Poetry-writing robot to take its couplets across the country on train adventure
Ryerson University instructor built literary android out of a pasta strainer, vacuum and thermal printer
At the Zeller and Harris Smith household there aren’t any pooches and no fuzzy felines.
But the Port Credit couple still has a creature that crawls around the floor making noises.
“It’s kind of like having a pet that hasn’t been house trained,” Ryerson University instructor Frauke Zeller said.
She motions to kulturBOT—a poet robot she and David Harris Smith built from a pasta strainer, vacuum and thermal printer.
The genderless creation flashes red and spits out poems it crafts based on strings of letters it finds in the diaries of David Thompson, an esteemed Canadian geographer and fur trader.
Many of the poems lack perfect grammar or a logical arrangement of words, but McMaster University researcher Harris Smith argues, “they’re still strangely beautiful.”
Among the 20,000 he estimated the robot had already written was one that said “one of woods grow on this weight moons and looking down the” and another read, “men had worn by our oldest hunter only six hundred miles of Great Britain and Women.”
Starting Saturday, it will dole out those epithets aboard the Great Canadian PoeTrain — a moving locomotive that will carry kulturBOT and dozens of poets and musicians from Ottawa to Vancouver, making stops in Toronto and Edmonton.
Along the way, snippets of its poems and photos of the robot travelling along the train’s scenic route will be tweeted and shared on Facebook.
Zeller and Harris Smith won’t be chaperoning their progeny for its journey, but they’re confident that won’t be a problem.
“Poets are friendly people,” Zeller said, giggling. “Plus, I don’t think kulturBOT gets motion sickness so it won’t be too much too handle.”
The trip will have kulturBOT following in the footsteps of its sibling, hitchBOT, which hitchhiked across the country last summer and made its way to Germany earlier this year.
“It’ll be nice for kulturBOT,” said Zeller. “HitchBOT usually gets all the attention.”
Of the two, she said, kulturBOT is the elder. Its first rendition, serving as a critic that photographed and captioned art, was built in 2012 by the couple and some of their students as a way to marry their passions of art and robotics.
Two remodels later, kulturBOT has lost its shutterbug element and begun toying with words instead.
Zeller and Harris Smith said they aren’t sure what is in store for the robot beyond the train tour, but they’re looking forward to having both their creations at home.
“They’ve never played together. One of them has always been dismantled or out somewhere,” said Zeller.
“It’ll be nice to be all together again.”