Exposition

FanFutures (2019)

Kate McCallum, Kate Monson, Majed Al-Jefri
open exposition

About this exposition

"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.
typeresearch exposition
keywordsAI, Natural language processing, Actor network theory, New Materialism, future, Environment, fanfiction
date01/07/2017
published18/01/2019
last modified18/01/2019
statuspublished
share statusprivate
affiliationUniversity of Brighton
licenseAll rights reserved
urlhttps://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/378163/393993/1376
doihttps://doi.org/10.22501/jar.378163
published inJournal for Artistic Research
portal issue17. 17


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id name copyright license
385583 Changed Environment Katie McCallum, Kate Monson and Majed Al-Jefri All rights reserved
385585 Brave New World Katie McCallum, Kate Monson and Majed Al-Jefri All rights reserved
385800 Publication1 Katie McCallum All rights reserved
385801 Publication1 Katie McCallum All rights reserved
385803 Publication2 Katie McCallum All rights reserved
394366 Changed Environment banner Katie McCallum All rights reserved
394368 Changed World banner Katie McCallum All rights reserved
394370 Publication12 Katie McCallum All rights reserved
394393 Publication41 k All rights reserved
394395 Publication42 k All rights reserved
394397 Publication41 k All rights reserved
394399 Publication42 k All rights reserved
394401 Publication31 k All rights reserved
394404 Publication32 Katie McCallum All rights reserved
394410 Publication32 Katie McCallum All rights reserved

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