The award-winning poet and artist on exploring attitudes around Brexit, using AI in their work, and swapping London for Paris
Born in 1988, Jay Bernard is a British poet, artist and film programmer born in London. Their multimedia project Surge: Side A, about the 1981 New Cross house fire, won the Ted Hughes award in 2017. Their debut poetry collection, Surge, won the 2020 Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year award and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize and the Costa book award for poetry. Their new project, The Last X Years, uses AI software to assemble news headlines from the last decade with segments of conversations about Brexit they conducted with people across the UK. They live in Paris.
What is the concept behind The Last X Years?
I’ve been really curious about how Cambridge Analytica manipulated the referendum and the elections in Trinidad and Tobago. I wanted to demonstrate that qualitative data was being manipulated, [but] instead of putting the spotlight on the data, I put it on the processes. The piece uses TensorFlow, Google’s open source AI, to make connections between about 2,500 articles and 450 clips from interviews I conducted [about Brexit]. The clips are then played in a six-day loop as a continuous broadcast, and the connections made by TensorFlow are made visible – you can see them all in a kind of mirror world, pulsating and moving. The idea was to make this often invisible process visible. We’re always going to see authoritarianism, tyranny, wars, but do we have the tools that we need to deal with the manipulation of democracy, not only by people, but by computers? If literacy was a problem 100-150 years ago, what’s our problem now? I think it’s technical illiteracy.
