FanFutures
(2019)
author(s): Kate McCallum, Kate Monson, Majed Al-Jefri
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
"FanFutures" is a project working with artificial (AI) automatic text generation in an exploration of fan fiction and speculation about possible futures. It is a collaboration between an artist, a computer scientist, and a social scientist — and, in an extended sense, also with the fan fiction community and an AI algorithm.
Using a data-set of short sci-fi-esque stories written by anonymous members of the fan fiction community, we taught a natural language processing program to produce its own, entirely new short sci-fi-esque stories. The program takes imagined futures written by amateur writers, rather than institutionally-sanctioned voices, and dreams algorithmically through those voices to produce its own re-imaginings of possible futures.
We then turned these stories into films, films that depict a computer’s dreams of the future drawn from a mass of unknown voices, using imagery selected by another algorithm. The outputs are feverish and confused, but, as with human dreams, we have embraced their incoherence, and allowed imagery and atmosphere to come to the fore.
The project is inspired by our collective interest in understanding how humans make meaning with and through others — and how others make meaning with and through us. In a moment when our rapidly changing world, with its mass communication, new technologies and changing environment, seems almost intractable, we take a creative and playful approach to representing this complex intra-acting assemblage of human and more-than-human elements, and the possibilities in our world through sensory experience.
The conflict of the faculties : perspectives on artistic research and academia
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Henk Borgdorff
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The thesis, written by Henk Borgdorff, is about artistic research – what it is, or what it could be. And it is about the place that artistic research could have in academia, within the whole of academic research. It is also about the ways we speak about such issues, and about how the things we say (in this study and elsewhere) cause the practices involved to manifest themselves in specific ways, while also setting them into motion. In this sense, the thesis not only explores the phenomenon of artistic research in relation to academia, but it also engages with that relationship. This performative dimension of the thesis is interwoven with its constative and interpretive dimensions. If the thesis succeeds in its aims, it will not only advance knowledge and understanding of artistic research, but it will further the development of this emerging field.