Connected/Disconnected
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Algorithms & Imaginaries
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
With the rise of AI, scholars are grappling with how it fits into their field and determining how authorship plays a role in the assistance of these tools. I argue that AI can be deemed a digital companion to creative and interactive design. Anthropic has recently launched Claude Code, a coding assistant for various projects. This talk explores how agentic AI can offer digital assistance while advocating for human thought to remain at the forefront. This talk will analyze and demo an interactive site and explore a collection of AI-assisted poems built alongside Claude Code titled "Connected/Disconnected." It will explore Claude Code as a digital companion for multimodal pieces meant to mirror the ongoing push and pull of technology and society. The theme of these poems is to connect these juxtaposing ideas by continuously asking Claude Code to make poems as emotional as possible, pushing the boundaries of AI through the rhetorical strategy of pathos.
My collection aims to demonstrate how, through specific prompting, AI can contribute to the themes of the poems through accompanying graphics. Each poem builds upon this narrative from various perspectives and showcases how digital poetry can expand upon the genre while also acknowledging the implications of AI within creative works. The site will present a combination of interactive poems that users can interact with and engage with in nonlinear forms, allowing them to become not only a viewer but also an active participant in the meaning-making of the works through digital spaces.
Connected/Disconnected
Algorithms & Imaginaries
With the rise of AI, scholars are grappling with how it fits into their field and determining how authorship plays a role in the assistance of these tools. I argue that AI can be deemed a digital companion to creative and interactive design. Anthropic has recently launched Claude Code, a coding assistant for various projects. This talk explores how agentic AI can offer digital assistance while advocating for human thought to remain at the forefront. This talk will analyze and demo an interactive site and explore a collection of AI-assisted poems built alongside Claude Code titled "Connected/Disconnected." It will explore Claude Code as a digital companion for multimodal pieces meant to mirror the ongoing push and pull of technology and society. The theme of these poems is to connect these juxtaposing ideas by continuously asking Claude Code to make poems as emotional as possible, pushing the boundaries of AI through the rhetorical strategy of pathos.
My collection aims to demonstrate how, through specific prompting, AI can contribute to the themes of the poems through accompanying graphics. Each poem builds upon this narrative from various perspectives and showcases how digital poetry can expand upon the genre while also acknowledging the implications of AI within creative works. The site will present a combination of interactive poems that users can interact with and engage with in nonlinear forms, allowing them to become not only a viewer but also an active participant in the meaning-making of the works through digital spaces.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2026/algorithmsandimaginaries/schedule/5
Bio
Emery Beckman is a second-year PhD student at the University of Central Florida in the Texts and Technology Program. Her areas of research include feminist rhetoric, digital poetics, and AI literacy. Her poetry has been published through a domestic violence shelter site, where she wrote and researched feminist theory and statistics. Her forthcoming publication in “Community Literacy Journal,” “Buried Burdens,” features digital erasure poetry that highlights vs. omits Black historical female poets and their contribution to social change, aiming to combine research inquiries and demonstrate how creative writing can promote social change through rhetorical strategies.