June 18, 2026
Ep.024: Special: Interview with Nina Beguš on Finnegans Wake in AI
<p><a href="https://www.onelittlegoat.org/finneganswake">https://www.onelittlegoat.org/finneganswake</a> </p><p>Welcome to James Joyce’s divine and delirious comedy, Finnegans Wake. This episode, number 24, is a special one because joining us from Berkeley, California will be scholar <a href="https://www.ninabegus.com/home"><strong>Nina Beguš</strong></a>, who is using Finnegans Wake to shape an unusual AI named “FinneGAN.” Nina is interviewed by <strong>Adam Seelig</strong>, director of the Finnegans Wake film series produced by One Little Goat Theatre Company.</p><p>For a transcript of this episode, please visit <a href="https://www.onelittlegoat.org/finneganswake">https://www.onelittlegoat.org/podcast</a>.</p><p>“James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake” is produced by One Little Goat Theatre Company, an official charity in Canada and the USA. To support our work, please <a href="https://www.onelittlegoat.org/contact">visit us online to make a<strong> charitable donation </strong>and <strong>join our mailing list</strong></a><strong>.</strong> </p><p>To get in touch, email us at <a href="mailto:onelittlegoattc@gmail.com">onelittlegoattc@gmail.com</a> — we’d love to hear from you. This podcast is made possible by Friends of One Little Goat Theatre Company and the Emigrant Support Programme of the Government of Ireland. Thank you for your support!</p><p>Music for this episode was arranged and performed on the piano by Adam Seelig, with Tyler Emond on bass and Jinu Isac on drums, recorded at Ghost Town Studio in Toronto.</p><p>A big thank you once again to special guest Nina Beguš. </p><p>Thank you as ever to the team at the Irish Consulate in Toronto. And thank you to Production Consultants Cathy Murphy and Andrew Moodie. Thank you for listening!<br><strong>Mentioned:</strong> Nina Beguš, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Digital Humanities, Stanford vs Cal (Berkeley), Frederick Wiseman, “At Berkeley” (film), FinneGAN, “imagitation,” latent spaces, GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks), large language models (LLMs), “What Finnegans Wake Teaches Us about AI,” “Latent Spacecraft Brains GANs Finnegans,” humanistic interpretability, eight-word experiment, whale communication, nonce words, child language acquisition and invention, children and language in Joyce (Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses “Oxen of the Sun”, Finnegans Wake), Mother Goose, Humpty Dumpty, “the writing of the night,” dream language, pre-verbal language, Metahaven, Ricardo Petrini, Gašper Beguš, University of California Berkeley, Whisper speech recognition, deep fakes (of cats), “We inhabit a locked hole but can we use it?”, William Wordsworth’s “poetic spirit” in children, Shaw’s Pygmalion, Irene Pepperberg’s Alex the parrot, Richard Harte, Pip Dwyer, Sweny’s Pharmacy Dublin, interdisciplinary science and arts.</p><p><strong>Resources: </strong><a href="https://www.onelittlegoat.org/podcast"><strong>Transcript</strong> for this episode</a>, including the text of Finnegans Wake.</p><p><strong>Cited: </strong>“<a href="https://gsas.harvard.edu/news/what-finnegans-wake-teaches-us-about-ai">What Finnegans Wake Teaches Us about AI</a>,” Paul Massari, Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences,2026-02-26.</p><p>“<a href="https://latentspacecraft.antikythera.org/">Latent Spacecraft Brains GANs Finnegans</a>,” Nina Beguš, Gašper Beguš, Metahaven, Ricardo Petrini; Antikythera,https://latentspacecraft.antikythera.org/, 2026-03-02.</p>
