INTERVIEW: ANA MARÍA CABALLERO

Ana María Caballero is an award-winning, Colombian-American transdisciplinary artist. Her expansive practice spans across poetry, prose, movement, and digital art, exploring the tension between physicality and selfhood, between biological processes and their cultural implications, and between the world and the stories we tell to contain it.

As part of a collaboration with TITLES, Caballero developed Being Borges, a generative model trained on imagery from her larger project of the same name, in which she also used AI to generate visual interpretations of Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero’s The Book of Imaginary Beings—a compendium of mythical creatures from across folklore. The project examines differences in visual rendering between the original Spanish text, its English translation, and Caballero’s own poetic rewritings, unmasking the biases latent in large data sets.

This model serves as a living interface into the mythic imagination of Borges, Guerrero, and Caballero, allowing others to tap into this layer of the collective unconscious.

We spoke with Ana María Caballero about poetry beyond the page, the symbolic possibilities of AI, and creation as an act that’s deeply entangled with history.

You are a multidisciplinary artist working across language, visual art, and digital media. Tell me more about what your multimedia approach allows you to express.

I feel that literature is a transdisciplinary work of art. There are many ways to experience it—through the text, of course, but also through sound or movement. We can experience meaning more holistically when we’re engaging with the literary through more than one medium.

For years, I’ve been translating my poetry into visual art. For example, I choreograph some of my works and then perform these choreographies. When you pair the language of the poem with the video of the movement, you tease out the underlying currents of emotion in the poem, creating a much more impactful experience.

I think that poetry has a lot to learn from the digital age, from engaging with emerging technologies and new participative experiences, beyond the printed page. Of course, I love books, but I think that if we reach beyond the page, more people will have access to poetry.

How do you think AI changes our understanding of what language is for and what it can do?

I believe we’re using language in new ways in the era of text-to-image generative AI. In prompting, we place emphasis, rearrange sentence structure, add repetition or parentheses, and remove words to affect a visual. This is a new way of writing. And it’s a new form of the symbolic, because the words we input are literally creating images through generative AI. Language becomes literal via the visual for the first time. As a poet, I’ve been creating images within people’s minds throughout my whole life, but now I can create actual images on the screen or on the page, using language.

Language becoming visual, in a literal sense, is something you explore in Being Borges. Tell me more about the idea behind this project.

There’s a book I love called The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero, a compendium of humanity’s imagined creatures. It’s written in encyclopedic form because a lot of Borges’ works are about that thin line between fact and fiction. So it could be an encyclopedia of real creatures, but it’s not. And I love that they wrote “beings” in the title, instead of “monsters” or “inventions.” “Beings” gives them humanity. I think that our ability to imagine—a phoenix, a dragon, a sylph—is what makes us human. I wanted to visualize these beings through AI, but I didn’t want to create a collection of monsters. I thought there was enough of that already out in the world, with or without AI.

I’m interested in the decision to feature these imaginary beings because I think it has parallels with the way AI creates, by compiling bits from this vast set of images to generate something new. Do you think generative tools reveal something about how creativity works?

My decision is very much linked to intertextuality, which is something that also weighed heavily in Borges’ work. He always referenced other writers, and I do the same in my literary work. In The Book of Imaginary Beings, many of the beings are constructed from other literary texts. For example, “The Double” is really a collage of descriptions of how the concept of the “other” has appeared historically in literature.

We access a database of our collective unconscious as we generate with AI, but that collective unconscious already exists within all of us, and we draw on it when we embark on any kind of creative pursuit. We’re always creating on the shoulders of giants who, in turn, create on the shoulders of other giants. Generative AI externalizes something that’s internal.

The more we know about the universe, the more unfathomable it is that we exist on this medium-sized planet going around a medium-sized sun in a medium-sized solar system. The fact that we pretend to know anything at all is unstable. Being Borges is about the instability of knowledge and the fluidity of absolutes.

Fluidity is something we see across the three different types of texts in Being Borges—the Spanish original, the English translation, and your own poetic distillation—with each of those texts yielding different results. What does this say about the nature of translation?

Being Borges investigates the impossibility of translation, but also the possibility of translation. I juxtapose Spanish and English, as well as prose and poetry. It’s hard to generalize across all the outputs, but for me, the Spanish is much more pastoral, more landscapes, a more removed lens, while the English usually generates images of people. And with the poetry, I tend to obtain more abstract results, which is fascinating as lyric writing tends to be compressed and symbolic.

How does the custom model you’ve created with TITLES tie into the Being Borges project?

I think it’s a key part of the project. The images used to train the model are ones I’ve selected over years of iteration. As models get better, they also get worse. They just output the catalog photograph version of what we prompt. To obtain compelling outputs, we must bend language. It’s great to freeze time, in a way, by telling the story of the project through this specific custom model—and I love that other people will be able to engage with it.

Try Ana María Caballero’s model on TITLES to create your own Imaginary Being.