Katy Ilonka Gero is a poet, essayist and scientist. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Catapult, Synaesthesia, and more, and she was named a 2020 Winter-Spring Brooklyn Poets Fellow. She is a computer science PhD candidate at Columbia University, where her research on new technology for writing is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Brown Institute for Media Innovation.
“I plan to investigate the history and practice of feedback as it relates to CultureHub artists and productions. Feedback is a fundamental idea in engineering, underlying all manner of self-regulation from cruise control to machine learning. Similarly, as human practitioners, we use feedback to improve or adapt our work, whether that feedback is external (teachers, peers, audiences) or internal. When does feedback act as a self-regulating process, and when does it lead to chaos, or perhaps new paradigms of thought? How do physical and digital feedback differ, and what new affordances for feedback might we create?”