Link: Solar powered dawn poems: progress report

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An account from poet and programmer Allison Parrish about a project of low-energy computational poetry:

Last year, CultureHub accepted a project proposal of mine for their residency program. I proposed the creation of “a radically small language model, trained on a low-power microcontroller,” which operates “only when drawing sufficient energy from solar panels.” This language model would be trained on a corpus of “albas, a poetry genre in which lovers lament the oncoming dawn” and generate new examples of poems in this genre—again, using only solar power. Both Solar Protocol and Low Tech Magazine’s solar powered server inspired this work, and I also see it as a continuation of my research in standalone poetry-generating devices.

In this post, I show the progress I’ve made on this project, and relate what I’ve learned so far. [...]