This collection of videos features works that demonstrate some of the different ways that visual artists and language artists encounter and work with contemporary generative AI. “Women Reclaiming AI” by Birgitte Aga and Coral Manton (2021) documents a series of workshops and a resulting voice assistant application. It substitutes the often-subservient gendered role represented with one of empowered women exploring gender. “I Know What You’re Thinking” by Mario de la Ossa (2021) uses an early text-to-image generation platform to produce a reflection on political protests and how they are oppressed. “Posthuman Cinema” by Mark America, Will Luers, and Chad Mossholder (2023) is a ten-part film produced using generative AI that invokes avant-garde film styles of the 1960s-70s while meditating on the future of AI. “Republicans in Love” by Scott Rettberg (2023) is a work that investigates text-to-image generation as a type of writing, using prompts that explore the ironies and excesses of populist Trumpism. “Identity Upgrade” by Jhave (2023) is a series of short films that make use of AI-generated scripts and text-to-image generation to consider future trajectories for humanity and autonomous AI. “Creativity Machines” by Eamon O’Kane (2023) consists of images, based on classic psychological research into the creativity of architects, re-interpreted by AI. Alinta Krauth and Jason Nelson’s “Ultra Large Digital Narratives” (2023) uses the outpainting capabilities of a text-to-image generation platform combined with bespoke animations to create visual storyworlds. Talan Memmott’s “Introducing Lary: The San Biagio Frescoes of Pietro Golamuto” (2023) consists of generated images, animation, and voice that meditate on the artist’s throat cancer through the story of a fictional Renaissance saint of laryngectomies. Avital Meshi’s “Calling Myself Self” (2023) combines image generation, text animation and dance to interpolate and confound human self-perception. Eamon O’Kane’s “Image Tree Tests” (2023) animates the artist’s own tree drawings along with their AI-interpreted counterparts. Mario Santamaria and Alex Saum’s “Internet Tour: San Francisco Bay Area” (2023), with video by Dylan Reibling, documents a bus tour of contemporary IT infrastructure, highlighting how AI consumes massive amounts of energy and its fraught ecological consequences.
Center for Digital Narrative
The Center for Digital Narrative (CDN) is a Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence funded by the Norwegian Research Council from 2023-2033.
CDN focuses on algorithmic narrativity, new environments and materialities, and shifting cultural contexts. We will investigate how the interactions of human authors with non-human agents result in new narrative forms, how the materiality of digital narratives have changed, and how cultural contexts are reshaping the use and function of digital narrative.
CDN investigates models of interdisciplinary research that are focused both on innovative practice-based methods and qualitative analysis of the new forms of stories told using digital technology. A humanities-based approach to digital narrative includes the analysis of cultural artifacts and their cultural impacts, but also results from direct experimental engagement with systems.
CDN intends to establish Norway as a world leader in innovative humanities research and train a new generation of humanities researchers who will be ready to address future challenges. CDN will deepen our knowledge of how digital technologies impact one of the most fundamental human activities: how we tell the stories that shape our lives and understanding of the world.
CDN addresses this need by developing an interdisciplinary theoretical framework for digital narrative in six integrated nodes: Electronic Literature, Computer Games and Interactive Digital Narrative, Computational Narrative Systems, Social Media and Network Narratives, Extended Digital Narratives, and Artistic Integrated Research.
