Looking back on my early blog posts, I was surprised to find that many of the overarching themes I’m considering in my project have stayed constant — ideas of reading and writing with/around/through computational tools, and what these practices mean for speculative futures and future imaginaries. However, the form of the project has evolved significantly.
Month: November 2023
On November 17, I attended a conference in Dundee entitled Abundant Word: Writing & Gesture in Interactive Media. All of the speakers offered inspiring ideas, but I was particularly struck by Broderick Chow’s talk, “British Lads, Hard Lads: Violence, Care and Speculative ‘Writing.’” He put forth a fascinating argument that speculative writing is a deeply risky and precarious endeavor, because it transforms the ways we are invested in writing or, indeed, in reality: It asks creators to invest themselves deeply in a version of a text or of a world that they want and need, even despite the knowledge that it could be overturned at any moment (e.g., when canon contradicts fanfic). By putting so much time and emotional investment into speculative work, creators open themselves to the risk of devastation by the forces of canon or of reality beyond their control.
An apparent paradox:
We think of machines as foreign and “other.” Robotic means stiff and inhuman; often it’s easy to distinguish machine from human because machines have an uncanniness, a quality that we perceive as unnatural.
And yet
We put so much effort into anthropomorphizing machines that it is also often easy to mistake them for humans or for real life.
