Alphabets of Automatisation

Burg Hülshoff – Center for Literature (CfL) is a cultural centre in a rural region which organises projects on literature, digital culture and technology, among other areas. The new project “Alphabets of Automatisation” highlights the literary exploration of AI technologies. The project organisers are collaborating with authors, partner institutions, such as the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (LCB) and Verstehbahnhof in Fürstenberg/Havel, as well as degree programmes offered by the Deutsches Literaturinstitut Leipzig, das Institut für Literarisches Schreiben at the University of Hildesheim and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Under artistic director Jenni Bohn and the conceptual advisor, poet and theorist Daniel Falb (CfL artist in residence 2024/25), the project investigates how AI and large language models (LLMs) are impacting literary writing and practice. The project also plans to create its own training datasets and to establish prompting as a critical practice. Engaging in literary writing with authors, students and the public, the project aims to practically probe the limits of AI literacy in 2026 and 2027. In various workshops, authors will gain the necessary know-how to create their own training data sets. This will enable them to integrate their own or underrepresented perspectives into the evolving literary bots. The workshop participants will then interact directly with the bots, explore their literary capabilities and work together to produce new language experiments and texts. In workshops with students and adolescents, the safety guardrails and limits of comprehension inherent in large language models will be made visible. A public lecture series will accompany the project, and the final results will be presented as a publication.