AI and Generative Medieval Fictions
Submission Type
Paper
Start Date/Time (EDT)
19-7-2024 10:30 AM
End Date/Time (EDT)
19-7-2024 11:30 AM
Location
Algorithms & Imaginaries
Abstract
This presentation is an artist talk by the creator of the ELO Exhibition Item “The Gross Gloss.” “The Gross Gloss (Hypertext)” is a hypertext modality of an artist’s book that parallels contemporary technology with medieval culture. Inspired by medieval literature and art, the book engages with socioeconomic power dynamics by exploring similarities between the technology industry and feudalism by using mystically-adjacent language. Web aesthetics guides the project by drawing from Web 1.0 interfaces and the Commodore 64 color palette.
Attendees will hear about how this hypertext modality, in tandem with planned print and manuscript modalities, plays a crucial conceptual role in drawing a parallel between the denouement of manuscript culture with the early internet and its aesthetics. Through visual techniques and fictional narratives, our contemporary moment is repositioned into a historical one, where an algorithmically informed understanding of the world becomes a worldview similar to medieval Europe’s conceptualization of reality through the Western philosophical canon. The algorithm becomes a universal, unchallenged narrative, and the “computer wizard” idiomatic expression is reified through techno-mysticism. This techno-mystical understanding of the materiality of contemporary technology is positioned as a future feudal dystopia.
The presentation will also delve into how the work uses future-medieval imaginaries as received by generative processes. In 2019, the last chapter of the book was generated by GPT-2, then a cutting-edge precursor to Chat-GPT, after being trained on the preceding chapters and a corpus of literature including medieval works. Illustrations for the book were collaged from patent drawings and/or made with Stable Diffusion, a popular image-generation AI, by prompting the AI to create images based on the written text.
Recommended Citation
Perry, Alan, "AI and Generative Medieval Fictions" (2024). ELO (Un)linked 2024. 37.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2024/algorithmsandimaginaries/schedule/37
AI and Generative Medieval Fictions
Algorithms & Imaginaries
This presentation is an artist talk by the creator of the ELO Exhibition Item “The Gross Gloss.” “The Gross Gloss (Hypertext)” is a hypertext modality of an artist’s book that parallels contemporary technology with medieval culture. Inspired by medieval literature and art, the book engages with socioeconomic power dynamics by exploring similarities between the technology industry and feudalism by using mystically-adjacent language. Web aesthetics guides the project by drawing from Web 1.0 interfaces and the Commodore 64 color palette.
Attendees will hear about how this hypertext modality, in tandem with planned print and manuscript modalities, plays a crucial conceptual role in drawing a parallel between the denouement of manuscript culture with the early internet and its aesthetics. Through visual techniques and fictional narratives, our contemporary moment is repositioned into a historical one, where an algorithmically informed understanding of the world becomes a worldview similar to medieval Europe’s conceptualization of reality through the Western philosophical canon. The algorithm becomes a universal, unchallenged narrative, and the “computer wizard” idiomatic expression is reified through techno-mysticism. This techno-mystical understanding of the materiality of contemporary technology is positioned as a future feudal dystopia.
The presentation will also delve into how the work uses future-medieval imaginaries as received by generative processes. In 2019, the last chapter of the book was generated by GPT-2, then a cutting-edge precursor to Chat-GPT, after being trained on the preceding chapters and a corpus of literature including medieval works. Illustrations for the book were collaged from patent drawings and/or made with Stable Diffusion, a popular image-generation AI, by prompting the AI to create images based on the written text.
Bio
Alan Perry is an interdisciplinary artist who works with video, installation, artist’s books, computer animation, 3D printing, creative coding, and photography. His work questions the relationship between past and present, with a particular focus on communication technology. Questions around how technology takes on a magical or arcane aura permeates his work. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Fort Collins, Denver, Portland, Seattle, and Chicago in the United States, and internationally in Gimpo, South Korea. He was granted a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Photo Image Making from Colorado State University in 2013, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Art & Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019.