Kyle Booten: Gyms
Daniel Barbiero
June 2025
Kyle Booten
Gyms
Dispersed Holdings
Right now, few things are as talked about – or worried over – as the rise and sudden ubiquity of Artificial Intelligence. Rapid advances in generative AI naturally raise apocalyptic fears of the possibility of a self-sustaining technology for which human control, participation, and ultimately even existence, is unnecessary. In more immediate terms, creative writers – poets, novelists, essayists, and (indulge me for a minute here), even critics – understandably fear that AI-generated texts could replace human-created works. The larger – metaphysical, even — question generative AI raises is whether a deeply human art like creative writing could be usurped by technology and turned into something like what Lyotard termed the inhuman: an instance in which “what is ‘proper’ to humankind” becomes the exclusive province of a non-human technology. But what if AI were taken on as a partner rather than competitor in creative writing? Kyle Booten’s Gyms imagines one form such a partnership could take.
The relationship between human and machine intelligence is a focal interest for Booten, who’s been described as a computational poet. He characterizes his academic interests as consisting in the “algorithmic mediation of thought, especially poetic thought,” which in practical terms means, as he put it in a recent article in the journal Critical AI, designing algorithmic systems that “help us think instead of thinking for us…[and that] use computation systems to challenge writers to be stronger.” Hence Gyms, a collection of examples showing how AI, rather than thinking for us, could prompt us to think for ourselves.
“Gyms” comes from progymnasmata, the Greek term for the preliminary exercises beginning students of rhetoric in ancient Greece and Rome undertook in order to learn to write, memorize, and deliver public speeches. Booten’s gyms are the digital analogues of these ancient activities. For Booten, AI algorithms can help to form, or reform, users’ language skills in composing poems – in fact, he’s likened gyms to creative writing workshops. Gyms presents nine such virtual workshops that Booten has developed. Some engage in elaborate dialogue with the writer, suggesting ideas, asking questions and offering critiques; some set out initial topics or bundles of words for the user to explore or elaborate on. All are intended to break a writer out of reflexive linguistic habits. To pick just three:
Lotus Chorus Workshop is a program that assertively intervenes in the writing process. Booten described it in a 2023 paper for a conference on computation and aesthetics as “a text-based interface that assists poets by simulating…a creative writing workshop…[it] is polyvocal: its various characters respond to a user’s poem with different (and possibly even contradictory) suggestions.” The algorithm functions as a kind of Socratic chorus in which multiple interlocutors comment critically on an initial, user-supplied sentence:
This is how you prepare for the next world.
:Replace “next” with a similar word that is alliterative with “world.”
:This really needs an anthimeria.
:What if you swapped “world” with a 6 syllable word that begins with “l” and that sounds like it could be from your private language?
>This is how you base for the whooshing world.
:Well revised…now keep going, write a new sentence.
>First you pick a country—America, not America, or soon America.
:Too vague. Make this a specific country from London.
:Try this again but without any proper nouns.
:I’d move “country” to the beginning of the sentence.
The italicized text is the writer’s; each sentence following a colon represents the voice of an individual member of the virtual critical chorus. Members don’t always agree among themselves, and often make suggestions that are deliberately contradictory or absurd in the context of the writer’s text. But it’s all for the purpose of creative provocation. Like Socrates, they employ a maieutic method of question and criticism to midwife more imaginative, if not more semantically cogent, results from the writer.
Minimal Ekphrastic Morphs is a gym that takes the user-supplied title of an existing work of visual art and, through word substitution, “creates” an imaginary work that the writer then is asked to describe, critique, and compare to the original, real work. Subjected to this gym’s transformations, Nancy Holt’s 1976 earthwork Sun Tunnels becomes, in turn, Sun Reservoir, Haze Tunnels, Sun Flats, Sun Roadways, and Sun Runways. Here is how the user describes the hypothetical Haze Tunnels:
Two cement tunnels pointing south/southeast from Boy Scout Tr. south of Griffith Observatory. On downward slope but pointed slightly (4° and 6° respectively) upward toward sky above city. Buttressed by dirt embankment and COR-TEN columns. Floor of tunnels scored to allow climbing. Safety railing at end of tunnels added in 1992 after UCLA student fell.
The algorithm requested a precise description, and mostly got it. From the writer’s invented facts we know what the earthwork is made of, can picture what it would look like and even learn something of its unfortunate history. (Curiously, although we get an exact measurement of the tunnels’ upward angles, we aren’t told their length.) The gym’s usefulness in stimulating a writer to flesh out his or her imaginings in detail is clear – but it would also be a fun game to play for its own sake. (There’s a decidedly ludic dimension to all of Booten’s gyms.)
The Allusion Interjector is a gym in which the algorithm interjects a word or phrase into a poem in progress. As the writer keys in the poem the gym suggests allusions to “very old things” drawn from Wikipedia, based on the most recent words the poet has typed. Booten describes the gym as a learning tool for broadening the user’s knowledge of history.
Here is the last stanza of one of the sample poems written with the interjector’s suggestions:
So now I ask for your support,
your investment in my design
of a clock, A LOTUS CLEPSYDRA⁶
of sorts. I’ve almost got
the porcelain rhododendra
to fill and fall as minutes often do
but will need some years of research
yet, and fleeting earth besides,
to make them grow as time grows,
behind our backs, like a hydra.
The gym’s contributed allusion of “a lotus clepsydra” is capitalized and footnoted to the Wikipedia article it was taken from – the entry on Guo Shoujing, the 13th century Chinese scientist and instrumental maker who made improvements to the lotus clepsydra, a water clock whose catch-basin was shaped like a lotus flower. The rest of the stanza consists of the user’s creative response to the program’s intervention. What I find intriguing about this gym is its use of association to expand a poem’s imagery, and its potential to stimulate further associations. The gym made its insertion of “A LOTUS CLEPSYDRA” on the basis of the poet’s “my design of a clock,” using “design” and “clock” to associate to a reference to a redesigned clock. That’s the first move in the game; next is the poet’s response with an association based on assonance — of the final syllables of “rhododendra” and “clepsydra.” There are further links to the concept of time, to a suggestion of the motion of water falling and filling the water clock’s receptacle, and an ending word, “hydra,” that once again associates to “clepsydra” on the basis of sound. The gym’s intervention channeled the poem’s direction and diction in imaginative but coherent ways. The process resembles a game of exquisite corpse played with a machine.
The texts set out in Gyms seem to operate at a number of different levels, depending on how we want to look at them. Are they “just” writing process exercises? Collaborative works created with a nonhuman coauthor? The results of a research program, as ironically indicated by Booten’s presenting them as the work of the (presumably) fictional A. L. Petechuk and Elodie Debras of the Center for Noetic Therapy and Healing in Tromsø, Norway? Any or all of the above? In the end, I read Gyms as a demonstration by example of Booten’s vision of a possible poetry supplemented, but not overtaken, by computational systems – as a poetics for a computational poetry. Certainly, few recent books of poetry or poetics are as thought-provoking as Gyms.
Programs like Booten’s gyms could help us to think for ourselves by pushing us to break old habits of thought and to expand our inventory of words, ideas, and images. The prompts could suggest objects we hadn’t imagined before or throw us associations we never would have arrived at and which, once imagined or arrived at through their help, would stimulate us to expand our creative ontologies or to forge further chains of associations with new and surprising linkages. AI could in these cases help us remap the districts of our imaginative worlds by prompting us to bring words into contact with each other in ways we ordinarily wouldn’t – by revealing or creating connections through what André Breton memorably called their secret affinities. What the inhuman algorithm lacks in its handling of language – what I think of as the semantic underworld, or the affective and aesthetic dimension of words which colors, shapes, and adds weight to the purely semantic or logical aspects of language – is precisely “what is ‘proper’ to humankind” and an irreducible factor in creative writing (and in any kind of language use, for that matter). Presumably, AI language models lack a semantic underworld, but with applications like Booten’s gyms they could lead us further down into our own. Can programs like Booten’s foster good poetry? That depends on the poet’s imagination and creativity – precisely those things proper to what is human.
For more info on Kyle Booten”s Gyms by dispersed holdings →
dispersed holdings is an artist-run platform for experimental publishing and listening practices founded in 2015 by Sal Randolph and David Richardson.
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Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He writes about the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work; his essays and reviews have appeared in Arteidolia, The Amsterdam Review, Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Word for/Word, Otoliths, Offcourse, Utriculi, London Grip, and elsewhere. He is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press; his score Boundary Conditions III appears in A Year of Deep Listening (Terra Nova Press).
Link to Daniel Barbiero’s, As Within, so Without →
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