machine-writing
Episode 7: Computational Narrative Systems and Platform Studies with Nick Montfort
Scott Rettberg, director of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN), in conversation with Nick Monfort, who is leading the CDN's Computational Narrative System's research node.
Expanding the Algorithm
Daniel Punday reviews Andrew Klobucar’s edited collection of essays, The Community and the Algorithm: A Digital Interactive Poetics.
Embodied AI: An Extended Data Definition
Multimodal AI trained on YouTube-TikTok-Netflix (object-segmented and identified audio-video-speech) and public domain science data (that exceeds the spectrum of human sensorial field) will be grounded in a world that is in some ways vaster than that experienced by a single human neurophysiology.
Davin Heckman’s Re-Riposte
Accepting Søren Bro Pold's proclamation that "the social knowledge base of the University has already disappeared", Davin Heckman locates a few, forward looking prospects for a reconstruction of the Humanities in Jean-François Lyotard's "famously sloppy" Postmodern Condition (1971), Hannah Arendt's Human Condition(1958), and Imanuel Kant's prescient hope that the University could serve as a "mediating nexus among a growing array of conflicting professional tendencies."
Cyborg Authorship: Writing with AI – Part 1: The Trouble(s) with ChatGPT
In this anticipation of John Cayley's ebr essay on Artificial Intelligence, Scott Rettberg contextualizes some of the ethical and systemic problems of ChatGPT and argues that works of electronic literature and digital art might serve as tutor texts for understanding effects of technological mediation on humanity.
Textpocalypse Now?
Pold's riPOSTe to "Thoughts on the Textpocalypse" extends Heckman's "thrilling (if not chilling)" critique to left-wing understandings and critical takes by theorists such as Walter Ong, Bernard Stiegler, and Vannevar Bush.
Modelit: eliterature à la (language) mode(l)
Cayley's image is an apt illustration of an essay that's also a work of 'digital language art.' Although Cayley incorporates new material and newly contextualized examples, referring chiefly to his own work, what follows is also the reconfigured rewrite of a recent essay for a series of conferences and a peer-reviewed online journal, Political Concepts, which can be found online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDJRQYRWpvQ.
Response to John Cayley’s ‘Modelit’
In his response to John Cayley, Dougherty takes the current concern with AIwriting as an opportunity to revive one of ebr's long-running threads; namely: the critical, contrarian riPOSTe.
Thoughts on the Textpocalypse
Davin Heckman offers thoughts on Matthew Kirschenbaum's now well-known essay in The Atlantic, The Textpocalypse (2023). Contemplating our own limits in digital media scholarship, including the reinforcing of technological determinisms, Heckman discusses the concept of transindividuation and its relationship with technology, or, the process of becoming an individual through participation in culture and society.