Dear Alter
by Jiaqiao Liu

This book is addressed to Alter – a humanoid robot designed by Kohei Ogawa, Itsuki Doi, Takashi Ikegami, and Hiroshi Ishiguro. Alter has a human-like face and hands, but a bare, metallic, skeletal body. It has an underlying algorithm that mimics the logic of neural circuits of living things, so that its actions and expressions are spontaneous, in real time. It explores what it means to be ‘life-like’ and asks the question ‘What is life?’. When reading these poems, we can also think of ‘alter’ as in alter ego; alternative; and to change in character or composition, typically in a comparatively small but significant way.

In this charged and electric experimental book, Jiaqiao Liu imagines a surreal world where robots have gained souls, a red-eyed rabbit looks out for them, hummingbirds fly, peaches smell sweet and bruise, ancestors send signs, and ancient Chinese mythologies come to life. It feels futuristic but nostalgic too, the chrome of tech brushing against the clouds of passed time. This is a world that holds all life dearly: ‘…whether stranded here – – or in the old world – – or adrift in the sky – – everything that has a soul – – wants to live’. It also sees the plurality of potentials. Liu uses many different poetic forms, one a messy version of the difficult-to-pull-off contrapuntal form, where two poems are placed side by side and can be read discretely, or merged with the lines of the other. This seems to speak deliberately to a duality of genders and plurality of identities (Liu is nonbinary). They also – in at least one instance – write several versions of the same poem, each one emitting a different tone. They are like software upgrades. Liu writes in a way that allows for multiple readings, which adds a clever and poignant layer to the question of what it means to be alive and to matter. What makes a human in this cyber age? What is a soul, what is a poem?

There are echoes here of Neo-Seoul in Cloud Atlas, where an enslaved robot gains consciousness and seeks freedom. (According to John Ayto in Word Origins, the word ‘robot’ comes from the Czech ‘robota’ meaning ‘forced labour, drudgery’, a word related to German ‘arbeit’ meaning ‘work’. It was used by the Czech dramatist Karel Capek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) 1920 for ‘mechanical people constructed to do menial tasks’.) Dear Alter also evokes The Matrix – the iconic science-fiction movie written by two transgender sisters, who wrote it as a metaphor for being trans. Lilly Wachowski has talked about the way they ‘were existing in a space where the words didn’t exist, so we were always living in a world of imagination’. Liu writes: ‘…beyond a word is an essence of a thing. / for years, I had many words / none for the essence of what I am. / I could only get to it through a dream.

One important thread in the book is the issue of loneliness. Liu draws on real-life accounts of robots in care homes, whose purpose is to provide conversation and company for the elderly. Does the fact that they are robots performing mimicry make them any less? If they are making real people feel real emotions, if they are offering something warm and soft – human? The word ‘soul’ comes from the ancient notion of the soul as something fleeting or mercurial. Liu makes us wonder if machines can grow souls, and the makeup of a brain. Bodies, too, are a recurring image – the flesh alongside the silicone.

Dear Alter is highly imaginative, topical and messy. The cover is a cosmic explosion of colours and lights and the book itself feels like silicone. It’s comic and moving, and also a book of incredibly beautiful, simple lines:

I can’t
stop my mind’s chittering, it skips
and fizzes like a once-gutted cassette. I was
so young, delighting
in wanton creation – back then,
I could, for instance

 

step on a hose without picturing a windpipe.

Liu addresses memories, the work the living must put in, the weight of feelings. The first poem prepares the reader:

some forms of flux are considered finished states
or, at least, metastable. dissociation
of the atomised self. swapping parts
down at the body shop, hip-mod out
triple-joints in. black box dusted off
trimmed chrome. slap on a name
and call it a day. repeat
per auto-update, cycle,

 

or till the great Wheel runs dry.
at the end of the world
the oldest soul got put in a baby
and baby got given a box
full of gender, and, y’know, children
are scientists, and you can never say
you are allowed one toy and one toy only
to a soul that recalls every gender it’s ever gnawed…

Some of these poems have been generated using ‘Verse by Verse’, an experiment in human-AI collaboration for writing poetry, trained on American poets. This speaks to the current hot discourse around the ethics of AI, its impact on the world, and its role – if any – in art. If the purpose of poetry is to express human experiences, how far can mimicry take us?

Liu’s generation was born in a world of microplastics and online shopping. Gone are the days of pen on paper – instead there is Google Docs, and the collaboration of global networks – each mind, each soul a little line in a shared online document. Gone are the days where poetry was reserved for writing about nature and the sublime – now technology is as much a part of our environment – as important, even – as mountains. Liu sees the beauty in this new world and is more interested in exploring questions than delivering answers.