Rob Wittig and Alex Mitchell discuss the very beginnings and the most recent iterations of Netprov, with a focus on generative AI, collaboration and improvisational writing.
Tue, Jan 10, 2023 11:46AM • 28:18
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, prompts, write, thinking, guess, question, interesting, interested, ebr, character, building, satire, google docs, post, mark, bit, read, real, couple, class
SPEAKERS
Alex Mitchell, Rob Wittig
Alex Mitchell
Rob is away from Zoom, grabbing coffee. It’s so late here in Singapore, so early there in Minnesota. Coffee is essential. Now I can talk about Rob while he's not heredo things for the benefit of Anna Nacher. And . . . he's back! He's back with his coffee. So I think everything is good.
Rob Wittig
Great! Thanks! [sips] So I'll just jump right in. So could you share your personal story of how you got engaged with Netprov?
Alex Mitchell
I'm pretty sure that the first Netprov that I remember being actively involved in was Monstrous Weather.1More on Monstrous Weather: http://meanwhilenetprov.com/index.php/project/monstrous-weather/ I ended up sort of getting into that because I probably attended a workshop that you and Mark Marino did. I don't know, one of the Electronic Literature Organization conferences, it was 2014 or 2015 or maybe earlier.
I was always playing around with sort of proto Netprov type stuff with my interactive storytelling class. I would give them some prompts and they would write a story as a class together in a wiki or in a blog or in Google Docs, as one of their activities. And I had them read a couple of papers, like a Scott Rettberg paper on collaborative storytelling. 2S. Rettberg, All Together Now: Collective, Collective Narratives, and Architectures of Participation, https://retts.net/documents/cnarrativeDAC.pdf I guess I didn't really know the term Netprov at that time. So, I had that in mind, and that's what got me interested in attending the workshop that you and Mark were doing. And it just was really cool. Then I must have gone to the Meanwhile NetprovStudio website and signed up to the mailing list.
And then the etprov that seemed to fall in place for me in terms of timing — when I was actually free — and where I found the prompts interesting, and I got into it, was Monstrous Weather. From that point, I started watching out to see if there was going to be another one. And then there were a few. The ones I remember are like One Star Reviews. And more recently, there were _Grumple and Destination Wedding 2070. There've been a number of them, but those are the ones that stuck for me somehow. Sometimes they get traction for me and I start writing, and other times I play around it for a little bit and then doesn't click for whatever reason. So, over the years, since Monstrous Weather— I wrote a couple of things about that one — I really got into being part of theNetprovs. I'm glad that they're out there. It's something that you you've been making possible and I've been enjoying it.
Rob Wittig
Great, thank you! What are some moments, some passages of play, if you will, that are particularly memorable for you?
Alex Mitchell
I think what generally happens is there'll be certain times where things start to connect with other people and things start flowing, right? I've actually not really done face-to-face improv, but it feels like it's the same sort of thing. Someone will put something out and then depending on the structure of the Netprov, somebody else will respond to it. In the current Netprov, The Grand Exhibition of Prompts,3The Grand Exhibition of Prompts was a netprov run on Discord in November 2022. A group of participants was experimenting with writing prompts for a generative AI platform and preparing for Great Exhibition of Prompts – an allusion to the Salon, a major art event held in Paris since mid-XVII century by the French Académie des Beaux Arts, which eventually also resulted in Salon des Refusés, painters who were rejected at the official Salon (mostly impressionists, whose painting was considered too avant-garde for the academic tastes of the official Salon’s jury (which thinks of written prompts for artificial intelligence image-making as literature) there have been a couple of times where I've put something up and then someone else has done a review on it. And then I will follow up on that. Then I'll start seeing the same people in some of the different channels — because this one is in the Discord platform — and it feels like there's a bit of a real back and forth going on. Then it can feel like a whole story world is starting to develop around me that’s not always fully formed yet. Like in Grand Exhibition, I see that starting to happen. It definitely happened in Monstrous Weather. And in Destination Wedding there were a few moments where I was going back and forth with people — I mean, I don't know who they are, because they're using their characters’ names, right? But which actually makes it even more interesting! And somehow, between us, we're following up on each other's ideas, and for a little while it goes. It doesn't always ‘go anywhere’, but it goes, which makes it memorable for me.
Rob Wittig
That's a great description! How has participating in Netprovsimpacted your own creative and scholarly practice?
Alex Mitchell
Good question. Maybe scholarly practice is the more straightforward one. I've been interested in collaboration and creativity — writing stuff together — for a long time. Many, many years ago when I did my master's thesis, it was on computer science. I was building stuff. But we were making a shared editor, a bit like Google Docs before Google Docs existed. And I had some primary school kids write a story together using a similar application.4A. Mitchell, I.Posner, R. Baecker, Learning to Write Together Using Groupware, CHI’95: Proceedings of the SIGCHI on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 7-11, 1995 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=223941. That was what got me thinking, okay, writing stuff together, using whatever tools are out there, is something that's interesting. It’s not been my main research thread, but it's always been in the background somewhere. So when I started doing writing with Netprov, and thinking about it, I realized, oh, yeah, there's still something there that I find interesting! So I've gradually revived that interest. I wrote a paper about Monstrous Weather that was in Electronic Book Review.5A. Mitchell, “Monstrous Weathered: Experiences from the Telling and Retelling of a Netprov”, Electronic Book Review, February 3, 2019 http://electronicbookreview.com/essay/monstrous-weathered-experiences-from-the-telling-and-retelling-of-a-netprov/. I did a couple of little experiments with colleagues, making tools that help people to tell stories together,6A. Mitchell, J. Yew, L. Wyse, D. Ang, P. Thattai, (2017). The AntWriter Improvisational Writing System: Visualizing and Coordinating Upcoming Actions. In: Nunes, N., Oakley, I., Nisi, V. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10690. Springer, Cham, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71027-3_38 and A. Mitchell, J. Yew, P. Thattai, B. Loh, D. Ang, and L. Wyse, (2017). In Proceedinga of the 2017 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition (C&C ’17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, USA, 28-38. https://doi.org/10.1145/3059454.3059470. one of which I'm going to be talking about at the interactive storytelling conference next week.7A. Mitchell, D. Ang, S.H. Tan, (2022). “It’s Fun not to Know”: The Role of Uncertainty in Text-Based Online Collaborative Storytelling. In: Vosmeer, M., Holloway-Attaway, L. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13762. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22298-6_15. I guess it’s reignited that interest in that thread of my research. I'm not sure where it's going. But it just makes me realize that I like this idea of technology support for people who want to be creative together, particularly when writing. It's been good to get back to that.
In terms of my own creative practice, I've always, like a lot of people, sort of ‘wanted to be a writer’ whatever that means. It's always been something that I've dabbled with. I've written a few short stories here and there. It's been a nice way to keep that going even though it's not something I'm actively practicing. [pause] I guess practicing is a funny way to say it, right? In some ways, that's what Netprov is: you’re practicing writing, right? You can write stuff on the fly like that! Take one of the daily prompts for a particular gallery in the Grand Exposition, for example — “playfulness,” “regret,” “anti-machine bias,” “imposter syndrome.” I just go: Okay, write something and don’t think about what you're writing; Just write. That’s hard to do! Normally, I mean. If you sit down — at least for me — if I sit down and say, “I want to write a story” I'm gonna stare at Microsoft Word for a long time. But if I just have Discord open, I'm looking at some previous people's postings, I can think, okay, who is this character I’m playing? For example: Brad, the character I'm doing in Grand Exhibition right now, I’ve got some ideas about his background. He wanted to be a chef, and he wanted to be a programmer, something to do with, like, procedural work. And then I just write AI prompts that I imagine is what he would be thinking in response to this upcoming exhibition. I think it's freeing that you don't have to be judgmental about what you're going to write. You just write something. The same way that if you were standing on the stage, doing an improv and people are staring at you, you just have to respond to what the other person said. It's like that in text. It's the closest I've gotten to doing actual improv, I guess.
Rob Wittig
I love that description. I think for a lot of us Netprov’sa way of sidestepping the whole heavy apparatus and scaffolding of what it is to “be a writer.”
Alex Mitchell
Exactly. Just write it. Just do it. And actually in a playful way.
Rob Wittig
What is the community building potential of Netprov? And could Netprov be a possible tool to build bridges in a polarized society?
Alex Mitchell
In terms of building communities, I think there is something there. Even before I knew what Netprov was, I was getting my students in the interactive storytelling class to write stuff together. And I could see that there were connections building among the students. They're part of the communications program, but they may be taking a class with people they haven't taken classes with before. And once I’ve gotten them to spend two weeks or so writing in response to prompts that I gave them, either in Google Docs or in a wiki, you can start to see some real connections between people coming up, right? They start to riff off each other in the same way we were just talking about. Afterwards I will make a PDF of what they've written, let them download it, and then they are all sort of proud. ‘Oh, yeah, we wrote this together!’ At the start, they were just a bunch of students who decided to take this class with me. By the end, they've written… sometimes nonsense, but it doesn't matter that it's nonsense. They’ve written something together! And they can look back and laugh and say, ‘oh, yeah, remember, you did this, I did this!’ Saying we did this together right away suggests community. There’s a connection. We made this. At least on small scale, it really seems to work that way.
There have been these occasional examples — there was one I shared with you recently about the imaginary Martin Scorsese film, right? Goncharov. His classic film that doesn't exist. Those are things that happen seem to happen spontaneously, like in Reddit or in Tumblr. Even though it's not labeled as Netprov and it wasn't something that was deliberately crafted, it seems like those things happen online. And somehow telling stories together about something that doesn't exist starts to create a community.
Rob Wittig
Anna Nacher’s last questions I'm going to give you together. They're intertwined. The first one is about Netprov and post truth, especially here in the States after the 2020 election. What is the significance of fiction, including politically and socially controversial aspects of fiction in the digital space now? And then: how have Netprov-style projects evolved over the last decade?
Alex Mitchell
One of the things I realized in doing some of the Netprovs that you and Mark have set up over the last few years, is that sometimes they're very private. Monstrous Weather was in a private Google Group. But sometimes they're quite public. And some of the earlier ones were even more public, on platforms like Twitter. So some things need to be thought about a little bit more when Netprovsare more public. The whole context of: is this fake news or not? Is this real? When you start to loo at postings from a fictional character's perspective, that may or may not have happened, and someone else might see it, someone who’s not in the know, then I think there are interesting issues of responsibility and the question of: how much do you wink to the audience? “This is not a game,” that sort of thing. Right? Do you have to be more explicit about that now? Actually, maybe I can ask you a question in response. As people who sort of set up these projects, that it put together Netprovs, is that something that's more on your mind these days compared to like, when you did Occupy MLA? That was how many years ago anyway? That was the pre fake news era, compared to now. Would you do something like that now?
Rob Wittig
Personally, no, I wouldn’t. I’ve been thinking about that kind of thing constantly. Partially because of the variety of responses to Occupy MLA [It was over a year long performance with fictional characters and discussion about the problems of non-tenure-track faculty, carried out mostly on Twitter and revealed during MLA2013, more on that: http://meanwhilenetprov.com/index.php/project/occupy-mla/]. Even just within the last year, you know, I've heard both that people that were upset about it, and then people who claim to have inside knowledge that it actually positively influenced thinking and policymaking inside the MLA. Dropping into a public space and doing a parody, a satire has changed a lot over the years. In the big picture it’s the tradition of street theater, of graffiti art, Banksy, — putting surprising, humorous truth in unexpected places to bounce people out of their trance.
Alex Mitchell
I'm thinking of The Yes Men, for example. They really push it, but yeah.
Rob Wittig
My thinking about the future of Netprov includes those small group projects where it's your group of friends, plus Netprov Featured Players like you, Alex, playing small private versions of satires. But Netprovscan be big or small. Anyway, sorry, I rambled on.
Alex Mitchell
The Yes Men basically do parody, but they stay in character for a long time. And then there was the guy with the website Birds Aren’t Real, right? He stays in character. And then you do start to wonder about conspiracy theories: is that Netprov? Maybe that actually starts to answer that question about whether Netprov can make an impact in the post truth era, right? I mean, the fact that you start to think about those things and wonder: Is that real? Or is that Netprov? Then maybe you start to question a bit, and maybe you don't take things so seriously. Not assume that they're fiction, but just wonder, what is the reality that those people are seeing? And start to realize that everything in some ways is based on how you frame it and how you tell the story? Even if it is so-called Truth. It's still someone's truth, someone's storytelling, someone's framing of things. It's the post truth dilemma: who’s to say which one is really real? Maybe once you start to think about that, then you won't just blindly accept that someone's telling you this is the way things are.
Rob Wittig
Interesting.
Alex Mitchell
Netprov for critical thinking.
Rob Wittig
And some Netprovs— you can tell me what you think about this — like 1Step Forward, 2Steps Back which was a satire of fitness apps. We invented the backstepping craze that maintained that walking backwards is much more healthy than walking forward. I felt comfortable with that being on Twitter, because it seemed sort of self evidently silly. Are those in a different category?
Alex Mitchell
I guess, partly, it’s: what is the topic of the Netprov? But the platforms are public to varying degrees. For me, that's one of the things that sets the tone of the piece. I know, it's virtual, but where is it? Some of the ones that I was involved in were on Reddit, which is basically: anyone can come and look at your Reddit, but nobody will. [laughs] But they could theoretically, right? Even The Grand Exhibition, presumably — I don't think any of those Discord channels are locked. I presume someone could just come stumble across it possible. So it’s about: who can hear what you're saying. And then: what are you saying? The way it's framed maybe would make certain things more likely to be said than others. But even if it's somewhat private, you can run up against the outside world. I don't know if you saw, one of the pieces I tried to post in The Grand Exhibition almost got me banned on Discord.
Rob Wittig
Wow! How?
Alex Mitchell
It was totally funny. The AI image-making system MidJourney has this obsession with shadowy figures in the background, it seems. So I just wrote a prompt that said something about like reality bleeding through, and it flagged “bleed.” Basically, the system said: if you do this, again, you'll be banned. If you try a work-around, this will be banned. Because Discord MidJourney bot is actually connecting us to the main MidJourney and sending our prompts to the AI. So all their rules apply to us. Even though I said “bleed” in a totally different context, in a literary way. The filter has no idea. It's just a word. Right? So that sort of jarred me a little bit: oh, hold on a second! Okay, we're in this little space, we're doing our little Netprov. But our text is actually going to… I don't even know who's behindMidJourney. It's going out there and coming back. It made me realize that maybe it's being logged somewhere. Who knows, right? None of these things are ever completely private. That made me think. I just made sure I didn't say “bleed” again. [laughs] But I responded to it in character and tried to make a joke out of it. But these things, if they're online somewhere, they’re connected. It's never completely private. I mean, Zoom can hear what we're saying now, right?
Rob Wittig
Yeah. And we always all read the terms and conditions so carefully.
Alex Mitchell
Exactly. With a highlighter. [laughs]
Rob Wittig
[laughs]
Alex Mitchell
I guess I'm curious where Netprov'sgoing to go next. The thing I've noticed that's most interesting is the sort of wild, feral Netprovs that we keep stumbling on, like the imaginary Scorsese movie. There are people who are doing political satire deliberately to push an agenda. That's one direction it takes. But there are also those amazing, spontaneous ones that just take on a life of their own. So I think I'm going to be more sensitized to looking out for them. Netprov wasn’t invented, it was discovered.