Katherine Parrish

Sometimes the stars really do align. Just as I’m getting back into thinking, writing, teaching about creative and critical uses of digital technologies, the Electronic Literature Organization hosts a free (!) virtual conference about just that!

The ELO, founded in 1999, has been supporting, and creating spaces for “the investigtation of literature produced for the digital medium.” (I like the use of the word “investigation.” ) It’s been an invaluable resource for me.

It was nice, and grounding, to see familiar names among the panelists and exhibitors: John Cayley, and Dene Grigar, who I met at E-poetry 2001, mez breeze, Rob Wittig, Stuart Smallthrop, Stephanie Strickland, and of course, Cailtin Fisher, who has been doing extraordinary creative work and research in Augmented Reality up at York University. It was nicer still to see how much the ELO community has expanded, and diversified.

I am interested in pretty much every paper and panel, but am restricting my investigations to sessions about AI, most of which are in the “Algorithms and Imaginaries” track. I attended two sessions this afternoon- papers ranged in topic from the Hollywood film workers strike against AI, a marxist reading of the development of the Queer internet, and AI generative literature as a potential site of queer resistance, disruption. It was so good to be immersed in these conversations, and my list of links and works to pursue further is growing at a steady rate.

Deeper dives:

1) Will Luers pointed to the poetic potential of AI “cinemawriting” by describing the process of making “Posthuman Cinema,” a collection of ten AI-generated cinépoèmes he created with Mark Amerika, and Chad Mossholder, exhibited as part of the festival. He talked about the “interval” as a site of disruption, re-magining, respite. He’s written about this elsewhere, and I’m eager to explore. He also talked about the challenges of getting the AI to produce more nuanced images of the female character in one of their pieces. “There’s a huge difference between a ‘cowgirl’ and a ‘female cowboy’.”

2) I was particularly interested to attend Siobhan O’Flynn‘s presentation, ““E-Mote AI: A Speculative Exploration of Generative AI, Artificial Intimacy, Artificial Unintelligence, and the Uncanny.” In the abstract, she referenced Natalie Loveless, whose work on creative pedagogy is so beautiful and thoughtful and transformative. But I was also excited to get to know her because she teaches at the University of Toronto. She’s doing fascinating work, designing an AI mental wellness bot, initially for students in her Speculative Futures course, to create opportunities for “provocations” : critical thinking about, in this case, mental health bots, before some really troubling practices become entrenched. Looking forward to tomorrow!