Many congratulations to the two WSA PGR Alumni who have published articles in the latest issue of Journal of Contemporary Painting (vol. 6 issue 1-2). It is wonderful to see alumni making such a contribution to art criticism. Some details below of both these contributions to scholarship
Feng Jie (2021) âWriting from the other side: Critical reflections on the calligraphy of Zhang Qiangâ Journal of Contemporary Painting, Vol. 6, Issue 1-2, pp. 131-148 [available here].
This article presents the specific case of a contemporary practitioner of Chinese calligraphy, Zhang Qiang, a notable figure within the current Avant-garde movement. After outlining aspects of his practice, which has been controversial along gender grounds, the article turns to his specific project of âbi-directionalâ calligraphy. It is argued this work opens up a more rewarding way into his work as an enquiry into writing, which bears connections with Derridaâs deconstructionist account of writing and trace. However, in a brief exchange at Tate Modern, Zhang offers a form of âwriting lessonâ, which both helps takes us towards the decontructionist account of general writing, yet equally reveals a reliance upon the cultural category of âChinese calligraphyâ, which takes us away againâarguably symptomatic of a wider struggle for Chinese contemporary art to gain recognition in the West.
Cheng-Chu Weng (2021) âMaking minimalism disappearâŠâ  Journal of Contemporary Painting, Vol. 6, Issue 1-2, pp. 149-164 [available here].
âMaking minimalism disappearâŠâ presents an essay regarding my approach to âexpansion paintingâ, and specifically provides a study of another kind of minimalist aesthetic. The account begins with a signature work, Shoji (2015), which is proposed as a way to unfold what expansion painting is. I describe my approach as drawing upon painterly compositional methods but developed through site-specific considerations of architectural spaces, bodies and differing levels of consciousness. The works âtake placeâ when interacting in these layered spaces, or what I refer to as a âsenseâ of painting space. The article goes on to articulate howâin terms of a western discourse â my works might âlookâ minimalist but, in fact, are not minimalist art. This articleâin representing my practice and providing broader critical analysisâleads us to question an ideology of art history around the enigma of minimalist art, and gives rise instead to another shadowy form of minimalist art. Hence, this article can be said to make minimalism disappear in being haunted by it.
You can also see Cheng-Chu’s PhD practice and contributions to WSA’s PhD researcher community featured on this blog here.
We would like to congratulate Yijie (Ink) Gao, who recently joined WSA as a PhD student, on her win for the MLH Best Hardware Hack prize in the February 2021 Highfield Hack competition.
Ink and her Digi-Key collaborators built Gua, a âviable monster robot living in the garbage dump of the wasteland eraâ, a kind of robotic pet who can interact with humans whilst demonstrating innate characteristics. Gua aims to address the benefits of pet ownership for humans, articulating the qualities and behaviours of a real-life pet.
Inkâs description of this fantastic and thoughtful project can be found here, including the original inspiration as well as the outcomes of the teamâs creativity.
Recent PhD alumna Noriko Suzuki-Bosco and current PhD student Lesia Tkacz recently ran a fantastic workshop which introduced participants to computer-generated novels. Below, Noriko shares some details.
PhD student Lesia Tkacz asked me to help her design and organise a computer generated novel workshop. I suggested that the workshop should be collaborative, and together we designed it so that the participants would be able to work with us as fellow authors. The workshop was for the Human Worlds Festival which the University of Southampton was running as part of the UKâs national Being Human festival in November. I didnât know anything about computer generated novels but I really enjoyed working with Lesia for the Lockdown Larder Cookbook project, so I said yes. The aim of the workshop was to create a âmash-upâ style generated novel using a program that Lesia would write. Participants would select texts which would then be computationally processed to produce the generative novel. I liked that the collaborative element of the workshop would further complicate our thinking around the roles of the author and of the machine. I also thought the whole process sounded a bit like making a communal stew, which made it seem accessible, even for a non-technical person like me.
What is a computer generated novel?
All computer generated texts can be algorithmically produced from data such as images, spreadsheets, or other texts. Computer generated novels are a form of creative text generation because the programmer has prioritised creativity over functionality. Prioritizing creativity often results in generated texts which can contain surprises and unusual use of language. Generated novels are therefore different from more practical computer generated texts like the weather, sports, finance, and election reports we read in news media, because the latter prioritise factuality, grammatical coherence and clarity while often ignoring creativity.
Indeed, when Lesia showed me an example of a computer generated novel, I was slightly taken back by its strangeness. Lesia explained that this was because language processing technology was still very limited when compared to the traditional âhumanâ written texts which have interesting narratives, rich character development, and can sustain semantic coherence. In recent years, however, creative text generation has been gaining attention in digital culture where it has been used for creative experimentation with language and with AI tools, for cultural critique, expression, for comic entertainment through chance and absurdity, and for parody and pastiche through the computational altering or remixing of literary works.
Furthermore, Lesia described that current computer generated novels were not meant to be âreadâ in the conventional way from start to end. Rather they should be read in bits or skimmed through, picking up any interesting or intriguing sentence structures or word combinations. As I scanned through the text and skipped from one section to the next, I found myself creating my own rhythm of âreadingâ and warming to the weird but strangely addictive generated texts.
The WSA Computer Generated Novel Workshop
We decided to offer an extra workshop session for the PGR community at WSA as we thought it would be fun to involve them in the process of creative text generation and to engage in conversation around this emerging form of literature.
The workshop would produce a 50,000-word computer generated novel that would be entered into the National Novel Generation Month (NaNoGenMo) 2020 challenge. NaNoGenMo is an annual online challenge which asks participants to use computer code to generate a work of 50,000 words or more.
Six people signed up to take part in the WSA session. They were asked to watch a lecture about generative text creation prior to the workshop and to select one or more texts from Project Gutenberg that would become computationally processed to create the generated novel. We asked them to select text(s) that resonated with the idea of âbeing humanâ to reflect this yearâs Human Worlds Festival theme âBeing Human as Praxisâ.
Here is the list of the texts that were selected:
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
An Honest Thief by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Kawidan by Lafcadio Hearn
The Works of Edgar Allen Poe (Vol. II)
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Grimmâs Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm
The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication by Charles Darwin
The list shows the varied nature of the texts but interestingly they fell into three general themes â human behaviour and experience, the supernatural, and the animal.
During the workshop, Lesia shared the computer programming code that she had written using the Python programming language and the Markov chain tool Markovify to demonstrate what actually happens behind the scenes when we say, âthe computer is processing the textâ.
Six different versions of the generated novel were produced and the participants spent a little time âreadingâ through the texts to decide which was to be their final version to enter the NaNoGenMo 2020 challenge.
Discussions around authorship and creativity ensued as we questioned whether the resulting text was human or machine authored. The collaborative nature of the workshop further complicated this query. The unconventional âreadingâ experience also generated dialogues on practices of reading. âAre we reading?â, one participant asked. We wondered whether we were making concessions to the machine because we were trying to make sense of what we were reading. I also noticed the participants making more references to visual and sensory forms of interactions whilst engaging with the generated text.
At the end of the workshop, a collective decision was made as to which version of the generated novel would be entered to the NaNoGenMo 2020 challenge. A title, configured from words in
the text that caught our attention, was also given. We also agreed that all of the participantsâ names would be acknowledged as âauthorsâ to highlight the collaborative nature of how The Apollo and the Dragon-King: wild and semi-wild rabbits came into being.
Book Launch
The Apollo and the Dragon-King: wild and semi-wild rabbits was entered to the NaNoGenMo 2020 challenge and we felt that we should have an official book launch to celebrate. We invited all of the authors to come to the book launch dressed up in the character from their chosen text(s) or inspired by the mash-up nature of the final text.
After the opening speech, the link to the submitted novel was shared. This was followed by Lesiaâs dramatic reading of excerpts from the novel and a game of textual scavenger hunt where we had to find as many references to animals as we could in 3 minutes. The scavenger hunt was great fun and, interestingly, it also made us reflect on alternative ways to engage with text. âMaybe generated novels should be read in a groupâ, pondered Lesia.
Lesia and I are hoping to create a physical version of the generated novel, which may also give us opportunities to engage with the text in material ways. What if we drew pictures, made comments in the margins, rearranged the paragraphs or attached additional pages?
How would our interventions into the material matters of the book influence our reading of the computer generated novel? Would it affect how we think about the role of the author and machine?
I think Lesia and I will have to have a little chat to see how we can come up with another project to take these ideas further.
By way of a welcome back from the Winter Break, a link to some interesting reading: YiÄit Soncul (recent PhD alumnus; now Associate Lecturer at UAL) and Jussi Parikka (Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics at WSA) on the significance of the mask. The essay is published in issue 66, “State of Emergency”, of Neural, of which WSA’s Alessandro Ludovico is the chief editor. It can also be read here.
EXPERIMENTAL ZONE 1: Re-thinking Methodologies at Intersections of the Arts and the Humanities is the first of a series of planned events organised by a group of scholars and artists at Linköping University (Linköping, Sweden) under the tentative and temporary heading: Bureau for Alternative Methodologies (BAM). The following report on the event was kindly provided by Ana ÄaviÄ, a current WSA PhD candidate.
One thing the pandemic revealed was the strong sense of community amongst WSAâs staff and PGRs. Below, Noriko Suzuki-Basco (then a PhD candidate and now an alumna) reflects on her Covid-19 project with Lesia Tkacz (currently a PhD candidate), The Lockdown Larder Cookbook Challenge.Â
Boundary2âs online journal recently published a special issue, edited by WSAâs Ryan Bishop, on âFrictionless Sovereigntyâ. The special issue can be accessed from the journalâs website. Here, Ryan talks about the collaborations and research interests from which the special issue grew.
Berit Fischer (http://www.beritfischer.org), a recent WSA PhD graduate, is curating an exciting three-day live online event (10-12 Dec 2020), Liminal Encounters. Details are below; registration and full details of the programme are at this link.
Ana ÄaviÄ, currently a WSA PhD student, below discusses her artwork, âRules that order the reading of cloudsâ, exhibited by the Intermission Museum of Art.
John Beck & Ryan Bishop Technocrats of the Imagination, recently published by Duke University Press, is about a particularly striking form of interdisciplinarity: the Cold War cooperation between the military-industrial complex and avant-garde art. Below, Ryan shares some of the background related to how he came to co-author the book, the experience of writing the book and the continued necessity of understanding the Cold War.