Hyperrhiz 28

Alinta Krauth, An E-poet: Where Nature and Humans come Together

Yolanda de Gregorio Robledo
University of Cadiz

Citation: de Gregorio Robledo, Yolanda. “Alinta Krauth, An E-poet: Where Nature and Humans come Together.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, no. 28, 2025. doi:10.20415/hyp/028.e03

Abstract: Dr Alinta Krauth, e-poet and visual artist, was interviewed by Dr Yolanda De Gregorio Robledo on July 2023, at University of Bergen, Norway. Dr Krauth grew up in Australia and lived there until a few years ago when she moved to Norway, her life in her country, as pointed out in the interview, configured her work and the themes of her works. She describes her work as an intersection of the arts and the sciences where she combines environmental and animal behavioral research with artistic imagination. She focuses on technological methods such as coding algorithms and machine learning, but all these processes are guided by a sense of beauty. The interview shows how Krauth designs interactive experiences not just for humans but also for animals using technology to create positive multispecies interactions. Krauth is a multifaced creator handling most aspects of her projects and only occasionally outsourcing tasks beyond her skill set. Her work embodies a “more-than-human” perspective, considering symbiotic relationships across species and one important aspect of her work is the use of AI as a tool to foster interspecies understanding, as for example in her project The (m)Otherhood of Meep where with the AI help, she translates flying fox vocalizations into poetry.

Keywords: e-poetry, electronic literature, eco-literature, women writers, AI, visual art, more-than-humanism.

Introduction

Dr. Alinta Krauth is an Australian new media artist and e-poet, whose practices include interactive art and sound, digital literature, and expertise in digitally connected spaces. Her background covers industrial work and academia, she is currently teaching Digital Culture at University of Bergen, Norway. She is a professional in the realm of digital interactive art as well as a volunteer in animal care. Her research is rooted in digital interactive arts and cultural philosophy, focusing on exploring the conflicts between animals and humans as well as the relationships within the environment. For this reason, Krauth's work themes are climate, extreme weather, human/wildlife coexistence, and contributing in spaces of post-environmental-crisis.

Her innovative contributions have been honored as the Leonardo-ASU Imagination Fellow for 2023/24, and she has been recently been shortlisted for the prestigious Ars Electronica S+T+ARTS Prize (2023) from the European Commission. Her works have been displaced in venues such as large screens in Times Square for ZAZ10st Gallery NY, Science Gallery Detroit USA, The Glucksman Gallery Ireland, HOTA Australia, Gallery 3.14 Norway, Art Laboratory Berlin Germany, and Cádiz, Spain.

This interview was conducted by Dr Yolanda De Gregorio Robledo on July 2023, at University of Bergen, Norway. All images © Alinta Krauth except where noted.

Interview

Dr Yolanda De Gregorio (YG): Dr Alinta Krauth, how do you describe your work?

Dr Alinta Krauth (AK): Broadly, I work at the intersection of the arts and the sciences, both in terms of the environmental themes of my research, but also its actual practice in attempting novel technological methods of creation. This can involve technical processes of developing procedural coding algorithms or developing corpora for machine learning, but it is also very aesthetically focused, where decisions about visual, sonic, storytelling, or haptic design come together. More recently I’ve started working with the idea that contemporary aesthetic practices usually made for human audiences, such as digital or interactive art, can be made for more than just human interest. This has taken me into the realm of animal computer interaction and enrichment design, which is the act of creating an environment or object for the purposes of animal well-being. A common example of enrichment would be a ball that is given to a dog. A more niche example would be some kind of food puzzle given to a wild crow that may be injured and in wildlife care. The intentions of the puzzle are to help the crow regain psychological strength and knowledge on how to survive when returned to the wild. I’m interested in the fuzzy borderline between human ideals of interaction aesthetics, and another creature’s sense of sensory pleasure gained through interactive objects. This also lends itself to the affordances we both may see in those objects or experiences, just as a ball or the act of playing with a ball is both for dogs and for humans. To my mind, philosophising about the ways in which interaction, play, and objects are sensorially important to both humans and certain other species is a way of showing our inherent similarities; spaces for humans to both help other species through direct creation and gifting of objects or experiences, and to empathise with other species through shared interests.

I would probably describe my work most honestly as being ‘bin-sifting’. Sifting through the trash of environmental and animal behavioural scientists, taking thrown out ideas or lab experiments that did not work as intended in their initial fields, and reinvigorating them through creative or poetic means. Of course, there is a tension there – an elephant in the room if you will - between the technological nature of my work and its themes of environmental and species harmony. And this is something that I have been thinking about a lot lately. How does one continue to use digital and technological practices while making those practices sustainable? How does a creative practice like mine align with the many environmental issues of the Anthropocene? How could such a practice possibly be realistically positive for multispecies relations? My practice benefits from the extractivism required to build new technologies, use servers, and the human delight in the new. Developing creative work in response to the wildlife volunteering that I do through enrichment creation is an attempt to confront this while also acknowledging its continued presence.

I think my creative drive comes from a confluence of interests when I first started over a decade ago. So, I studied creative writing and computer arts in the early 2000s, so this is where I began to consider multimodal practices, interactivity, and poetics. But I have never been very good at writing plot, I am more of a prose poet who describes small odd snapshots of life. So, I started experimenting in visual poetry and sound art around 2012. When I started releasing my work publicly and gaining commissions, which was around 2014, my practice seemed to split in two. There became a commercial side and a side that is more just for me, perhaps we could call that an academic side. So, what I’ve described just now is more the academic side of what I do. That’s where you’ll find more critical making, and responding to research in areas such as posthumanism, linguistic translations, AI development, animal-computer interaction, and umwelt theory; all of those interests in multispeciesism and the environment. On the commercial side, it was the visual nature of my work, and perhaps its interaction design, that people were most interested in. This is what would win funding and commissions. So eventually my commercial calendar became largely filled with creating family-friendly animations or interactive displays. I am opportunistic in that way, because I want to survive as a full-time practitioner, so commissions have steered one side of my practice in directions I may not have meant to initially go. Of course I am still not surviving as a full-time practitioner, but the dream is there. So, if you look at my body of work as a whole, you see these two different sides that sometimes have quite starkly different aesthetics to them. And again, this comes back to that tension between surviving as an artist but having themes that could be seen as arguably anti-technology.

Also, I should warn you that my practice is quite frantic in that I have a thousand different things going on, and am working on many projects simultaneously. It’s probably due to imposter syndrome mixed with some sort of need to multitask in order to keep my brain occupied. And in my mind all these projects are very much related to each other and all fall under the same umbrella, but I can see how others might see them as relatively separate to each other, at least in genre. I experiment with many different technologies in order to find the right genre to fit the concept or research that I am exploring. For instance, my work building interactive sound sculptures for flying foxes in rehabilitation care – the Quantum Enrichment Entangler sculptures, was made at the same time as I began the The (m)Otherhood of Meep (The Bat Translator) project, which is an AI model and interactive interface for humans to decode certain flying fox vocalisations into digital poetry. These were all also made at the same time as I was making a co-operation game for humans and dogs to use together through interactive walking harnesses. At the same time, I was working on several large-scale commissions for both public and private clients and many of these projects are ongoing. And I could list several other projects as well that are all happening at once. This is before I even get a chance to sit down and write about these works and the processes behind them. So, when I say I should warn you, I mean if I jump between ideas and struggle to explain my practice in a nutshell it’s because it can’t be neatly contained in a nutshell without purposefully excluding really large chunks. So, this is going to get messy!

YG: In your works you play the role of coder, visual artist, sound artist, you do all aspects of the work yourself…

AK: Yeah, I pretty much do it all, from idea to asset creation through to final release. Perhaps this is part of the messiness! Messy in a positive sense, of course. There are certain things that I get help with sometimes, for instance sometimes I pay for coding assistance to complete tasks that are beyond my skill level. My skill level generally, and frustratingly, keeps my practice contained to the limited space in which I can function. So, in a way, I am my own constraining criteria.

For example, a few years ago I made a work called ‘Shelter in Place’, which was a big interactive room commission in a gallery in Australia. The work was about how native animals struggle to survive bushfires. Over two billion land mammals were estimated to have died in the 2020 Australian bushfires alone, and this was something that I lived through. I was evacuated from that fire and volunteered to help local wildlife agencies in the aftermath. Something that people don’t realise is that even animals who are rescued from bushfires often don’t survive, due to smoke inhalation or burns. Rescue and rehabilitation are important but it shouldn’t have to be the only answer to our heightened risk of fire moving forward. So, the work invited the audience to digitally participate, through touching the walls, in the design of ‘personal protective equipment’ for other species. That’s not necessarily something that could ever become a reality in an ethical sense, but the idea was to put thoughts in people’s minds that they have agency to help wildlife. And to put the idea in their minds that design and creation have an important place in this conversation. Initially the interactive room was two big touchable walls, which I was able to code myself. But then Covid hit, and many interactive artists were being were told we could not make anything touchable anymore. Because everything would need to be cleaned after each person touched it, and this was just not feasible for many galleries. So, suddenly the idea of how people interacted with this work needed to completely change. In the end, rather than using touch interaction, I designed it such that if you stood in certain places in the room and performed certain gestures, things would happen on the screen. But coding this was not in my skillset, so we needed to bring someone else in to retrofit it. All the tech for this was in the building’s ceiling using six different cameras pointed downwards to the floor to pick up movement.

Speaking realistically, there are definitely pros and cons to working alone. I think if you are working alone, certain parts of your process happen much more quickly. For instance, ideas don’t have to channel through multiple people or be communicated to, or approved by, a managing body before an outcome can begin. But I also worry that there is an inbuilt bias towards work created by larger teams, completely outside of the amount of hours put into the piece. The bias simply comes from looking at a longer list of contributors and believing this makes the outcome more professional or more impressive or more expensive. I believe larger teams are naturally more impressive to the onlooker, which can be unfair for the independent creator. It’s a psychological bias that many people seem to have.

But part of why I have often worked alone is just circumstance. Everything that I've made up until recently has been in Australia, in a small town, where there really wasn’t anyone to collaborate with other than my husband, who I have subsequently collaborated with often. Up until 2017, I really didn't have much of a home internet connection due to where we were living. I had 4 GB of comparatively very slow internet I could use per month, and that was it. And I was lecturing at that time, so that's really what I had to use a lot of that home internet for. So, I was trying to be very strategic in terms of spending that internet on creating works, self-learning, and sending artwork files to others. So, it wasn't the easiest place in the world to be doing highly digital practice. Perhaps it just goes to show how much you can do with technological limitations, and limited access to influences. But I think I did miss out somewhat on being part of a community of makers.

YG: Talking about influences, could you explain the influences that you have in your work?

AK: Almost all my work has a political environmental theme or message of animal welfare. Growing up in the Australian bush made this very central to me. So many of my thematic and visual influences come from sci-art – practices that combine environmental or animal science with creative outputs. This is why I’ve experimented with, for example, biofeedback technologies on plants, or created co-operation games for humans and dogs, or created works about how climate change is affecting the sensory perceptions of different species. But also, I grew up on books about talking animals, such as The Silver Brumby series by Elyne Mitchell, in a time when anthropomorphism in children’s books was going strongly out of fashion. I seem to remember in this particular book series, the first book or two were narratives where horses spoke to each other. The author then moved to a style where the animals never spoke. And as a kid that cemented in my mind that making animals speak was culturally inappropriate, to the point where a well-known author seemed pressured to change their approach. I don’t know if that is exactly what happened in that case, but that is how I sensed it as a kid reading those books, and I’ve carried that with me – that sense that anthropomorphism is a taboo and something that causes misinterpretation of animal’s gestures and signals. While it is true, the part about misinterpretation, it’s also somewhat impossible to not translate other species’ communications into our own understandings, when we see them. So, this is something I’m now actively trying to undo in my own mind and in my own practice, because I firmly believe that small amounts of anthropomorphism in stories about animals and the environment are very useful for allowing humans empathy towards other creatures. Recently I have been thinking a lot about the book ‘The Animals in That Country’ by Laura Jane McKay and how she deals with anthropomorphism in animal voices. She uses a particular poetic style to be able to write fictional animal communications made of sounds, smells, gestures, timing, etcetera, down on paper in English. This was a direct influence on my ‘The (m)Otherhood of Meep (The Bat Translator)’ work that gives poetic voices to fruit bats using an AI listening device.

YG: So, your work is connected with more-than-humanism, could you explain it?

AK: Yes, so it's a term that sometimes gets used in scholarship to refer to an actor network, that might be either social or biological, that involves humans and other species. For example, symbiotic relationships, companion relationships, relationships of geography, relationships of care, relationships of hate. We have other species living on our skin and in our gut at all times, we eat food that may be produced or pollinated by other species, and many of the daily decisions that we make may be unwittingly dictated by other species. We are already more-than-humans living in a more-than-human world! Or perhaps, as Latour would say, we were never human at all in the way that the humanities have traditionally used the word. But actually, I like to think of it as an ethics of day-to-day interactions with other species and how we can be respectful. For example, when I was completing my PhD, I used to like to walk up and down my driveway and think. But we would have this group of wallabies that liked to lie down on the driveway, and so I couldn't complete my walk sometimes because I would scare them away. So, I would have to go back inside instead. That’s more-than-humanism for me – it’s little everyday compromises as a way of trying to head towards small equalities.

During my PhD, my work really turned in this more-than-human direction. The concept behind all the interactive interfaces produced during my PhD was that each work could be used by both humans and other species, and were in some way aesthetically pleasing to both parties in different ways. For instance, I created a cooperation computer game where player one was a dog and player two was a human. I created a series of interactive sound sculptures for fruit bats. I created an interactive dog grooming brush that would speak a dog’s favourite calming words during the process of being groomed. Of course, one of the first things I realized was how useless written language was to nonhuman participants. And how sensory experiences are so different between species that creating works that speak to both humans and another species led to multimodal combinations that humans might think of as quite odd. But I did create some early experiments that used written language as the part of a work made for humans and flying foxes during rehabilitation care. It was an installation wherein when flying foxes engaged with an enrichment toy in their aviary, their engagements would control combinatory poetry delivered to a human via a mobile phone screen. This way, both species received some form of enrichment from the same experience, albeit very different species-specific enrichments.

YG: How do you use AI in your work?

AK: Yes, so ‘The (m)Otherhood of Meep (The Bat Translator)’ uses a type of AI. But it doesn’t use AI to replace my practice, it doesn’t write anything for me or create any imagery. Those might be the kinds of generative AI’s or Large Language Model AI’s that we currently immediately think of due to large corporations such as OpenAI. Instead, I have trained a model on flying fox vocalizations that I have recorded while volunteering in flying fox rehabilitation. From this, I now have a corpus of flying fox vocalizations, and a trained model that can recognize them in real-time when it hears them. Because flying fox vocalizations have communicative meanings, it is able to pick up on these communicative meanings and display a poetic translation on screen of what it thinks it is hearing. This is a reactive machine, meaning it has been trained on one specific task and it will only ever perform that task, that is, to listen to flying fox voices and translate them based on sentences written by me. It is also what we might call assisted learning, in that the AI does not tell me what flying fox vocalizations mean, quite the opposite, I teach it based on scientific literature and my own history in flying fox rehabilitation. But once it is taught, it knows, and is able to call upon that knowledge and show it to other people. One of the interesting things about this project is that as a society we’re going down a road of developing technology strictly for human use, and we have amassed large corpora of human data to train teachable models on – such as Large Language Models. Perhaps you could say we are developing AI in a very self-centred way. But we don’t really have the same data for other species, and indeed, LLMs don’t make much sense for most other species. I’m interested in how AI can be useful, rather than harmful, to other species and the environment.

I was recently reading about a study in which it was found that people like art created by AI when they think a human has created it. But as soon as they are told it was made by AI, their feelings sour. The study was by Simone Grassini. And I’m really not surprised by this. People have a deep personal connection to creativity, and we often see creativity as something we can’t possibly share with any other species or object. We want to hold onto it as our special trait that makes us different. I worry that this makes us less likely to look into the ways in which we share creativity with nonhuman species or entities. But as it turns out, machines can produce visual products that people find aesthetically pleasing without being inherently creative, particularly when they are trained to follow the many rules’ humans have set up for perceived aesthetic value such as the ability to reproduce genres, styles, or ideas.

The last thing I want to see is a future where machines get to sit around making poetry and art while humans do labor-intensive jobs! This is the opposite of the utopia we were promised where technology would cater to humans, allowing us time and space to be creative. But I am hopefull. What I do see instead, are similarities between the backlash happening now towards novel generative AI and the backlash that occurred when large-scale digital art tools such as those from Adobe and Macromedia first emerged. There was a distinct worry that digital art would replace traditional art forms. Yet what we have found instead is that digital art has simply formed its own series of interesting genres, and traditional fine arts are still just as prevalent. In time I hope AI becomes a similar tool in the digital toolbox, in that we devise new artistic genres, aesthetics, and forms of expression around it, while other genres and tools remain just as relevant. 

YG: During the creation of ‘The (m)Otherhood of Meep (The Bat Translator)’, did you work with people from other fields?

AK: Yes, so firstly there is already some published material out there from animal sciences regarding the contexts and behaviours associated with each grey-headed flying fox vocalization. As you can imagine a vast amount of the literature review for this project had to come from the field of animal behavioural studies specific to that species. So that was really helpful for me because I could point to that literature and say, ‘see, I'm not just making stuff up!’ But because I also volunteered in a flying fox rehabilitation organization and worked with flying foxes as part of my PhD, I had observed these same contexts and behaviours many times. I now have ears trained to vocalizations of this particular flying fox species. By contrast, if you’ve ever read a book that tries to explain animal vocalizations, you’ll know that attempts to write down vocalizations cannot prepare you for what they actually sound like. Seeing ‘eee-ooo-eee’ or a description like ‘harsh chup’ written in a scientific paper cannot possibly prepare your ears for recognizing a flying fox vocalization – at least that is my experience! So, years of direct observations lead to that project, and this required working with others. The rehabilitation centre has a great team of core volunteers and workers who helped me immensely in many ways, not only through direct access to the aviary in order to make sound recordings, but through conversations about the contexts and meanings of flying fox interactions. It was really nice to have a community with which to discuss meanings when I needed it, and a lot of that happened simply through social media. I really respect the knowledge of wildlife carers because they work with animals every day, and the amount of hours that they have observed and interacted with animals over time adds up to an immense amount of experience and knowledge.

YG: What’s your favourite work that you have made and why? And what’s your next project?

AK: I don't know if I like any of my creative works very much. That's why I'm still making them; I'm still waiting for one that makes me proud. Or perhaps more that I’m still waiting for something to feel completed. It’s a bit of a worry that I’m somewhat driven by my own dislike of my work. I wonder if I will just stop making things when I finally make something I like? I made something a few years ago that I guess I like a little bit, which is called ‘Diffraction’. It has never been publicly released beyond being shown at the Electronic Literature Organization conference exhibition in 2019. It’s a mobile-based work influenced by the Situation International movement and Guy Debord’s notion of Dérive, or on-foot place-making via an unplanned journey. So, a Dérive journey often involves following participatory performative tasks that you don’t see in advance. It’s a bit OuLiPo-esque in that respect. These tasks might be unusual or absurdist things that you need to perform outside, gamifying your surroundings and perhaps discovering something new about them. For example, it might be that every time you see a red car, you must turn left. It's probably a very dangerous thing to do it in a city, really! But I really like this idea of absurdist interactions with the environment, because I would hypothesise that it doesn’t just contribute to place-making, it also puts you into a more creative headspace. So, the ‘Diffraction’ work plays with this idea of creative headspaces outdoors, but it's specifically used for going out into the forest and engaging with the trees, rather than a city. But you do so in absurdist ways, like every time you see a mushroom, you have to you have to curtsy at it, or now you have to get on the ground and crawl for as many paces as the number of rocks you can see to your left! So, these tasks come up on the Diffraction interface via your phone.

In terms of what I'd like to do next, I’d like to do more in the area of interspecies translation and what digital poetry can contribute to that field. So, for instance, taking ‘The (m)Otherhood of Meep (The Bat Translator)’ listening device and expanding it to other species. The flying foxes from that project are a threatened species that live in a very small area of the world, and so while that work is about their plight and issues surrounding human and flying fox relations, it also means that the work quite literally doesn't function in other parts of the world unless you were to have it listen to a recording. I’ve just started working as a Leonardo Imagination Fellow with Leonardo Journal and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination to expand this project into creating poetic translations and AI models for different species of improvisational songbirds. This is quite an involved task because there isn’t much research out there on the meanings behind the songs of the specific species I am looking at. Instead, there is a general idea that they sing because they want to, perhaps as a general stance on territory, and that certain birds in each family are designated songstresses. This makes a difference to how I approach translation – I feel a lot more artistic freedom in that I am not attempting some kind of direct translation, I am approaching songbirds as improvisational storytellers. I am allowing myself to be more anthropomorphic, perhaps.

YG: We were talking about influences before, but what inspired you to explore digital art/poetry as an artistic medium

AK: (Pause) I know it's not a difficult question, I'm just trying to think about what really did inspire me initially. I have to go back quite a way to tell the full story. I was very young, perhaps around 10 years old when I started trying to write stories and poetry. I had special notebooks I would use to house all my poems. Creative writing was something I was told I was good at as a child and in my early teenage years. I used to win writing awards for short stories and poems as a teenager. I think my one talent at that age was an ability to recognize cliché and avoid it when writing, which I think a lot of children can struggle with. I would perform at poetry reading nights where I was the only speaker, and after me there would be belly-dancing performances. The local paper would publish my poems in their own little section. When I say ‘I was the only one’ I mean just because no other kid was doing it. As I said, I grew up in a small town and did not know or come into contact with any other child interested in writing. It was seen as very uncool.

Around the same time, we happened to have a computer in our house. It was my dad’s work machine. So, I started learning to type around the age of 12. I don’t recall my friends having that same privilege, but I’m not sure. I remember thinking it was something special that we had in our house. While they had gaming systems on their televisions, I had access to this word processing machine with a black screen and bright green text. I would hear my dad yelling at it through a cloud of cigarette smoke from the next room on the weekends, when he lost data before exporting it to a floppy disk. So, I guess you could say I was accustomed at an early age to recognising love/hate relationships with technology! So, this perhaps started me on the path of being interested in computer technologies, it was maybe simply a case of access and of being able to simply see the machine and know how to turn it on. That’s the first step to feeling comfortable with a technology.

I know that seems to sit in contrast to the idea of growing up in a tiny town feeling cut off from the rest of the world but both points are true simultaneously. My dad would travel out of town for work and he had access to this big wider world that I didn’t see so often as a kid. Actually, it was probably more when I became an adult and had to pay for my own things that I suddenly found myself with no access to internet or equipment or community – it’s funny how money works! So during my time as a university student, I moved to the coast, to a more populated area, and landed myself a job as a photo editor and graphic designer. It was not really a creative job, my job was to Photoshop food muck off children’s faces all day, and we were given a maximum of 20 seconds per image to completely transform it into something sellable. But this kept me working with computers and creative software packages outside of a classroom, allowing me to continue to build my skills through my workplace.

But what I like about art and poetry is that you can be inspired by almost anything. I don’t need to be interested in digital art or poetry, in and of themselves, as inspirations in order to create things. I need only be inspired by other things – like the environment, the world around me, the bushfires and floods, my relationships with other animals, and so on. I think I am also clearly influenced by family.

YG: And how did your family influence you?

AK: Well, my grandmother, for instance, was a potter. I remember as a kid being taught how to use clay and making little sculptures. I remember she was always building something out of found things or spare parts and making them look beautiful. For example, she once built a fence to stop the dogs from running away, and she used bits of her broken clay sculptures to reinforce parts of it, or just for aesthetic purposes. I miss that in my work. With it being so digital, I miss that sense of working with the hands, and having that more haptic kind of engagement with materials. I think that is a more meditative practice, whereas mine is perhaps more frantic. I think it is harder to get into an enjoyable flow when you're frustrated with code, or frustrated with your hardware or lack of it. You don't get that sense of slow, accumulative meditative practice. Some of my recent projects such as making the interactive enrichment sculptures for flying foxes - the Quantum Enrichment Entangler project – start to get back to that more haptic interaction with objects, rather than spending all my time on screen-based creation. In a way, while working with animals, the animals have taught me how to return to the sculptural nature of digital technologies.

Alinta Krauth website: alintakrauth.com

A simple website for “The (m)Otherhood of Meep” artwork: alintakrauth.com/otherhood/