Dada or DaDa or DADA! was a vigorous post-WWI movement in the arts. It reflected the madness of what preceded it. It suggested, enacted, exploded what was to come after it. Here is our Dada! poem made by actual quotations that support of Artificial Intelligence by real people (who knows! DaDA!).
A note before we get into it. I am not linking out to references such as Tristan Tzara, Kathy Acker or the technique mentioned here. This is because I want people to go and search and find. Then, in the search, be distracted, to go down rabbit holes. That’s human. Two very contradictory events:
- Read to the end without distraction
- Search for you feel, and be distracted
Those two sequential events are beautifully related. They can lift the mind (the soul and the heart) differently, not so much elegantly or authentically (whatever that means) but differently to the way The Internet has trained us. Differently to the way it has trained Ai, which has been trained only on the digitised and the digitisable. No old postcards making up or breaking up with distant lovers for Ai. No bad charity shop notes left in forgotten books of the dead and the desperate to stir the mindlessness of Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini or the rest of them. Rabbit holes, tunnels from your senses into barrows and hillsides and gas station rest-room graffiti, all hidden away, all available to you.
“But people will leave the page! People will engage for less time!”
Yes, that’s perfectly true. What’s also true is that I may find people who read from the start to the finish. Then, after taking that much interest, they may visit a library or a second-hand bookshop, or look for links. I, we, have nothing to sell you here, so engagement time, page views, links in and out mean nothing. What does mean something is reading from start to finish and seeing what happens inside your imagination.
Does this makes no rational sense? Does it only appeal to the heart and soul?
This poem also draws on the Cut-Up technique credited to and used by many artists including Dada master (as if there could be such a thing) Tristan Tzara, the painter/writer free-minder Brion Gysin who was a friend to professional slumsman, rich kid and wife-shooter, William Burroughs. Of course, the cultural magpie and sometime pal of Burroughs, Mr David Bowie (no idea where part 1 is) also had his shot.
More women please
As ever, Women poets, writers and artists rarely get a look in ever, but even more so when the subject of the cut-up technique is invoked.
Dearest Kathy Acker had a bash because ‘control is a myth’. In fact, Kathy could be the poster girl/women for Ai given her predilection to plagiarise heavily (just tap the table and ask Jean Genet about that one).
Acker did, however, interweave the lifted pieces with her own imaginative work – something that Ai is incapable of because it has no imagination. Its ‘recall’ is constructed entirely from everything available on the internet (which, we need to keep reminding ourselves, is not everything there is), it has no ability to choose or to discriminate what ‘means’ anything to it. This is not a matter of having no ‘taste’. It is a matter of simply being a storage and retrieval unit, an automated IKEA shelf.
If you know of any women artists, writers, poets, normal people who use this technique please get in touch.
Back to the pome
So, to the never-ending poem. Like Artificial Intelligence, I plucked the source material from the internet because i could because i will. I printed out pages of quotes line by line and then cut the pages up, line by line. I then collected them in a bag and, eyes closed, picked a line of paper out. Then I looked at it and decided if I wanted to include it in the poem. I based my decision on my current state of sobriety or how angry, hungry, sleepy I was. I based it on whether my partner and I were getting along, whether she was with me or far away (she travels a lot). All of these choices were sub-themes of the main theme:
Does this makes no rational sense? Does it only appeal to the heart and soul?
A final point that needs to be made: unlike Ai, however, all of these quotes are in the Public Domain. This poem steals from no one. This poem will go growing until I die.
Part I – March 2026
Looks good. The hard truth: Beautiful AI visuals are table stakes now. The value is in knowing WHAT to create and WHY.
Strategy > Execution.
AI now saves me hours every week without diluting a single opinion. But not in the way most people assume… I use AI to structure my thinking.
The bubble isn’t AI. The bubble is us.
This isn’t a threat to writers. It’s a wake-up call.
The bar for “good enough” writing just changed forever. If your content isn’t substantially better than what AI produces in seconds, you have a problem.
AI won’t replace writers.
But writers who use AI will replace those who don’t.
Some readers implicitly equate roughness with humanity and polish with automation.
Cognitive offloading avoidance
Read till the end. It will make sense. Something interesting is happening right now.
The real question is: What does this mean for the film industry?
AI disrupts that. Someone without elite training can now produce a clear, organized thought.
PART II – March 2026
It’s true, the skill of the future is your imagination!
Let that sink in for a second.
Welcome to the big leagues.
AI is becoming frighteningly stable.
But be careful when writing your prompts, because they tend to come true
This wave is unstoppable.
You turn people data into business strategy.
You drive change before the business even knows it needs it.
You’re policy and performance. Pragmatism and care.
You’re not one thing. You never were.
We see all of it.
Is that authentic? Or is that just… polished pretending?
What do you think does the medium affect authenticity?
The message is 100% real