Electronic Literature and Artificial Intelligence (AI): Theory and Practice of Digital Storytelling
Recently I attended an Online course on the Gian platform on ‘Electronic Literature and Artificial Intelligence (AI): Theory and Practice of Digital Storytelling’ hosted by Prof. M. Rizwan Khan, The Department of English Aligarh University, Aligrah, U.P. in a virtual mode. This blog deals with my learning out of attending this interesting course.
Day-3
Lecture 5: Prof. Paola Carbone [Foreign faculty, Department of Humanities IULM University, Milan] on Locative Narratives: Definition of “Locative narrative” as a way to write with the Physical World, to read within the Physical World and give Place and History a voice, Examples
And How to project Locative Narratives. Locative Narratives and the Meta-verse
Locative narrative is a way to write within the physical world, to read within the physical world and to give place and history a voice”; “to write with place, object and absence as well as textuality.
Locative narratives are writing with space Flaneur, Street art/writing, Performance art and Land art.
Land art artists were interested in the combination of body, line, surface, site and materials and it opened up a perspective of experimenting with place and space through what Stiles described as ‘an amplification of the process over the product’– a shift from the representational object to further modes of action / presentation of experience.
geographical space = canvas
Immersive aesthetic experience
1. The place is de-familiarized in order to see differently
2. The genius loci becomes a framework for re-experience
Media artists started to explore the possibility of turning these principles into a digital artistic experience
Real world spaces are augmented with artistic contents – primarily audio and/ or textual – and mediated by mobile devices. E.G: Google maps
Locative mobile social networks – LMSN: to coordinate sociability in the city
location-based mobile games – LBMG
narration of places: enhancing the value of places through new technologies
site-specific fictional stories, stories written just for that particular environment
The user is set into a communitas, commonly referring either to an unstructured community in which persons are equal and are allowed to share a common experience, Communitas is characteristic of people experiencing liminality together, and more specifically in this case a space between organic and inorganic.
It offers to other users my sense and my knowledge of the place, my awareness of other people's behaviors, in other words my story.
The experience of public spaces especially in urban areas mainly consists of transit, a transition from one place to another... mostly a solitary experience.
Private space within public space
How can digital media draw one into an awareness of place?
narration of places: enhancing the value of places through new technologies
site-specific fictional stories, stories written just for that particular environment
Locative media is an instance of 'unframed' media practice, unframed in the sense of unbound from the desktop, detached from the singular screen and thus a fixed spectatorial perspective.
To read is to recognize that a critical engagement requires a range of cognitive and bodily activities, only one of which is reading in the sense of the visual processing of linguistic signs.
Reading involves seeing, moving, listening, touching = it is a challenge to the hegemony of words.
Examples
The design of a Locative Narrative
an idea on how to structure your contents, of what you want to say, and how you want to communicate it. This is called storytelling.
You need to activate your attention.
Before the scripting, the storyteller must :
1. survey the potential attractors distinguishing them between main and secondary >> they will become episodes of the core or satellite
2. select the myths, which will define the paradigms on which the narrative will be built visit the place
3 define the characters
4.choose the narrative typologies of the story: the choice will depend on:
the context: quantity and quality of the POI and eventual additional materials (documentation, archives, etc.)
users: if universal, it will have to refer to all typologies; if you have in mind a target, you have to adapt the choice to this, economic availability.
Vertical narration: a main plot must be identified without secondary subplots and a route that moves between the objective is the sensory immersion of the visitor in the narrated context, to be achieved through a detailed script of the movements of the user and the character.
Horizontal narration: once the main plot is established, the visitor has all the material at his disposal and can explore it as he likes and assemble it as he likes during the visit.
Example:
Digital art and Interactive media
Lecture 6: Prof. Mohd. Rizwan Khan [Host Faculty, Department of English Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh. U.P., India] on AI and the Discipline of Humanities
Humanities: The humanities include the study of all languages and literatures, the arts, history, and philosophy. It is a critique of human conditions.
AI education is valuable not only in the fields of Computer Science and Engineering but also in humanities. It will become an essential component in education like mathematics, language and Science. The English department has started a course in digital Humanities.
- Literature
- Electronic Literature
- AI Generated Literature
- Cyborg/ Robot Literature
Use of AI
Art historians
Historians
Archaeologists
AI in Art, Music, Dance
AI is seen as the sole generator or a collator.
Artwork can be generated.
AI song contest.
AI in film and media
Role of VFX, movie editing and creating trailers.
The film ‘Her’ depicts the story of a man who falls in love with a Virtual assistant.
‘Coded bias’- facial recognition treats dark-skinned faces unfairly’.
DAY-4
Lecture 7: Prof. Paola Carbone [Foreign faculty, Department of Humanities IULM University, Milan] on Podcast: What it is, Typologies and Examples and Discussion
Podcasts are an increasingly successful form of communication.
Three determining factors
- The podcast is currently very fashionable and therefore the more people talk about it, the more they want to do it.
- The on-demand characteristic of podcasts makes them suitable for multitasking listening, i.e. while doing other activities.
- The podcast does not have interaction as its peculiarity and it is this 'lack' that makes it such an intimate and profound content.
Podcasting communicates in one direction:
- you construct your content
- you reason it out
- you write it down
The word podcast comes from the combination of iPod and broadcasting.
It first appeared in an article published by Ben Hammersley for "The Guardian" on 12 February 2004.
In 2005, the New Oxford American Dictionary declared 'podcast' to be word of the year.
The term podcasts refers to original audio content, usually of an episodic serial nature, that is made available on demand over the internet.
RADIO VS PODCAST
- Podcasts and radio are not the same thing. Not only are they based on two different technologies, but they also present two different types of content.
- A podcast is not a web radio. Web radio is streamed by users through an internet connection. A podcast, on the other hand, can also be listened to offline, after being downloaded via an Internet network;
- Radio is interactive, podcast is not
- A difference and advantage of the podcast compared to radio is also the availability of time.
Intimacy: the radio tends to address, through the radio speaker, an indistinct mass of potential receivers while in the podcast you really have the feeling that the narrator is addressing the single person wearing his headphones.
Podcast range in time from 10 minutes to an hour long (for example for Crime Podcast)
CATEGORIES OF PODCASTS
- Interviews + Panel Discussion
- Free talk
- Scripted fiction
- Documentary + educational
- Scripted non-fiction
- News-recap
Example
Identify your podcast goals- To generate leads, To share an important message and To have fun
The only requirement is passion
Find two stories: same topic but with two possible endings or perspectives.
Find a story you like and then find another that somehow matches that story. This is because each episode of Shadow Lines is basically made up of two stories. Once the first story has been selected, the objective of the second story is clear. It has to be somehow similar to the first story (not only by similarity but also by contrast).
There are two types of stories:
- Exceptional stories, out of the ordinary, able to arouse strong emotions and leave us stunned.
- Ordinary and common stories, which precisely because of their "simplicity" allow us to identify with and relive, through the story, the events and themes that are somehow part of us.
DAY- 5
Lecture 8: Prof. Paola Carbone [Foreign faculty, Department of Humanities IULM University, Milan] on AI and Literature: Ontological Issues with examples
Ontology: the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.
In AI, an ontology is a specification of the meanings of the symbols in an information system.
Machine learning
Machine Learning is based on algorithms designed to perform a/one task.
Machine learning is able to find values not perceived by the human eye, but useful for making future predictions or behaviors based on algorithms..
Deep learning
Deep Learning works on a set of techniques that allows the system to automatically discover the representations needed for feature detection classification from raw data. Such representations are often hidden to our human comprehension. The data used by an AI to identify an image, for example, is very different from what humans would use. Through the neural network an image is analyzed and transformed into smaller representations (feature maps) that the computer can recognize so precisely to be used to identify content. The same features maps would appear as scribbles or random lines to the human eye.
Digital culture vs AI:
Digital culture defines flow of content (immaterial) distributed across various intersections of media human behaviors determined by virtual reality in its relationship with a real-world environment.
AI acts on the playground of reality since it acquires data from it in order to do things, to carry out actions, to perform tasks in the real world.
We should not consider AI as a tool (a hammer, for example) because an AI processes and interprets information. It is not even an environment (matrix) since it inhabits products and services that surround us (see internet of things).
AI vs Hyperreal:
AI emulates and determines (rational) behaviors rather than their simulation
“Hyperreal” simulates, it is a simulacrum or a “real” without origin or reality
Definition of AI:
(…) the artificial intelligence problem is taken to be that of making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving.” [1955, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon]
Luciano Floridi: “ … were a human to behave in that way, that behavior would be called intelligent.”
Fears of AI:
- Question of an advanced aligned AI system and human values.
- A machine lacks those specific peculiarities of human intelligence that are generalization and abstraction
- Is the AI aware of the fact that it is playing chess? No, it is simply applying an algorithm
- Likewise, also emotions and doubts are essential human distinctiveness that a machine, trained to proceed algorithmically, cannot experience or understand.
- Today research is trying to go farther and control emotions. Next-generation AI aims to capture these moments with webcams so as to adapt responses to emotions.
- Machines must have the ability to understand emotions and to articulate responses in terms of both content and facial expressions, tone of voice, and body management = communication.
- Understanding AI means being aware of the risks
- transparency problems > who does what
- inequality, accountability problems: human bias processes on algorithms (exclusion of minorities)
- Manipulative problems echo chamber
This 'advanced' form of computer-assisted processing is still working on the idea that a screenplay, like a literary text, is a formal structure, but the neural networks allowed the generation of a text that is new in so far as it is a priori unpredictable and based on hidden learning features.
The text generated could only be written by that specific AI and from that particular dataset.
I hope this blog is useful. Thanks for visiting.
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