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Research Questions

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My research questions all formed over time, arising from the course readings as well as the projects I completed. I did not enter into the course with any questions in mind, only excited to learn and explore material that I was previously unfamiliar with. It is difficult to find the specific source of each question, as I only recognized each of them as I was putting together my final project. These are the questions that guided that project, having developed as I played, discussed, and experimented:

What is a machine?

This question is the center of my explorations in this course. This one did arise sooner than the others, after I had put together my tape experiment. My tape experiment was the first moment in which I considered that I myself am a machine; this further encouraged me to question what else might be an atypical machine. I sought to discover where the human and typical machine come together and interact, displacing prior beliefs about the separation of the natural and the mechanical.

What does a machine sound like?

This question arose closer to the end of the semester, as I was working on my Gertrude Stein experiment. We discussed in class whether her poetry reading seemed robotic, and it made me come to terms with my own ideas of what a machine could sound like. Typical understandings of machines would lead one to expect that machine sounds would be similar to those found in a factory setting, or perhaps similar to that of digital beeps and boops. I became curious about exploring the sounds of natural machines as well, and whether the human voice itself can be found mechanical.



This course created questions beyond the material itself, though. I found myself interested in how AI and other machines might use language. This arose in part from my Judith Butler experimentation, but also in part from my work in a different class; my other course discussed many readings about speech, language, and performances of the two. I grew curious about how AI could utilize language as a performance of humanity, imitating the human in a game much like that of Turing's creation. This question was not explored within the course projects, but I feel it is an important curiosity to highlight for possible future work:

How do machines utilize language?

In theory, machines only know as much about language as they are given by humans. Models are trained on language found online, utilizing the sentence structure and phrasing of others' words to create their own new (or newish) sentences. There is something particularly uncanny about this use of language, formed from the remnants of other sentences, and yet that uncanniness is precisely my point of interest.

References

Butler, Judith. "Theatrical Machines." differences, vol. 26, no. 3, 2015, pp. 23-42.
"Gertrude Stein reads If I Had Told Him a Completed Portrait of Picasso." YouTube, uploaded by awetblackbough, July 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJEIAGULmPQ.
"Question marks creative black vector image." Vector Stock, https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vector/question-marks-creative-black-vector-27983413. Accessed 3 Dec. 2024.
Turing, A. M. “I.—Computing Machinery and intelligence.” Mind, vol. LIX, no. 236, Oct. 1950, pp. 433–460, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/lix.236.433.

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