Experimental Poetry: Machine Children

I’m inventing a new artform by combining poetry, color, and mathematics. In Machine Children, I use category-theoretic notation to show a cycle of transformations between states in the machine people’s lives. I take advantage of the abstraction in category theory to overlap with seemingly non-mathematical ideas. By framing these emotional ideas in a mathematical context, we see that quantification is not as separate from the human experience as some might think. I discuss machine people to further blur the cultural distinction between mechanism and emotion. The colorful disks provide a bridge from the black-and-white text (which describes colorful concepts) to a physical manifestation of color. In this way, I bring out the underlying hues inside the notation and make them visible to all. Machine Children links logic and emotion, demonstrating that these ideas need not be isolated from each other.