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Joe and Mark are joined by the famed cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling, from his studio in Torino (Turin), Italy.

Bruce describes himself as is a ‘diaspora kid’ and currently splits his time living in Austin, Belgrade, Torino and Ibiza.

“I don’t like doing the same thing over. So, I don’t write trilogies or sequels. I’m writing a lot of short fiction. I do some lecturing and consulting. I’m also the art director of an arts festival here in Turin, which is called Share Festival.”

The Share Festival is a technology arts festival in Turin, one of the most heavily visited cities in Italy.

One of their projects is to re-create a working model of The Versifier, which was originally a 1959 short story by Primo Levi. In the story, a poet is offered the chance to produce more poetry faster with a machine AI. “Then in 1971 it became an episode on an Italian TV,” Bruce says.

“It’s probably the most prophetic object that Italian science fiction has every produced.”

They are assembling a polystyrene model which is the first step to creating a working replica.

In the story, The Versifier is cybernetic object at the center of a story about how the human experience is altered by computer and AI.

What follows is a deep and fascinating conversation that also digs into the work of kinetic sculptor Alexander Calder, AI technology and the human need to create art.