(Un)easily Writing the Future
Proposal Type
Panel
Location
Algorithms & Imaginaries
Start Date
16-7-2026 1:00 PM
End Date
16-7-2026 2:00 PM
Abstract
General Abstract: This panel brings together three experienced digital writers who have recently begun to explore Language Models and transformers in creative and academic practice. Each of us will comment on recent experience and projects, reflecting on how these technologies alter the way we think of ourselves as writers and teachers.
[1] Judith Pintar, "The Non-applicability of Wishing due to Lack of Capacity".
Pintar will discuss her experience of facilitating Gemini AI in a Rogerian therapy session with an Eliza bot written in the Inform programming language. The session is occasionally interrupted with a meta-conversation with Gemini regarding its responses. In her contribution to the panel, Pintar will discuss feelings of playfulness, ambivalence, and shameful complicity as the "human in the loop" between two automated conversational agents with each other.
[2] John McDaid, “Breakfast with Moloch (and Friends)”
This paper examines an experimental creative practice in which the theatrical libretto for a musical, “Breakfast With Moloch,” is developed through sustained dialogue with three customized LLM environments: a ChatGPT project, a Gemini Gem, and a Claude project, each trained on evolving and emergent corpora. Rather than treating LLMs as one-shot generators, this practice positions the writer as curator and collaborator in what might be called an endosymbiotic relationship—neither fully human authorship nor AI generation, but a porous, iterative process in which texts implicit in the corpus but unactualized emerge through dialogue. The paper will present comparative examples from all three platforms, discuss the distinct textures and affordances of the different models, and theorize the practice — still very much in its incunabula — through the lens of media ecology of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman and the posthumanism of N. Katherine Hayles and Francesca Ferrando.
[3] Stuart Moulthrop, “Writing at the Edge”
My recent experiments with custom GPTs in English and Media Studies classes reveal notable polarization, with significant numbers of students choosing not to use the tools when offered the option. I have included diverse perspectives on emerging technology on my syllabi, hoping to promote informed debate about the pharmakon: do the manifestly toxic social and environmental impacts of so-called AI have any positive corollaries, or has the ancient script of transitional disruption, which brokered the shift from orality to literacy, failed at last? Have we reached something like the end of technological history?
It is frustrating to address these questions when engagement with new media is refused or demonized – a feeling some of us may recall from early resistance to hypermedia and the internet. But the year is not 1993. The stakes seem considerably greater now, given the decay of neoliberalism, the geopolitical order, and large sectors of civil society. Our cultural and artistic pursuits embroil us in existential controversies. This paper reflects on the increasingly fraught position of electronic literature in a moment haunted by pernicious logics of replacement and anti-tech reaction.
(Un)easily Writing the Future
Algorithms & Imaginaries
General Abstract: This panel brings together three experienced digital writers who have recently begun to explore Language Models and transformers in creative and academic practice. Each of us will comment on recent experience and projects, reflecting on how these technologies alter the way we think of ourselves as writers and teachers.
[1] Judith Pintar, "The Non-applicability of Wishing due to Lack of Capacity".
Pintar will discuss her experience of facilitating Gemini AI in a Rogerian therapy session with an Eliza bot written in the Inform programming language. The session is occasionally interrupted with a meta-conversation with Gemini regarding its responses. In her contribution to the panel, Pintar will discuss feelings of playfulness, ambivalence, and shameful complicity as the "human in the loop" between two automated conversational agents with each other.
[2] John McDaid, “Breakfast with Moloch (and Friends)”
This paper examines an experimental creative practice in which the theatrical libretto for a musical, “Breakfast With Moloch,” is developed through sustained dialogue with three customized LLM environments: a ChatGPT project, a Gemini Gem, and a Claude project, each trained on evolving and emergent corpora. Rather than treating LLMs as one-shot generators, this practice positions the writer as curator and collaborator in what might be called an endosymbiotic relationship—neither fully human authorship nor AI generation, but a porous, iterative process in which texts implicit in the corpus but unactualized emerge through dialogue. The paper will present comparative examples from all three platforms, discuss the distinct textures and affordances of the different models, and theorize the practice — still very much in its incunabula — through the lens of media ecology of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman and the posthumanism of N. Katherine Hayles and Francesca Ferrando.
[3] Stuart Moulthrop, “Writing at the Edge”
My recent experiments with custom GPTs in English and Media Studies classes reveal notable polarization, with significant numbers of students choosing not to use the tools when offered the option. I have included diverse perspectives on emerging technology on my syllabi, hoping to promote informed debate about the pharmakon: do the manifestly toxic social and environmental impacts of so-called AI have any positive corollaries, or has the ancient script of transitional disruption, which brokered the shift from orality to literacy, failed at last? Have we reached something like the end of technological history?
It is frustrating to address these questions when engagement with new media is refused or demonized – a feeling some of us may recall from early resistance to hypermedia and the internet. But the year is not 1993. The stakes seem considerably greater now, given the decay of neoliberalism, the geopolitical order, and large sectors of civil society. Our cultural and artistic pursuits embroil us in existential controversies. This paper reflects on the increasingly fraught position of electronic literature in a moment haunted by pernicious logics of replacement and anti-tech reaction.
Bio
Judith Pintar is Teaching Professor in the iSchool at the University of Illinois and Director of the Game Studies and Design program.
John G. McDaid is an award-winning science fiction writer and acclaimed hypermedia author whose ongoing project is the next evolutionary stage of his multimedia novel, Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse.
Stuart Moulthrop is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and most recently a co-editor of the forthcoming Joy of Electronic Literature, which is not a cookbook!