Fantasyland Autofiction

Published by Reblogs - Credits in Posts, October 16th, 2024

This essay explores a return to hope and romanticism by contemporary artists looking at themes of fantasy worlds and mapping imaginary lands as a type of autofiction. These fantasylands are created in collaboration with hallucinating machine learning platforms, as a tool for contemporary art-making. Seen through the framework of Metamodernism, how does AI hallucination contribute to Metamodern structure of feeling?

AI, as part of the metacrisis, places society and culture in a type of no man’s land or in-between, where rapid and unchecked advancements in machine learning and generative technologies are a further addition to an already complicated time, while simultaneously being a new and useful tool for contemporary artists.

Introduction

While high on opiates in 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the well-known writer and philosopher, channelled a 349-word poem Kubla Khan, about the construction of a palace by the Mongol ruler in the fantastical utopian land of Xanadu. Coleridge was the founder of the Romantic movement that became prevalent from the late 1800s (Haekel).

Historical romanticism originated in a time of great changes and conflicts in Britain, Europe, and America. Some of these included the American Revolution and the loss of the Thirteen Colonies, the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, the beginning of political change in Britain, with power beginning to be taken from the monarchy, the Industrial Revolution, and the pro-independence and revolutionary movements in Ireland (Sedlmayr). The "end of history" (Fukuyama) during the romantic period is comparable with the metacrisis that humanity has been dealing with since the late 1990s, if you take into account the rapid development of technologies and the political, economic, and social changes of the time (Christensen). As defined by Bhaskar et al., the metacrisis is "a singular socio-ecological crisis" that is described as a "complex multiplicity" that requires an interdisciplinary point-of-view (5). Bhaskar et al. go on to say that

these interconnected crises are also situated in a(n) (inter)subjective context of ‘interior’ meaning making (semiosis), construal and response that includes philosophical, scientific, religious, existential, worldview, and psychospiritual dimensions that are essential to include in an adequate understanding of the complex dynamics in play in order to facilitate more effective responses. (5)

A shift towards idealism or the "utopian turn" (van den Akker and Vermeulen 55), in addition to a return to sincerity, hope, and a neo-romanticism can be found in cultural artifacts (van den Akker et al. 4). These help to form what is known as a structure of feeling and is part of a new era beginning to be known as Metamodernism.

Metamodernism

Metamodernism is a broad and currently evolving term that emerged in the 1990s. Using the definition of Metamodernism proposed by the Dutch school, the term includes ideas that originate in Modernism and Postmodernism, which respond to, then move beyond to encompass, a wide range of recent and currently occurring cultural shifts (van den Akker et al.). ''The use of the prefix meta here derives from Plato’s metaxis, describing an oscillation and simultaneity between and beyond diametrically opposed poles" (Turner).

Metamodernism explains the culture shift away from postmodernism in terms of a ‘structure of feeling’ arising out of the ‘dialectical oscillation’ between modernism and postmodernism (‘metaxy’), it sees a ‘romantic turn’ in the newly arising works of literature, art, media productions and so on, and it includes a sweeping cultural critique of politics. (van den Akker et al. 199)

Some themes that can be found in contemporary cultural artifacts include ironic sincerity or ironic honesty (Ironesty) and neo-romanticism or the new romanticism. Indeed, "‘Utopia’ – as a trope, individual desire or collective fantasy – is once more, and increasingly, visible and noticeable across artistic practices that must be situated in, and related, to, the passage from postmodernism and metamodernism" (van den Akker and Vermeulen 57). For example, a group exhibition in 2022 titled The Black Fantastic, held at the Hayward Gallery in London, with the curatorial theme of a fantastical Afrofuturist realm, featured the work of 11 artists that use a wide variety of media (Southbank Centre). Described by Obuobi as being an exhibition of "Black artists who use fantastical elements to address racial injustice and explore alternative realities", they go on to say that two of the curatorial themes include "the multi-dimensional aesthetic experience of real and imagined worlds" and "contrasting utopian and apocalyptic views on time with regards to the past, present, and future" (Obuobi 136).

This return to romanticism could be seen as facilitating a form of escapism from the metacrisis, but Vermeulen and van den Akker argue that utopia "should be understood as a tool, say, a looking glass, for scanning this world and others for alternative possibilities" (65). Vermeulen and van den Akker highlight the term ‘utopistics’, a word coined by sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, that combines ideas associated with utopias, statistics, and logistics to imagine ideal societies created using practical information combined with idealistic hope to achieve them (Wallerstein). Examples of these ideas can be found in the use of "postmodern melancholy in order to invoke hope" in contemporary art (55) or the New Romanticism that focusses on the beauty of the "world while recognizing its ugly reality" (Aziz 28). This idea ties in with the idea of fantasy lands as they include imperfection, as opposed to a utopia, or "the good place that is no place" (Marks et al. 1), that is perfect in every way. In contrast, Santambrogio states that the meaning of utopia contains two aspects that oscillate between "eutopia, or good place; and that of outopia, or non-place" (148), or in other words "the ultimate in human folly or human hope" (Mumford 1). These definitions of utopia, align with the central idea of oscillation in Metamodernism.

Autofiction and Fantasy Lands

The aim of autofiction is to present an authentically relational experience for viewers. Autofiction is an in-between medium that blends reality with fantasy. Gibbons describes autofiction as

an explicitly hybrid form of life writing that merges autobiographical fact with fiction. The autofictional mode is not restricted to writing; it has been observed in the visual arts, cinema, theatre and online. (Gibbons 120)

One of the main attributes of autofiction is that the author is featured in the writing as a narrator, in the first person, or as a third-person character in the story (Gibbons et al. 176). The artist establishes "their self corporeally in the world, including in relation to others". In addition, Gibbons goes on to say that "identity is also acknowledged as a social category that is constructed by subjects and by larger structures of social power" (120). This affectual aspect of the work, combined with the oscillation between the personal and impersonal, the real world and a fantasyland, establishes autofiction as a Metamodern form of storytelling and contributes to a structure of feeling.

AI as Muse

The use of hallucinogens by Coleridge and the other Romantics to aid in the creation of their literary works is very well known (De Quincey; Dormandy; Vickers; Schäfer). Opium and other drugs like hashish have been seen to be a type of muse or collaborator in the creation of their work (Partridge 104). In Lamuse: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence for Sparking Inspiration, a conference paper on AI and artists, Lamiroy and Potier describe a project that used AI as an inspiration for work. "AI is not creating art in any way but is merely a muse to the artist, a tool" (3). AI hallucinations develop due to computational errors, while drug-induced hallucinations develop from biochemical alterations in the brain (Rolland et al. 1). Like Coleridge’s dream of the imaginary land of Xanadu, experiencing illusions, nonsensical output, or things that don’t exist, the artist uses these hallucinations as inspiration in the creation of work.

According to Maleki et al., the definition of an AI hallucination varies (6), but the most cited, originally coined by Koehn and Knowles (3), is that "AI hallucination occurs when the output of the Neural Machine Translation (NMT) system is often quite fluent but entirely unrelated to the input". In the text-to-image process, a machine learning platform may add unrelated subject matter to the image or make errors in the appearance of the intended subject.

Fig. 1: Adobe Firefly. Prompt: ‘Sue Beyer Land’. Text-to-image machine learning, August 2024.

In fig. 1 the prompt used to make this image was ‘Sue Beyer Land’. The example image appears to display a landscape combining three different landscapes that make up the back, mid-, and foreground. Mountains form the backdrop to green rolling hills of a rural landscape that features a dog sitting in the foreground, wearing a hat, with an Australian flag placed over the bottom half of its head. Different lighting is used in each section of the image. The strange and humorous aspects of this image are considered to be an AI hallucination.

Fig. 2: Runway ML. Prompt: ‘The Land of Sue Beyer’. Text-to-image machine learning, August 2024.

In another example, shown in fig. 2 using Runway ML and the prompt ‘The Land of Sue Beyer’, the AI produced an image that resembles a black and white Ansel Adams photograph of a dirt track with wooden fence posts, heading straight through a field towards mountains in the distance. The image, when examined closely, is obviously generated by AI. There are repetitive marks and errors along the length of the road, and inconsistencies in the light. The AI has generated an idealised land that exists outside of reality through an attempt to emulate an Ansel Adams photograph that invokes an idealised land that exists outside of reality.

Collaborating with AI

Topi Tjukanov, a geographer from Helsinki, has trained a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) using a large collection of images of maps since 2020. The result is a collection of images that morph into different styles of maps. There is no burning conceptual reason behind this project and Tjukanov says that "besides nice animations, it is very interesting to just explore the latent space" (Tjukanov).

In a more practical application, Google maps now use AI to add information and suggestions to help you get to where you need to be, and to make "a map that can reflect the millions of changes made around the world every day" (Glasgow).

Fig. 3: Sue Beyer. Slumberia, the Nation of Procrastia. Xanadu Roller Party, 2024.

Sue Beyer, an interdisciplinary artist, collaborated with a machine learning platform to create a map with the title Slumberia, the Nation of Procrastia. The work was created through the text-to-image machine learning platform DALL•E. The image uses parody and pastiche, to create a map in the style of an old-world hand-drawn map, featuring subdued or faded colours. The map also includes various fictional planets that surround Slumberia.

The prompt that made this image included data that the artist collected on their daily habits for the month of June 2024, recorded in 15-minute increments. The artist completed tasks each day according to their state of mind. Each country or continent was meant to represent the amount of time spent on each activity. Some of these activities included sleeping, working, playing PlayStation games, and reading. The result of the prompt shows that the AI focussed on sleeping, procrastination, and creativity and largely ignored the rest of the information, including the percentage of time spent on activities. In addition, the title of the location, Slumberia, the Nation of Procrastia, was not included in the prompt, with the AI deciding on this name for itself.

This article argues that, as a form of data mapping, this map can be seen as a type of activity and emotion-based cartography or cognitive map that Jameson describes as being a combination of real and ideological space (51). Did the AI create a psychogeographical map or a representation of the state of mind of the artist when completing tasks? We have moved beyond the psychogeography of the Situationist International with their "promise of critical empowerment" as it was "unable to address the contextual problems of the geocoded hybrid space" (Morilla Chinchilla 465; Tuters). We are now engaging with postlocative media, which is described as being postlocative art that "deploys strategies that critically accept the important role that non-humans play in public representation as well as in delegating the production of meaning to AI, thus moving beyond the locative framework and closely associating itself with the postphenomenology of complex systems" (Morilla Chinchilla 463). These ideas allow this collaborative work to fit into a structure of feeling or affect, while taking into account non-human and unfeeling AI.

Fig. 4: Sue Beyer. "Welcome to Sue World!" Xanadu Roller Party, 2024.

In addition to Slumberia, the Nation of Procrastia, Sue World is an online chatbot that can answer questions regarding a place called Sue World. The Webpage features an image of a woman standing in front of a space themed backdrop. The woman is looking off into the distance and is dressed in a type of cosplay-style spacesuit. The image appears to have been created by AI as it shows the tell-tale signs of things looking ‘not quite right’. Her right arm looks like it has been dislocated as the shoulder does not exist, there is unintelligible ‘writing’ on the front of her space suit harness, and the hair is a mix between smoke and strange highlights. Her skin has an airbrushed, unnaturally smooth and perfect, "selfie aesthetic" that has become normalised on social media (Swerzenski and Kim). There is a prompt for the viewer to ‘Ask me a question about Sue & Sue World’, with an arrow pointing to a set of three dots in a speech bubble. The text is displayed using bright colours that replicate a style associated with the Barbie brand, which, in this case, indicates a sense of playfulness, humour, and irony.

This work presents an autofiction of overlapping factual and fictional histories. The use of fiction to embellish history is now emphasised in stark reality on social media, where facts and lies are indistinguishable from each other even when sitting side by side. Examples given by Breithaupt of misinformation spread by bot farms and misguided opinions during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic have been described as an "infodemic" (1). However, in this case the fictions are written by AI acting as ghostwriter of the autofiction Sue World.

Both the Sue World chatbot and Slumberia, the Nation of Procrastia are intertextual. They both mimic past styles from geographic and art history, and popular culture. They appear to be satirical, while also interrogating how artists can collaborate with machine learning to answer existential questions like who and where am I? The predominant aspect of this work is the biographical nature of the information presented. It is a type of autofiction, written in collaboration with AI, with the AI acting as a ghost writer. Both works are also self-reflexive in their emphasis on the use of AI. In addition, there is a sense of ironic sincerity. The artist is sincerely looking for an answer, but the AI used to inform this work cannot be trusted to tell the truth. AI and the Internet can provide information and knowledge to whomever has access, but more recently it has become evident that they are being used as tools for misinformation and control (De Witt). When using machine learning platforms, the artist and the viewer must question whether the answer is accurate. These online tools are creative and destructive at the same time and can be seen to represent hope and despair (Singler). Elements of reality and fantasy, certainty and chance, irony and sincerity can also be found in both works. "This oscillation between different affective poles is seen as a characteristic of the metamodern structure of feeling" (van den Akker and Vermeulen).

AI and Metamodernism

The metacrisis or "the dramatic and complex situation of the current world is a scene for the birth of metamodernism" (Pipere and Mārtinsone 7). During the development of the metacrisis, there were rapid advancements in technology like the Internet and AI that are now part of people’s everyday lives. Anecdotally, artists have embraced relatively new tools like ChatGPT and DALL•E, but many are worried that the technology is being developed too fast and without a thorough regard for checks and balances. "The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) systems into various domains has raised concerns about their impact on individual and societal wellbeing, particularly due to the lack of transparency and accountability in their decision making processes" (Cheong 1). This problem is only part of what Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, talked about in a recent interview published in The New York Times (Metz).

A positive example of the use of AI is that it played a part in the development of "predictive models to map the spread of the outbreak and contact tracking applications to support governments and organisations in the management of the pandemic" (Etienne 306). However, it has also been revealed that the work of artists is being used to train AI without their permission, leading to the perceived problem of AI taking creative jobs, like extras acting and voice-overs (Spangler). This had led to major strikes by writers in Hollywood, demanding better contracts to safeguard their jobs against studios replacing humans with AI (Schuhrke). At present, AI is seen as an existential threat (Spangler), because recent studies show that AI or Large Language Models (LLMs) consistently fail to provide a comparable quality to that of human-created writing. Despite the difficulties of objectively assessing creative output, a recent study by Chakrabarty et al. shows that stories written by LLMs pass their assessment three to ten times less often than a story or screenplay written by a human (Chakrabarty et al.). Considering this result, we can safely state that AI is not creative. However, it has proved to be a useful tool to contemporary artists (Lamiroy and Potier).

Lev Manovich has linked contemporary media and art creation using Generative AI with the processes that artists from the modern art movement have used. He says they "achieved innovation by reinterpreting and incorporating older art forms from other cultures. Similarly, generative AI tools allow the creation of new works because they are trained on massive databases of existing art and media". Furthermore, "AI models trained on specific datasets to produce novel artworks that engage in a dialogue with historical art while introducing new aesthetic possibilities" (1).

This process of innovation through the reinterpretation of historic art forms, using the next generation of new media, is a Metamodern process. In Manovich’s words, modernism was concerned with "making it new" and AI is trained on "already existing art", and "although generative AI and modernist art appear to be opposites of each other" (1) they work together in a type of oscillation to create something new. This oscillation is a hallmark of metamodern process.

AI and Affect

At present, AI is fallible, and, like a human, makes mistakes (Glover and Sayre). An AI hallucination can be compared to an artist who uses mind-altering substances to enhance their output. The hallucination takes ideas into places the artist might not have gone otherwise. In the examples shown in figs. 3 and 4, the artist was using ironic sincerity when collaborating with an AI to write an autofiction that describes their physical and emotional world. Like the stereotype of the tragically beautiful English literature junkies Shelley and Byron (Ruston 344), who are hopelessly romantic and beautifully destructive, a collaboration is formed with something you may end up relying on despite the drawbacks.

Conclusion

In this article, a parallel was drawn between the historical period of the romantics and contemporary artists, not only in the political, social, and cultural aspects of the time but in the use of opiates for inspiration. Their use of opiates was compared with the use of AI hallucinations as a tool for contemporary artists. In the examples shown that examine the topic of utopia and fantasylands, there is a return to hope and romanticism. This shift towards the utopian turn is part of a Metamodern structure of feeling. An oscillation between the ideas found in utopia, eutopia, and utopistics is being used "so that we can once again conceive of the future" (van den Akker and Vermeulen 55). The autofiction of Sue World and utopian map of Slumberia use postmodern techniques such as irony, intertextuality, and self-reflexivity to reveal the modernist spirit of romanticism and "affective states like melancholy, hope, enthusiasm, and despair" (van den Akker and Vermeulen), while also considering non-human and unfeeling AI. In the chosen examples, the use of AI as a collaborator places the work in an amorphous in-between place, where ideas perpetually oscillate between bittersweet hope and destructive optimism.

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