Synkroniciti is excited to welcome poet and artist Karen Faris from Rochester, NY. Her poem “HAL Has Left The Building,” beautifully illustrated with her colorful photo “Electrical Hum,” warns that Artificial Intelligence may very well be a creation which outlasts the human race. “The AI grasps infinity./ Takes it with them wherever it goes.” Taking inspiration from HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Karen takes us to the brink of human extinction. What if the next step in evolution is a pivot away from organic life? The appalling possibility has never been more credible. The AI doesn’t need the conditions which organic life needs to survive and it is designed to learn from its mistakes, which we humans don’t seem to be doing in the face of cataclysm.
Read “HAL Has Left The Building” in our September 1st issue, “Broken,” available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Karen Faris works across the artistic spectrum and creates in order to escape the constraints of gravity. Whether she is making visual art, fabric, or performance art, words remain her constant in this rapidly changing world as she argues for a kinder, more compassionate, more humane planet. She has published the art + words chapbooks Florine! Oh Florine! and The Death of Compassion (aaduna, 2019). Her poetry based Aliens Like Us was in the 2019 Rochester Fringe Festival and she has a growing fondness for art in unexpected spaces. She lives in Rochester, NY where she continues to dream up new projects.
On September 23rd, 2023, Karen Faris’s Like the Last Woods in the World pop up art exhibit will be part of Tinker Park’s Harvest Festival in Rochester (Henrietta), NY.