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.
I began with various ideas that I thought were quite disparate. I narrowed in on the idea of story evolution, and quickly realized that I could use a single evolving story to create a narrative about the evolution of a society in relation to AI and/or other computational tools. At this early stage, I also added the idea of epistolary or unusual formats (marginalia, paratexts, analyses).
At first, I envisioned the story as a fairly traditional piece. I had considered hosting it digitally, but the digital element was more of an aesthetic choice than a meaning-making one — until a conversation with my classmates drove me to consider incorporating interactive elements. I initially conceived of these interactive elements as separate from the computational elements that I might incorporate into my own creative process. However, a comment from a group member asking about whether readers could see or play a role in the fictional scholar’s interaction with AI helped me realize that these elements might actually be two parts of a whole. The main character was very ill-defined at this point (I was even thinking of using a series of multiple characters). They were more a device for explaining where the marginalia and paratexts originated, rather than a thematically rich part of the story. In a way, I was thinking of the evolving story text as the main character, and the person/people as more secondary.
The first group supervision brought to the fore the ideas of layering, editing, and revision, which I decided to incorporate into my story as textual and interactive elements, rather than only as thematic concerns. One of my classmates suggested that I could introduce a mechanic for audiences to interact with the work by adding different layers; this made me start thinking about layering and revision in the context of “reauthorship,” and fleshing out the scholar as even more of an agentive actor in the story, as I realized they might not only respond to the evolving story but also potentially edit it. Overall, the balance of focus between social/cultural/technological evolutions vs. personal arcs in the story continued to evolve, and generally shifted more toward the personal — an element that I realized was important to me after engaging with different interactive works that emphasized or deemphasized it.
The considerations about AI and computational elements brought up by my peers also led me to reflect on my own creative interests regarding AI, and to realize that I’m interested not in using AI or computational approaches to replicate human writing (to try to do “the same thing but better”), but rather to bring an element that I as a human author could not contribute on my own.
In terms of “now what,” in addition to the technical details, there are still a few big thematic questions that I’m grappling with. One of these is the role of emotion — how I want to incorporate it and what it means in an algorithmically or machine-mediated context. I’m also considering what balance I want to strike between a game-like mode and a story-like mode — essentially, the types and amounts of interactivity and branching that I want to include, and how they reflect thematically on my story.
Alexa Pukall
This is such a minor thing, but if you choose to use layers to indicate the passage of time, it’d be very cool to see the visuals change from something very analog and traditional to becoming more and more “tech-y” the more time passes.
Anja Hendrikse Liu
I love this! Super helpful to think about how visuals can play a part in the project, especially given the potential flexibility of the digital format (compared to, say, a traditional story/book).