Week 11 – Laying the Foundation for the Summative
This week I reflected on what I have learned over the course of Semester 1 and what I am looking forward to in Semester 2. This post will form the basis for my Reflective Blog Post Summative Assessment, as I assess each of the first-semester courses in turn and examine their individual contributions to my final project.
Interdisciplinary Futures
This course laid-out the foundation for what will become my final project by ‘breaking barriers’ between disciplines. Previously, having originated from a Humanities background (Literature & Language), I had not considered how AI could (and would) interact with ‘our work.’ In previous discussions of AI, a clear divide had been drawn in the sand between disciplines (particularly those from Sciences). However, IF helped demonstrate that, rather than opposing each other and working to achieve polarising outcomes, when combined – the disciplines can form one ‘super discipline’; enriched with the knowledge of both, and strengthened through intertwining.
World of Story
The ‘narrative’ element of Future Narratives came across most noticeably in this course. Here, we were tasked with constructing narratives out of elements previously unexperimented with e.g., film, performance, oral storytelling, etc. My previous experience with narrative had been almost entirely with prose, and so having to produce a film with a clear, cohesive narrative was challenging as I had to examine narrative through a ‘new lens.’ I was still unclear of what narrative I’d most like to experiment with when I completed my summative assignment for this course, but had a new grasp of narrative itself and went into the following projects with a much more open mind.
Creating Visual Narratives
In this course I’d identify the narrative format I wished to enact for my final project: visual design. Before this course, I had never once considered myself an artist. Artistically, I grew up in the shadow of my younger sister who collected awards for her work much in the same manner as one collects stationery for their desk. However, the course really pushed us to the brink of our creative selves – tasking us with creating entire 12-page portfolios brimming with art. I produced a comic book for this assignment, an art medium I always admired but was too scared to replicate, and was amazed by the final result. Thus, I came away from this course with the desire to try my hand at visual art again!
Gamifying Historical Narratives
This intensive came right on the heels of CVN and so I was still turning over the idea of creating art for my final project when I attended both days. This course gave me the other half to the design element of my project. I would not only create a visual piece (in order to measure an AI’s response to it), but would a) stylise it as a storyboard for a game project and b) would implement historical elements into the (game) design itself. Whilst working on my group summative assessment (on a Cyberpunk-rendition of 18th Century France), I pinpointed an era of history I’d like to focus on (The Three Kingdom period of Korea), a game objective (reunification), and the game genre (RPG simulation). I also was ‘granted access’ to experts in the field – which ties into the third (reflective) element of my final project’s process.
Text Remix
This course was very much the core of my final project as it gave me the ‘missing link’ – the AI component. Having little to no experience with AI and programming previously, I went into this course completely blind. Gradually, through completion of the notebooks and as an active participant in my group project, I became more and more familiar with the tools at hand, and with experimenting with programming language (namely Python) and AI tools (Chat-GPT4, DALL-E, and Google Bard). Here, I finalised my final project idea; I’d present the game visual board to Google Bard/GPT-4 and ask them to produce written prose in return describing the game concept in detail.
Writing Speculative Fiction
The final course of the six, WSF followed several discussions of my final idea with my course convenor and classmates. I am still very much immersed in the assessments for it while I write this, and so it is the course which I have had the least opportunity to observe with leisure from a reflective distance. However, I very much hope to do in the summative assessment for this – once all other work is done 🙂
