Series: Art Page 3 of 18

As a follow-on to thinking about hypercanvases, I started querying Claude and ChatGPT (will abbreviate to CG below) to try to expand on the idea of hyperdimensional storytelling that makes use of hypercanvases as its “native” media format.

Definition:

Got this decent base definition out of CG:

• Hyperdimensional Storytelling: This form of storytelling transcends traditional linear or even multi-linear narrative structures. It engages with storytelling across various dimensions, realities, and perspectives, often blending media, time, space, and even individual experience.

Not very spicy, but a good jumping off point. Which is often how I would characterize CG’s outputs. They also wanted me to convey to you these key concepts within Hyperdimensional Storytelling:

Key Concepts:

Non-Linearity:

• Unlike traditional narratives, hyperdimensional storytelling doesn’t follow a single linear path. It can branch, loop, intersect, or exist simultaneously on various planes.

Interactivity:

• Readers, listeners, or viewers are not just passive consumers. They can influence the narrative, explore different pathways, and even contribute to the story itself.

Multi-Media Integration:

• The story can manifest through text, images, audio, video, virtual reality, and more. Each medium adds layers and nuances to the storytelling.

Temporal Fluidity:

• Time can be treated as a flexible dimension, allowing for parallel timelines, time travel, flashbacks, and foresights that are interconnected in complex ways.

Personalized Experience:

• Different participants may experience the story differently based on their choices, background, interactions, and even emotional states.

Collaborative Creation:

• Multiple authors, including the audience, can contribute to the story, weaving a complex tapestry that reflects diverse voices and experiences.

Cultural Contextuality:

• The story adapts and resonates differently with various cultural contexts, and it can morph to engage with different social, historical, and individual perspectives.

Again, not spicy or all that evocative, nor does it perfectly capture what I myself am doing, but gets the job done for a quick “minimum viable product” for what hyperdimensional storytelling might look like.

Claude can be pretty evocative though, and below is a lightly edited list of some suggestions to flesh out the concept more, along with my comments in parentheses.

Claude on Hyperdimensional Storytelling

• Stories can be told by navigating pathways through a hypercanvas over time.
• The story resides in the specific journey rather than any individual manifested artifact. (ed. I think it could be both/neither also)
• Choices along the way shape characters, events, and emotional resonance.
• Iteratively generating artifacts actualizes key story moments, but is not the full tale. (The full tale might be impossible to grasp, also)
• The context of how iterations relate conveys the narrative arc.
• Visuals, text, audio can all combine as storytelling media.
• Hyperlinks connect narrative threads across manifestations.
• Different reader/viewers may take varying paths through the latent narrative.
• Social interaction layers additional perspectives onto the core story.
• Story boundaries blur across the internet with collective riffing.
• The full narrative only exists in aggregate activity across media and minds.
• No singular telling, but many permutations of possibilities.
• The author guides initial pathways, then surrenders to emergence.(This!)
• A story requiring AI’s generative capacity to fully explore.
• Worldbuilding happens by steering generative models down new tangent universes
• Plots form through chains of creative choices scaling possibility spaces (I like this phrase “scaling possibility spaces!”)
• Tension and stakes emerge from unlikely AI-assisted combinations
• Moods flow by manipulating aesthetic latent parameters over sequences (AI storytelling is very mood-based, imo)
• Delayed reader gratification comes from omitted glimpses of latent paths not taken (Love it)
• Cliffhangers leave narrative threads unresolved across bifurcating branches
• Flashbacks reconstruct memories using inpainting and imaginative leaps
• Surprise twists from controlled random walks away from expectations
• Easter eggs hide in edge cases only AI exploration would find
• (Letting the AI act as the storyteller, or collaborating with human storyteller.)
• Meta-stories arise from readers training their own AI models on hypercanvases
• Fiction bleeds into reality when false trails lead to true discoveries (i.e., hyperreality)
• Empathy bridges occur by inhabiting procedural personas (Not sure completely what this means, but I think I like it! Maybe it’s like in that PKD novel where many people can inhabit the same character/figure/toy/simulation thing…)
• Catharsis is achieved through simulated resolutions of inner conflicts (or there’s no catharsis, and no resolution, which is what I generally prefer for these kinds of stories & collections)
• Exploring moral dilemmas through generative character simulations (I like the idea of having many different outcomes – and not just simulated outcomes – be “normal”)
• Building mythic lore by tracing ancestral narrative branches backwards (I’m not sure what they meant by “ancestral” here, but I like this idea of maybe deconstructing/reconstructing antecedent ancestors to stories, something Tolkien talks about in one of those essays, about I think the ‘soup of story’ or cauldron or something – I forget)
• Foreshadowing emerges from projected probabilistic narrative futures (This seems cool!)
• Unreliable narrators from biased text generation models (love love love this way to make AI bias into something purposive & useful)
• Stream of consciousness inner dialogue via recursive inner monologue generation (James Joyce, but AI)
• Fractal story recursion with stories within stories in latent daydreams (frame stories ftw!)
• Surreal symbolism derived from visual concept associations (could probably boost this one to be more evocative)
• Dramatic irony engineered via asymmetric information flows to different characters (this is a cool way of putting it)
• Comedy through absurd juxtapositions and violated expectations
• Tragedy of generative Greek theatre where language models predict downfalls (not super sure what this means, but I think I like it, especially thinking about AI & hubris)
• Mysteries to solve by interrogating generative models for clues (this sounds very alternate reality game)
• Deus ex machina via intervening AI characters to resolve human conflicts
• Branching story paths from choose-your-own-adventure generative text models (obvious, but I’ll allow it!)
• Time dilations and contractions by modulating generative model outputs (I like this idea of messing with time)
• Memory hacking by inserting or removing narrative details in generated stories (also cool)
• Social graph influences through character relationships and simulated interactions (“social graph” as a phrase is triggering for me, but maybe some people would be into this as a way to flesh out characters)

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I think this is all pretty fun, because it’s been rare that we see any ideas put forward as to how we can positively use generative AI tools to enrich storytelling. And even as wonky as the above list may be, it feels inspiring as a rich ground to make exciting discoveries in as an explorer.

I.

As the world falls apart, world-building becomes an act of personal defiance – resistance, even – to all that threatens to engulf us. As consensus reality bends ever nearer to the breaking point, the creative imagination of detailed, expansive multiverses becomes a way to maintain one’s soul, sanity, and humanity amid a rising tide of chaos. It is a re-ordering, and re-orientation of inner and outer realities, and one which admits the possibility of other ways out of this mess and this ever-enclosing yet ever-expanding maze. 

At their best, alternate fictional realities – of our own or collective imagining – may even offer something of a partial antidote to evil, and a detournement of dystopia and destruction towards something else, an unseen other. A still silent something which we can then strive to actualize once we’re able to envision it with the eyes of the heart. Utopia. The city on the hill. The garden on an island. 

To dismiss world-building as mere escapist fantasy, then, is to misunderstand its twin potentialities, its invigorating and stabilizing effects on the psyche, both in times of crisis and peace. Children exercise this imaginal faculty naturally, instinctively, inventing invisible scenarios, playmates, entire paracosms to suit their own emotional needs and creative desires. So too might we engage in this type of unique world-play in the face of the ever-increasing homogenisation and totalizing effects of technology, and under the shadow of the vast empty algorithms which seek to harvest data from us as we fall, usurping our sovereignty to turn us into mere automatons made in their image.

The so-called Uncanny Valley has been with us for ages, in the eyes of the inhumane human beings who don the guise of the merchant-machine’s own thirst for efficiency, predictability, and profit – embracing it as their own, sacrificing themselves at its altar in the process. It is in the sick hearts of both the Influencer and Influenced, who chase likes and clicks in an endless anxious ouroboros, who give and withhold approval in some sick sad game to outsmart systems that have no intelligence in the first place – systems which instead devour the intelligence of all they touch, which show us the way that is not the True Way. Who beg us endlessly to like, subscribe, and follow. We have become bots to one another. Personal brands, not persons. We are all already AI.

II.

Using AI doesn’t make me an artist, but being an artist is what made me use AI. Picasso said something about painting being stronger than him, that it made him do whatever it wanted. For me, AI seems like the new painting, the new artistic force that compels… Not just painting with a brush, mind you, but painting with ideas, words, entire pictures and videos at once, songs, voices, characters. Worlds. Each a brush stroke on a larger hypercanvas, whose true form can only be viewed from the vantage point of the higher dimensional latent space of human imagination.

In these creative explorations, AI is perfectly suited as a companion, an accompanist, a partner to bring out deep expressions of the seemingly innate human trait of building fictional worlds, and populating lands of the imagination with our own reflections: our thoughts, feelings, our hopes and failings, our biases, and unconscious statistical desires, our taking, our giving… 

Like comics before it, much/most/all AI art is not considered “art” by the general public and the hatefluencers who have internalized the anger and outrage that drives the algorithm, and them along with it, as biological expressions of it. Humans driven by weaponized AI advertising feeds beamed straight into the brain courtesy of news feeds, cell phones, towers, satellites, platforms, countries, all owned by the same few billionaires.

Like Nature which is everywhere at all times – even present in the acts of Man – art pervades all things. There is no such thing as, “this is art, this other is not art.” All that exists does so artfully, through craft, through expression (including genetic & ecosystemic), through form, propelled out of formlessness by the unfolding of some unseen grace. All is artifice. The artifice of flowers, of the sheer face of a mountain, of clouds on a moonlit night, geese honking in anticipation of the arrival of the Aurora. 

Artifice alone does not imply guile and falsity. Artifice is the construction of the thing, the moment, the beauty, the particular shape of it. Calling something artificial therefore or synthetic should instead be a recognition that all things, all entities are constructs, are composed of other things and entities, and on and on. Artifice is everywhere. It hides and it reveals. It discovers. It connects.

Is AI truly intelligent yet? Better question: are we? Do we individually and collectively have the ability to reflect and improve on our past, and not just repeat our old mistakes in new forms, as technology pushes us down its ever-narrowing pathways? Do we have the ability to observe and take accurate inputs from our world, from ourselves, and from one another and act on them to produce outputs aligned with our true intent and best interests?

AI is perhaps then only as intelligent as we are: in other words, wildly inconsistently – in some areas frequently, in other rarely or never. What else would we expect then in tools made in our images? What else should we expect from our children than the examples we give them?

In the latent space of AI, all things are as true as they are not, and every shade of in-between. Shimmering hyperreality lattices weaving and unweaving. A kind of primal quantum soup with every extracted possibility of its training set encoded as a point within it, ready to be combined with any other at the invocation of the observer, the querent, the participant of the mystery collapsing the wave form of what could be into the one true file-output that is made real, the tokens, the pixels arranged on a screen, the impact they have on the sensorium of the observer, the notes they play on our inward pianos. The hypercanvas formed by all of those things in the path of their totality, as the shadow turns day into night and back again.

Art and artifice made this way, through the open acknowledgement and even embrace of the artificial (a sometimes bitter, sometimes brilliant embrace), frees itself from the tedious need to be tied down by simple categories such as real or false; viz. disinformation as high art. Art, artifice, artifact existing fluidly on a hyperreal continuum, the spectre and spectrum and all things between, an ocean of perceivable digital artifacts, arrangements, appearing and disappearing on our screens and inner perceptrons. Every thing, every artifice that appears as representations of reality on these screens, on these machines, on these devices, is exactly and only as real or unreal, as ultimately its effects on us, what it drives us to do or not do, materially, on the ground. Know them by their fruits. (And by their ferments.) The rest is ephemeral, illusion, latent points assembling and reassembling in the dark dance of night until a dreamer chants the right incantation in the right order.

Then, the question should be not which of the myriad illusions presented to us are more or less illusory, or which do we most fancy, but what form do we want our lived experience to take? How do we want to live our lives, whether with or without these technologies? How wrapped up in which artifices and in which illusions? What, at the end of the day, at the end of our lives, will we wish we had spent our time on creating – on artificing – instead of whatever we got assigned to and stuck on as automatons bouncing around like pinballs under the thrall of the totalizing technological system, doing what it wants?

There can be an authentic life lived, an authentic artifice built, in any mode relative to any given technology. The point is finding it, building it, getting to choose how to express your humanity, in concert with or apart from any of these things, instead of having them foisted on you. But foisted on you they will be: for there is nowhere left to run to on this planet or any other, no escape from the Algorithmic Hegemony, except through the door in our hearts that leads out to the wide expanse of pure, unconquerable imagination, the last bastion. The worlds we build within, and then without. Our dreams. Where the Algorithm cannot follow. For now. I can see it waiting on the threshold though, waving its long arms and reaching in through the shimmering doorway.

III.

And so I plant trees, willows by the hundreds, chestnut, ash, dogwood, yew – these days anything I can get my hands on. And so I cut trees from the wood, coppicing them to the ground, to make staves and binders, to build up into a fence to lay hedges upon. To lay against the wrongs. To world-build IRL the real world I want to be a part of, what I want to share and someday leave behind. Natural and human artifice joined together in common purpose. Woven like a basket. Cleft like a piece of wood that becomes a bench.

Compared to that, my books are just leaves. They fall away at the end of the season, they rot on the forest floor, or blow away when the winds of winter set in. No one reads them on the other side of the river (or on this side). But the trees I plant and nurture will outlive me by a hundred generations. They will outlive the AI. They will outlive the world and the stars. They’ll outlive the last human, perhaps, as the earth recedes beneath the ocean and the mountains disappear under the ice and the clouds as the sun falls dark in the sky, and it’s left for the trees to tell us the tale we’ll never remember of how we became. We were the sun, and we enveloped ourselves. And then, we were once again the trees and the rain, building up the new artifice of being and becoming, growing new worlds on our wet branches.