Messy Words Post
- Digital unconscious
- theory of affordances J.J. Gibson
- brave conversations
- ‘intersectional cyborgism’
- new modes of curation and co-curation
- AI ethics
- embodiment
Month: November 2023
Futures Project Reading List
-Alicia Yanez Cossio’s “The IWM 1000” from the 1970s
-The big book of science fiction
-Amazing stories
– Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction (1984), David Hartwell
– Rokheya Shekhawat Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” (1905) is a potent feminist utopian vision.
-W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Comet” (1920) isn’t just a story about an impending science-fictional catastrophe but also the start of a conversation about race relations and a proto-Afrofuturist tale.
– Yefim Zozulya’s “The Doom of Principal City”(1918)
– A. Merritt’s “The Last Poet and the Robots” (1935)
– Frederik Pohl’s “Day Million” (1966)
– Karel Capek- 1920s robot plays and his gonzo novel War with the Newts from the 1930s
– Katherine MacLean
-Margaret St. Clair
-Carol Emshwiller
– Ursula K. Le Guin – essay “American SF and the Other” (1975)
– Joanna Russ – essay “The Image of Women in Science Fiction” (1970)
– James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Russ, Josephine Saxton, Le Guin.
– The Ultimate Cyberpunk (2002), which contextualized cyberpunk within earlier influences (not always successfully) and also showcased post-cyberpunk works.
– Angelica Gorodischer was publishing such incendiary feminist material as “The Unmistakable Smell of Wood Violets” (1985)
– Misha Nogha, whose Arthur C. Clarke Award finalist Red Spider White Web (1990
– Zipes, Jack. Speaking Out : Storytelling and Creative Drama for Children, Taylor & Francis Group, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ed/detail.action?docID=199667.
Created from ed on 2023-11-08 19:27:53.
-‘Narrative fiction creates possible worlds— but they are worlds extrapolated from the world we know, however much they may soar beyond it. The art of the possible is a perilous art. It must take heed of life as we know it, yet alienate us from it sufficiently to tempt us into thinking of alternatives beyond it. It challenges as it comforts. In the end, it has the power to change our habits of conceiving what is real, what is canonical. It can even undermine the law’s dictates about what constitutes a canonical reality.’ —Jerome Braner, Making Stories
– ‘It would be misleading to argue that every story told is utopian or to assert that there is an “essential” utopian nature to storytelling. There is, however, a utopian tendency of telling that helps explain why it is we feel so compelled to create and disseminate tales and why we are enthralled by particular stories. In his monumental three-volume work The Principle of Hope, the philosopher Ernst Bloch argued that real-life experiences are at the basis of our utopian longings and notions. Because our daily lives are not exactly what we want them to be, we daydream with a certain intentionality and glimpse another world that urges us on and stimulates our creative drives to reach a more ideal state of being. It is our realization of what is missing in our lives that impels us to create works of art that not only reveal insights into our struggles but also shed light on alternatives and possibilities to restructure our mode of living and social relations. It is through art that utopia, designated as no place that we have ever seen or truly experienced, is to be realized as a place truly inhabitable for humans, a real humane place different from the brutal artificial places we inhabit and the earth that we are in the process of destroying with dubious notions of progress. All art, according to Bloch, contains images of hope illuminating ways to create a utopian society that offset our destructive drives.’
– Murray, Janet Horowitz. Hamlet on the Holodeck : the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace / JanetH. Murray. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998. Print.
-The John Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson, and Benjamin J. Robertson.
– Contemporary Science Fiction course – resource list
– Rob Lathan – Science Fiction Criticism – Anthology
– Autonomous by Annalee Newitz
Week 10
Project Development
How has your project developed? What were some of the key ideas/texts/resources shared by your peers that moved your project forward? Where have you made changes, where did these decisions arise?
My project has developed a little, I am slowly researching and am more at the widening scope stage at the moment. The different intensives have greatly shaped what I imagine my project will look like, and in talking to my peers I have gained ideas and thought more about it’s structure.
Currently, I am creating a long list of sources and readings, largely helped by the reading from the intensives, especially ‘writing speculative fiction’. Additionally, I have been adding anything I come across which I feel is relevant and have been listening to the podcasts ‘The Digital Human’ and ‘Edgy Ideas’ which are helping me think more about current issues, topics, and problems in the world and ideas about solving them. This has led for me to think about wider research questions and how my work could potentially address them. The two ‘Edgy Ideas’ episodes 62: Becoming digitally savvy with Anni Rowland-Campbell and 65: Purpose upgrade with Paul Skinner have been particularly relevant in terms of issues discussed and thinking holistically. I am interested in delving deeper into these ideas and into the work of the guests, particularly Anni Rowland-Campbell.
Additionally, In talking to my peers about the structure of my project, I have more of an idea of what I want to create. I want my project to be largely research based and centered around the exploration of ideas, however due to the modules ‘world of story’ and ‘writing speculative fiction’, I want to incorporate my own creative work (possibly short pieces of narrative text/a story spread throughout), and embed it in the project to aid and embody the ideas discussed.
I am still looking at the ideas of intersectionality in speculative fiction and science fiction works, and am still exploring texts and art for this. I think the idea of the cyborg and what that means in fiction vs in real life and how they combine is really interesting, and something to keep researching into.
Key Ideas:
- Cyborg Feminism
- Cyberpunk
- Afro-futurism
- Indigenous Futurism
- Interdisciplinary
- Intersectionality
- AI
- Science Fiction
- Speculative Fiction
- narrative
- art
Solidified Project Idea:
An essay investigating ‘intersectional cyborgism’ through narrative and scattering my own creative work (narrative) throughout as a response and to embody the ideas discussed.
Week 9
Text Remix
In text remix, I have learned a lot of new skills, such as the basics of learning how to code. and more about AI, which I also want to integrate elements of into my futures project. We also learned about different and new ways to play with text and literature, such as using chat GPT and black out poetry. It is quite relevant to the ideas I want to explore in my futures project, especially the elements to do with AI!
Doing the group project and all the notebooks has developed my skills significantly and I now feel much more confident with basic coding. It was also useful to use the texts on Project Gutenberg, and practice literary analysis, as well as experiment with different ways to both write and analyse text with the help of AI and coding.
Week 8
Writing Speculative Fiction
Writing speculative fiction was one of my favourite modules. Speculative fiction is, after all, one of my key interests and will most likely be the main focus of my futures project. The module also helped me solidify the idea that I want to include my own creative writing piece embedded throughout my project.
It really helped my develop my creative writing skills and gave me many techniques for experimenting with and working on my writing. These included idea generation, free writing with a prompt, formulating questions to develop an idea, the use of mind-mapping, and methods of researching. It was really fun to develop a sci-fi idea and world. After writing some paragraphs we also drew the shape of our plot and experimented with different perspectives (1st, 2nd, 3rd) and tenses (present, past). We were also given many tips. My story was based on technological brain implants and what would happen if they turned people into ‘zombies’. This is something I will continue to develop on for the assignment. We also discussed and analysed three different short stories (‘Bloodchild’ by Octavia Butler, ‘Repeating the Past’ by Peter Watts, and ‘Venus in Bloom’ by Lavie Tidhar) and looked at the different ways they had crafted a narrative.
This course really got my creative juices flowing, especially when we were given a talk (and the chance for q&a session) with the author Helen Sedgwick who discussed her various novels, especially The Growing Season and the sci-fi series she is currently working on. This was extremely eye opening and it was really interesting to hear about her process and opinions on writing.
The stories which I read, wrote, and analysed will definitely inform my project and it’s direction.
