Author: Kyle Booten Publisher: dispersed holdings (2025) Our computational devices—increasingly powerful, increasingly “intelligent”—can now think for us, perceive for us, pay attention for us, write for us. Lest we forget how to do these things ourselves, we dearly need new models for co-existing with algorithmic media, the artificial minds on our desks and in our pockets. Kyle Booten’s Gyms offers one such model. This book documents Booten’s process of developing nine different “gyms”—computer programs that, as he composes poems, place his human mind under unusual strain, trigger its unused muscles, and test its focus and endurance. One gym goads him to pick up and ponder weighty allusions. Another challenges him to painstakingly perceive and describe the features of various artworks. Still another stretches his verse’s syntax beyond the limits of human cognition. Gyms is a collection of poetry, but it is also the lab notebook of a speculative and idiosyncratic Human-Computer Interaction research, or of an applied, empirical approach to the future of poetic form. It invites the reader to imagine—and, more than imagine, create—their own answers to the question: how can we program ourselves to think the uncomputable?
