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.
Animated Ecology
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Lina Persson
connected to: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In these works I have explored how I can relate to my environment through my daily practices of teaching, eating, animating etc. I begun the project by improvising lectures for various audiences I wanted to have input from. I have lectured to all possible enteties in the ecosystem I am a part of, from blueberries to colleagues to films. Every time something new continues to take shape. The exposition include essays, paintings and animations.
