Thesis: Part II

Day 1 update

I spent some time this break applying to the TRANS Media conference (no luck, but I might attend as an audience member) and loosely reflecting on the assemblage of elements pulled from other final projects that might inform thesis.

New research, new findings, if any

How has your thinking about your project changed since December?

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I’ve been listening to new Alex Quicho’s continuing work on Girl Theory and she brings in these terms I’d like to pull more into the text of the project: gender synthesis, gender rigging to pull away from the gender essentialism brought up by the term. I’d also like to press more into dress, drag, “geish” and dissect more the analogs I’m pulling between AI, social media selves, the Girl, etc and the creation of self as it might connect to K Allado McDowell’s model as self as AI.

New clarifications about the prototype you plan to build

The form, the tech, the platform, etc.

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My final projects last year had me taking the text and placing them in New Art City which I then navigated to walk through and read.

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The knowns

Share any progress you may have made, preliminary designs, diagrams, images, user journeys, tech specs, etc.

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From class feedback last semester, I’d maybe like to include more recordings and videos of readings so the piece can be experienced without a performer. See:

The unknowns

What are your biggest challenges still? Where (if anywhere) do you feel you're still "feeling around in the dark"? How do you plan to address these unknowns?

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I think the question of relevance is top of my mind right now. I was talking to a friend today about pointlessness and meaning and he dropped this Deleuze quote:

We sometimes go on as though people can’t express themselves. In fact they’re always expressing themselves. The sorriest couples are those where the woman can’t be preoccupied or tired without the man saying “What’s wrong? Say something…,” or the man, without the woman saying … and so on. Radio and television have spread this spirit everywhere, and we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying. What we’re plagued by these days isn’t any blocking of communication, but pointless statements. But what we call the meaning of a statement is its point. That’s the only definition of meaning, and it comes to the same thing as a statement’s novelty. You can listen to people for hours, but what’s the point? . . . That’s why arguments are such a strain, why there’s never any point arguing. You can’t just tell someone what they’re saying is pointless. So you tell them it’s wrong. But what someone says is never wrong, the problem isn’t that some things are wrong, but that they’re stupid or irrelevant. That they’ve already been said a thousand times. The notions of relevance, necessity, the point of something, are a thousand times more significant than the notion of truth. Not as substitutes for truth, but as the measure of the truth of what I’m saying. It’s the same in mathematics: Poincaré used to say that many mathematical theories are completely irrelevant, pointless; He didn’t say they were wrong – that wouldn’t have been so bad.

KAM says something similar and connects it with generated text and cringe:

Well, as somebody who’s often at conferences and speaking almost constantly, I know that just because words are coming out doesn’t mean that there’s necessarily anything meaningful being said. But I have definitely experienced writer’s block. There is a kind of writer’s block that can come with generativity too. If you don’t have a deep structure for what you’re trying to get out, or you don’t have an image that you’re driving toward, or you don’t have something you’re trying to understand, then the act of writing can just be automatic, like a bodily function. It’s the same with generativity. You can generate endless amounts of text that isn’t good or meaningful or useful to you in that moment.

One thing that is very freeing about generated text is that it doesn’t come from you. You’re free to treat it however you want. You don’t necessarily have the experience of cringing at it the way you would at your own writing. Part of the initiation of a writer is to write something that you think is brilliant, and then in the harsh light of the morning, you revisit it and it makes you feel really bad about yourself, that you wrote it and thought it was good.

I’m very interested in what kinds of affects about writing or affects around writing might emerge when AI co-writing or AI writing processes are more common. I could see a more relaxed or sprezzatura affect around writing, rather than the kind of tortured 20th-century alcoholic womanizer trope, where it’s less about destroying your ego or judging yourself constantly, and more about what you can create without having to be the sole owner of all the words. There’s something freeing about not owning every word.

It’s like using found objects in a sculpture or something. When you’re using generated text, you have to ask yourself: Is this helping my thought process? You’re thinking more, is this something that people would want to read? and less, What does this say about me? So, there’s potentially less cringe involved for the writer, which could produce a less neurotic experience.