| All Possible Pathways, 2019 | next gallery > |
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(This is actually an old poem, just thought it fit here.) All Possible Pathways is a collaborative project with Jamie Zigelbaum and Ollie Razdow, supported by ThoughtWorks Arts’ “Democratization of AI via Blockchain” residency. For the next four months, Jamie and I will be revisiting our automatist/collaborative science fictive poetics from Boston and Barcelona, in the manner we wrote I-We, and Ollie will be in San Francisco to develop a non-linear reader application for the text. The application will work via experimental digital architectures to trace a variety of paths through the text, outputting an audio/visual experience. Links: https://orazdow.github.io/SAR/ – Test site, showing the brached form of the narrative, scraped from Mastodon. Mastadon Feed (This is the non-linnear narrative, in progress by M. Razdow and J. Zigelbaum).
Proposal: Narrative: For All Possible Pathways, M. Razdow and Zigelbaum will reprise the technique they developed in 2016 while making an experimental, Twitter based sci-fi novella I-We. Completed over more than a year, the two artists accidentally began writing the book by tweeting back and forth at each other, and refused to discuss the narrative until it was complete. Over time, their dreamlike futurist narrative slipped into a kind of ecstatic illustration of a transhuman future, where symbol and landscape braided and enveloped the self, creating a hybridized notion of dramatic progression. I-We was released as a limited edition paperback, an e-book and as an interactive text to speech application for SPRING/BREAK 2016. M. Razdow and Zigelbaum will work on All Possible Pathways amid a framework agreed upon beforehand of investigating possible futures of AI. This will likely develop to include both utopian and problematic visions, and cascade through a multiplicity of imagined outcomes for AI in sociopolitical architectures both wild and close at hand. As in I-We, All Possible Pathways will involve generative story-telling, in this case focussed on AI, but the snippets of its text, existing as nodes on a blockchain network, will be imbued with metadata placing them in a virtual coordinate space which can then be algorithmically traversed in any number of ways to create a reconfigurable narrative informed by the transcendental qualities of geometric, spatial, physical, dynamical, probabilistic, and fractal programs. For each text snippet, both Zigelbaum and Razdow will create a drawn illustration in their signature styles, which will also be loaded into the blockchain and can be hybridized as the visual component of the application’s output. Reader implementation and background: Each unit of the generated narrative for All Possible Pathways will exist in a data structure allowing for traversals which can be visualized as the evolution of a spatial path. The possibilities for story generation in this mode are as fertile as there are algorithms to explore, and some of these include gravitational simulation, flow fields, Chua’s circuit, perlin noise, strange attractors, the game of life, reaction diffusion, l-systems, flocking simulation, particle swarms, agent-based planning, and fractal generation just to name a few. Practically, the aim is to create an interface to allow the user to get a sense of the inexplicable settings of worlds generated using unorthodox techniques as well as the intrinsic nature of these algorithms through the paths they generate over time. The value that each programmatic method of story-tracing can impart to the generated story is held by the authors to be a fundamental property of the algorithms themselves. This attitude is best reflected by The term transcendental programming , which harkens to the programmer Yusuke Endoh, and refers to the practice of programming for its own creative sake, evolving from the demoscene, where coders would create graphical demonstrations free of any practical value proposition aside from the creative value of their efforts. In addition to poetic and narrative metadata that the authors would index (in I-We, many recurring symbols and cryptic characters were present), and their associated virtual coordinates in psychogeographical space, All Possible Pathways will also include illustrations related to these imagined worlds. Influence The precedent for this kind of digital story building was set by none other than Jeff Noon, The science fiction author of Vurt and Pollen whose writings featured progressively innovative wordplay, eventually arriving at generative and collaborative rule based techniques like that of “cobralingus” (2001). Noon’s own experiments on Twitter influenced I-We, and as with those experiments, Twitter can still be used as a vehicle to create a series of collaborative fictive snippets. In A.P.P., however, the use of blockchain data storage and incorporation of algorithms for their own intrinsic interest will bring these experiments into entirely new territory. Blockchain: While Public Presentation: The Reader can be set to output streamable or static videos, that can be presented installationally at Thoughtworks or other locations. Because the content of All Possible Pathways is dramatic, cinematic, illustrative, sonic, engaging and without start or end, it can be displayed to audiences in a theater like setting, projected in galleries or displayed on screens. |
