Over the holiday, I was reflecting on my writing practice and the fact that my main interest is in speculative fiction for the young adult (YA) audience. This made me wonder why I defaulted to an adult narrator and themes for the creative portion of my Futures Project, and prompted me to begin envisioning an alternate, YA version of my project to see if it might be an interesting direction.
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.
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.
As I’ve settled more into the idea of an online format for my project, I’ve been thinking about the specifics of how readers would interact with it. I have a personal website, so I could easily add another page for the project. I have some experience with HTML and CSS for basic web design, but would need to learn Javascript and either jQuery or another framework like Svelte, Nuxt, or Vue in order to enable the interactive and dynamic elements.
After last week’s group supervision, and engaging with the interactive story that one of the groups created for the World of Story project, I’ve found myself drawn more toward interactive storytelling, and torn between a more game-like mode versus a more short fiction-like mode for my project. I’ve also found that ideas of layering, editing, and revision have come up multiple times in recent days, both in the group supervision and in the readings I’m doing for this week’s elective, Narrative and Computational Text Analysis. Today’s blog post is my attempt to make sense of some of these pieces.
Based on my past few weeks’ reflections, I’m coming to the conclusion that a creative piece rooted in creative writing but incorporating computational and/or interactive elements will be the most compelling form for my project as I’ve currently conceptualized it. For context for the group supervision, my concept for my project broadly centers around the question of what the practices of writing and reading look like — how they evolve — in a world that is increasingly algorithmically mediated. So far, I’m thinking that an interesting way to explore this question would be through a piece of creative writing that is both about AI and also incorporates aspects of AI/machine writing in the creative process.
I’m rereading Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, and thinking about it this time around in relation to my experience as a reader, as influenced by structural/contextual factors. Namely:
- The breaking of conventional writing wisdom.
The book is written largely in second person, which was unexpected and jarring for me upon first read. In addition, the book dates itself very explicitly by referencing contemporary memes — which, given the transitory nature of memes, becomes an even more extreme version of books that date themselves through the mention of specific technologies or brands (usually longer-lived than memes). As a writer, I’ve been warned against both of these practices by teachers, writing group friends, and writing craft resources alike.
Prompted by a discussion in Text Remix about the (im)possibility of decentering the human in discussions of AI/machine creativity and writing, I’ve been trying to grapple with the question of how humans’ emotional and empathetic responses relate to our interactions with literature, and how those reactions are impacted when AI or automated processes enter the picture — as part of the writing process, the reading process, or both.
As I worked on my submission for the Futures Project themes form, I realized that the project idea that I’m most excited about (so far) is a creative piece exploring the processes of reading, writing, and interpretation that could surround a single story that has evolved over time — and, in particular, how these processes evolve in the context of AI, algorithmic reproduction, digital surveillance, etc.
