Talan Memmott
Winona State University
Talan Memmott is a digital writer/artist/theorist. Memmott has taught and been a researcher in digital culture and media practices at University of California Santa Cruz; University of Bergen, Norway; Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona, Sweden; California State University Monterey Bay; the Georgia Institute of Technology; and, the University of Colorado Boulder. He is Associate Professor of Creative Digital Media at Winona State University. Memmott holds an MFA in Literary Arts/Electronic Writing from Brown University and a PhD in Interaction Design/Digital Rhetoric and Poetics from Malmö University.His digital art and electronic literature work has been exhibited, presented, and published internationally. He was a co-editor for the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2 (ELO), the ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature, and was the recipient of the 2021 Electronic Literature Organization Maverick Award.
Alocutive Interpolation
Through the use of text prompts and various AI image generators, Alocutive Interpolation presents a collection of nine alternative, iterative self-portraits based on the artist’s own experience with a laryngeal cancer diagnosis and the medical interventions that follow. Using journal entries, written over the year since the diagnosis, and medical reports as text prompts for the generation of the images, the images were processed repeatedly across a variety of AI platforms, sometimes up to 100 times. Though the resulting images may emphasize the emergent body horror of cancer surgeries and treatments, they serve as a form of therapeutic aesthetics for the artist as patient.