“They should have sent a poet.”
Jodie Foster’s character says this in the 1997 movie Contact, as she flies through space and realizes she doesn’t have the words to describe the beauty of what she’s seeing.
But maybe if she’d brought a Poetry Camera, she wouldn’t have had this problem!
The Poetry Camera is a device that looks like an instant camera. But instead of printing out photographs, when you point it at something and push the shutter button, it prints out a poem.
The camera actually analyzes what it sees and then sends that data to an artificial intelligence (AI) language model that creates poetry describing the scene.
The user can choose between different kinds of poems, like sonnets, free verse or haiku, which are printed out like a receipt.
However, the Poetry Camera needs a Wi-Fi connection to use the AI.
At present, the camera can only create poems in languages that use the Latin alphabet, such as English, French or Spanish. But there are plans for it to use non-Latin writing like Chinese, Japanese and Arabic in the future.
The Poetry Camera was created by the designers Kelin Carolyn Zhang and Ryan Mather. They say it began “as an art project to explore new ways of seeing and remembering the moment.”
“So much about the world is telling you you’ve got to move faster,” says Mather. “And it’s really nice to have something that actually invites you to slow down and appreciate everything that’s already around you.”
Although the poetry is automated, building the camera is not. Each camera is made by hand in the designers’ New York studio — at a cost of $700. But they have also released online instructions for a DIY version that anyone can make themselves!
