Kenniscentrum faculteit Digitale Media & Creatieve Industrie

Visual Methodologies Collective lanceert cli-fi podcast

Gepost op: 20 mei 2020

If we could read postcards sent from the future, would we be more aware of the choices we make today? The Visual Methodologies Collective at FDMCI has been looking at how A.I. can be used as a tool to explore future worlds through the literary genre of cli-fi (climate fiction). This month they have published ‘Turning to the birds’, a set of audio postcards written by A.I. and edited by humans that provide a glimpse of life into a world heavily impacted by climate change.

‘Turning to the birds’ forms part of the wider project Climate Futures, headed by Sabine Niederer of the Visual Methodologies Collective:

“Turning to the birds offers us an imaginary future, seen through the eyes of a forward-looking literary machine. Working with algorithms to create these stories and their accompanying cover art allows us to reflect on the future of the environment in new ways. At the same time, it lets us explore our relationship with automation and test our willingness to collaborate with novel technologies on creative processes.”

Collaborating with Sabine Niederer on this project were Andy Dockett, Carlo De Gaetano, and Jessica Ciucci of the Visual Methodologies Collective. The algorithms used for the experiment are Open A.I.’s GPT-2 language model and the AttnGAN text to image model.