HAUS FÜR POESIE

Daniel Falb (born 1977 in Kassel) interprets the evolution of artificial intelligence in his new volume Große Sprachmodelle (Matthes & Seitz, 2026), which has gained enormous momentum in recent years and swept humanity into a rapid succession of developmental epochs, as a “transkulturelle Offenbarungsgeschichte”. An ancient animus encounters a new variant with far-reaching consequences. All of this is accompanied by a fundamental affront to the creative subject, shattering the dream of the sovereign original genius who draws everything solely from personal inspiration.

Falb converses with various chatbots and deadbots (the latter being supplied with data from deceased persons in order to enable posthumous encounters with surviving relatives). He confronts different large language models, whose predecessor and successor systems he coolly imagines as a “Frucht voller Schrauben”, with the same statement of existential self-assurance: “I was here.” He also explores the extent to which machines act as agents of a Homogenocene, actively contributing to the ongoing extinction of languages and accelerating the loss of dialects and linguistic diversity within individual languages. Finally, he examines the central role that certain specialised machines, such as the AI targeting system Lavender, play in contemporary warfare.

Joshua Groß (born 1989 in Günzburg, Bavaria) compellingly and wittily resists the pressures of uniformity and standardisation in his three-part Frankfurt Poetics Lectures, Neben sich selbst hergehen. Denken in Avataren. At the outset of what he portrays as a deeply unsettling age of artificial intelligence, he defends poetry, drawing on Ossip Mandelstam’s idea of poetry as an active form of understanding rather than a practice of mere imitation and retelling.

With Groß, listeners move through borrowed years marked by curiosity and despair. The lectures explore the advantages of shapeshifting through the example of a lizard hologram serving as an elaborate carnival costume, 3D body scans as health avatars, data-gathering technopolitical lamp-heads, and refuges of the imaginary and the supernatural within the surveillance structures of future smart cities. Unexpected connections are drawn between Street Fighter and Mahjong on the one hand, and between One Piece and Bruno Schulz’s Zimtläden on the other. In the end comes the recognition of the grace of literature and the memory of the pleasures of grilled processed-cheese toast made on a contact grill.

In Reading & Conversation Daniel Falb, Joshua Groß
Moderation Insa Wilke