Dante and the Ouija Board
Dante and the Ouija Board
Towards a Humanities-oriented Approach to AI Studies
Workshop
8 May 2024, 10:00-16:00
FAB4.76 (Transnational Resource Centre)
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Organizers: Prof. Fabio Camilletti (Warwick), Dr Paola Cori (Birmingham)
Funded by the IAS
On the 2nd of November 2023, Apple Records released Now and Then, a new song by the Beatles. The peculiarity of this release was that two of the musicians – John Lennon and George Harrison – were dead at the moment of recording, and that production only limitedly recurred to overdubbing. Lennon’s original demo and Harrison’s guitar and vocal parts were elaborated through AI technology, so that the two surviving Beatles could play along with the technological ‘ghosts’ of their deceased bandmates. This aspect was vividly captured by Peter Jackson’s music video, where the four Beatles cohabit the recording studio in a spectral way.
The release of Now and Then triggered a speculative debate on future, potential uses of AI in the creative industry, including the possibility of producing brand new artifacts by deceased novelists, songwriters, and painters. What is being largely forgotten, however, is that posthumous creation is not a recent invention, and that the dead have been making art for quite a long time. Throughout the long and ramified history of modern Spiritualism, professional and amateur mediums channelled a vast body of works posthumously ‘dictated’ by writers, philosophers, and musicians through devices such as the planchette, the ouija board, or automatic writing. The association between spirit writings and AI creations is not merely suggestive. In the post-Romantic age, spirit writings embodied similar concerns about authorship and style, performatively challenging dominant ideals of artistic creation through the production of disturbing artworks. Moreover, they did so by subverting social and gender roles, through the powerful image of the medium (often female, quite always from the working classes) ventriloquizing the ‘dead white male author’. In an age witnessing the slow emergence of the idea of an ‘unconscious’ sphere of psyche, these texts heralded the quintessentially psychoanalytic scandal that something speaks in the place of the Ego. Finally, as works produced by dead authors, they implicitly posed the question of the death of the Author. The de-subjectivized idea of literature implied by spirit writings challenged Romantic ideals of authorship, suggesting that all creation is ultimately a collective one and that authorship is merely a construct, thereby paving the way to the synergy between Spiritualist practices and those of Modernism and the avant-gardes, from Yeats to the Surrealists.
Aligned with the ‘Intelligence and Consciousness’ Arts Faculty research theme, the Dante and the Ouija Board project seeks to explore the possibility of a Humanities-oriented approach to AI Studies through the analysis of this forgotten body of works, which contemporary technologies and the retromaniac obsession of the present have made suddenly urgent. While keeping a transnational outlook, the project will focus on Italy, a cultural context witnessing a veritable proliferation of spirit writings from the 19C through the 20C. Unlike the Anglo-American domain, Italian spirit writings were mostly ‘dictated’ by canonical authors – particularly Dante –, as was probably inevitable in a country where literary tradition has historically been one of the most crucial articulations in the construction of national and political identity. Amongst these authors, the primacy of Dante is by no means incidental. As a poet from the Beyond as much as of the Beyond, in his Comedy Dante too had made the dead speak, and in Purgatorio had given a definition of poetry as dictation that the Spiritualists could easily claim as theirs: “I am one who, when Love breathes / in me, takes note; what he, within, dictates, / I, in that way, without, would speak and shape”.
By gathering Warwick-based scholars and external guests in a spirit of mutual intellectual exchange, thus workshop aims to set the initial grounds for the Dante and the Ouija Board project, particularly exploring possibilities for future events, joint publications, and applications for external bids.
The workshop is open to all and will involve a light lunch and a coffee break. For more information, please email F.Camilletti@warwick.ac.uk
Confirmed participants
Prof. Fabio CamillettiLink opens in a new window (University of Warwick) [PI]
Mr. Gennaro AmbrosinoLink opens in a new window (University of Warwick)
Dr. Marta ArnaldiLink opens in a new window (University of Oxford)
Dr. Federica ColuzziLink opens in a new window (University of Warwick/Centre for Dante Studies in Ireland)
Dr. Paola CoriLink opens in a new window (University of Birmingham) [Co-I]
Prof. Morena CorradiLink opens in a new window (CUNY)
Dr. Paolo De VenturaLink opens in a new window (University of Birmingham)
Dr. Francesco GiustiLink opens in a new window (University of Oxford)
Ms. Enrica LeydiLink opens in a new window (University of Warwick)
Mr. Matteo PolatoLink opens in a new window (Manchester Metropolitan University)