The man can’t bear the red straw hat on the table.

The sky is dark, and the world is still alive.

Copart: a automotive shop in Dunnes. The small boy was pulling a paper bag and staring at the street lights.

These are excerpts from the collected writings of Word Car, the four-wheeled poetry machine created by artist and creative technologist, Ross Goodwin. Goodwin, with funding from Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence Institute (AMI), set out on an AI-assisted update to the literary road trip, where the car itself was the writer. The artist hit the road in Word Car, a rented Cadillac equipped with a hacked surveillance camera, an onboard database of information on local businesses, and a text-generating AI program trained with the complete texts of over 200 classic road novels. On a 1,300-mile, 200,000-word road trip from Bushwick to New Orleans, Word Car responded images to visuals, sounds, and location data with a continuous, stream-of-(un)consciousness narrative in prose and images. Along for the ride were a team from Google’s AMI project, including photographer Christiana Caro (UA MFA Photography 20xx), and filmmaker Lewis Rapkin, who made Automatic on the Road, a short documentary about the project in collaboration with Dolby.

This evening will feature a screening of Automatic on the Road and a reading and conversation with Ross Goodwin, Christiana Caro, and Lewis Rapkin.