AI SERIES

Chicago Variations

AI Art & a poem, even

4 min readJan 1, 2023

For all the 17 years I lived, studied and worked in Chicago, I seem to have very few Chicago-dedicated creative works, but I do have a few, which I’ve collected here. Hopefully I have made up for the lack in quantity of Chicago-flavored output in favor of a few choice quality pieces.

First, just to get this part out of the way, here are my few blog-posts that have Chicago tendencies:

Metal and Wind: Bertoia and the Space of Reverie

Tools, Wires & Sound: The Soundtrack Story of a Truckload of Old Pianos

Shipping Container Apartment Blocks for the Creative Underpaid Population

How a Small Art Grant Got Me My First House: the backstory of Radar Ghosts

Stepping on the Light: Essay on a Large Scale Video Projection Installation

Next, there is my poem “Radar Ghosts” (not to be confused with my spoken word electroacoustic experimental opera of the same name — I reused this nice title just because), anthologized in the City of Big Shoulders poetry anthology and reproduced below.

It’s a poem, hence it’s short enough to reprint in full!

Radar Ghosts

in the zeppelin’s windows the aquarium city
shows a gold onion dome unspiraling
blossoming for docking atop a new office tower
suspicious and gaudy in 1928
when travelers with visas and faith in their telescopes
sporting new lenses and shiny screws
conspired with mapmakers in the viewing lounge
to designate a continent’s armpit
a little capital went a long way on the map
in each grid cell were dots, penciled names
most would never lay eyes
on the actual earth therein
which was for churning anyway, or
trawling, drilling, paving, filling, piling
the heat and the boiling begat
a foam you can walk on
in eddies under the bridges
where the city synthesizes its shadows
to combat the homely flickering glow
of ten million entertainment centers
meanwhile an arsonist’s skyline effects
replays in the valley of rooftops
the black fountains of smoke and ash
fade into blue, bluer, black
where antique space-stations rustless in their orbits
bear witness to terrestrial accumulations of motion
mute holocausts of sun tuck heat into vacuum
burning antennas in 2001
when two escalator strangers smile through blue windows
hiding their heat beneath clothes which sting
there is memory in the paralysis
of a ride between two points
they cross between the gleam and the corners
that was the dream of the swamp-sellers
the escalator loops and the lovers embrace
the empty space which swells between them

I think that’s about all I have in my vault & published/exhibited Chicago-themed repertoire, until yesterday that is, when I decided to put some Chicago mentations into an AI art generator, which will take up all the remaining space in this blog post.

Hope you enjoy, or at least have some new thoughts and visual impressions about Chicago!