Kyle Booten

Assistant Professor

English

About

Kyle Booten is a scholar-practitioner whose research and creative work explore the algorithmic mediation of human thinking, especially poetic thinking.

His most recent book is Gyms (dispersed holdings, 2025), a book of poetry written with and against nine different algorithmic “word gyms” designed to make writing more strenuous. Booten is also the author of Salon des Fantômes: Or, Streptohormetic Prompt Engineering for the Production of a Jagged Noetic Substrate (Inside the Castle, 2024), the documentation of a weeklong philosophical and artistic salon at which he was the only non-AI participant.

His current monograph project is titled Noöhacking. If mainstream digital media tends to “hack” our attention to disastrous effect, we can resist this noetic disaster not by retreating to anti-digital hermeticism but by re-hacking our minds—building our own small-scale cognitive infrastructures that manipulate and retune our attention. At once theoretical and design-oriented, Noöhacking reimagines the notion of care in a posthuman direction, in light of the modes of solicitude proper to algorithmic media.

Booten’s research—rooted in the humanities (especially media studies and digital humanities) but making frequent excursions into media arts and design, human-computer interaction, and even natural language processing—has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as Critical AI, electronic book review, Debates in Digital Humanities, Flusser Studies, xCoAx, Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and Creativity & Cognition.

With Katy Ilonka Gero, Booten edits Ensemble Park: A Journal of Human+Computer Writing.