHC of Chinese Artificial Intelligence Poetry

Virtual Conciliation: (Un-)Coding the Split between Tradition and Modernity in Chinese Artificial Intelligence Poetry

The workshop will focus on artificial intelligence (AI) poetry as a form of translation, understood here as the translation of a particular paradigm of poeticity operative within Chinese society into virtual reality. We will address three dimensions of this process—linguistic, human, and cultural—while identifying moments of unavoidable failure and examining their artistic and social consequences. The discussion will be preceded by a general introduction to the history and context of AI poetry in China, based on my research to date.

Joanna Krenz is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Language and Literature at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. She translates and publishes widely on Chinese poetry and prose. She is the author of In Search of Singularity: Poetry from Poland and China Since 1989 (Brill, 2022). She is currently working on the project The World Re-Versed: New Phenomena in Chinese Poetry as a Challenge and Inspiration to Literary Studies.

About the East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) is a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. Part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from across Cornell's colleges and schools.