Dear Reader:

We are bored by the words that surround us.

Online, the language we consume is designed by impersonal algorithms to provoke in us intense emotion, to compel us to stay a little longer. As writers, meanwhile, we find ourselves constantly confronted with images, turns of phrase that feel tired, overstated, predetermined; pre-packaged metaphors, marketable meanings wrapped in cellophane. 

In her 1913 poem “Sacred Emily,” Getrude Stein wrote the famous line Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. “I’m no fool,” Stein said in response to the dersision of her contemporaries. “I know that in daily life we don't go around saying 'is a ... is a ... is a ...' But I think that in that line, the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.” 

What Stein meant is that for a hundred years, poets had been writing about the rose without actually thinking about the qualities of a real flower – they’d just thought about it as a metaphor. Pre-assigned symbolic meanings, for Stein, kept a thing from being truly itself or vivid. In “Sacred Emily,” she wanted objects to cease to be merely metaphorical signposts, to become fresh, tactile, themselves again. 

Stein’s age was not dissimilar from our own. The industrial advancement of the previous century had meant that jobs once performed by human bodies were suddenly automated. The Great War and a new kind of machine age loomed: impersonal weaponry would soon bring about mass destruction of human effort; individual soldiers found themselves at the mercy of tanks and machine guns. Much of the writing that emerged out of the next decades sought to grapple with a mechanised, automated, and violent world that left no room for the imperfect experience of the individual.  

It’s no accident that Stein is interested in what it’s like to be a human being moving through the world – in questions of embodiedness. Despite the obscurity of her verse, one can’t help but sense the undeniably authentic emotion she conveys. Her concern for how people experience their surroundings, then, is really a question of what qualities of human experience might persist in a machine age. 

With the advancement of AI technology, we now live in perhaps the final iteration of that age. We’ve produced a machine that in the near future will be able, not only to perform tasks that once belonged to human bodies, but in every superficial way actually appear to be human – even to make our art, our war. We are confronting the threat such a possibility poses to human creative capacity, effort, and thriving.  

At VOLTA, we’ve found hope in Stein’s promise. Appearances can’t make the machine actually human, and the ordinary experiences of an embodied mind might enforce the division between person and machine. 

There’s an old Meg Ryan film called City of Angels where Nicholas Cage plays an angel who comes to earth and falls in love with her. When he asks her to describe the taste of the pear she is eating, she responds, with surprise, that he must know what pears taste like. “Of course I know what a pear tastes like,” he replies. “But I don’t know what a pear tastes like to you.” It may be a corny scene, but in implication it’s just as profound as Gertrude Stein’s rose. 

Technology isn’t embodied, and so it can never see a rose, or taste a pear, for itself. It can only copy what human beings have said about their experiences. 

Our age is hungry for a new self-image. At VOLTA, we hope to offer a way to think about what remains fundamental in us, what is worth preserving. 

With gratitude,

The Editors
Charlotte Ungar & Maisie Bilston