A collective group exhibition organised by Winchester School of Art (WSA) postgraduate research students was held in The Winchester Gallery between 29 June – 26 July 2023. This was the first collective PGR show at the Gallery, facilitated by Professor Louise Siddons, and curated by researchers Yimeng Li and Elio Hao, bringing together the work of 12 students and visiting scholars.
The works were created specifically for the exhibition and aimed to represent not only the artists research but their thoughts and processes that they apply to their work, providing a platform to celebrate their daily lives, interests, and voices.
A virtual tour of the exhibition, produced by Lian Pan, is now available:
The exhibition provided a unique opportunity to bring visibility to the experiences and achievements of the students, while fostering a sense of belonging and collaboration to the WSA, University community and wider audiences in this public exhibition.
A broad variety of work was showcased utilising a range of mediums and practices, including painting, installation, sculpture, textile work and the AI generation of texts and images. Topics embraced papercut, silent poetry Queerness and dream worlds, hobbies as methodology, devices that articulate actor network theory, recreations of a WWII desk, abuse, passions, silver stickers, desire, co-curation, and cultural rootlessness of international students and the ‘unknown’ vegetable, Pak Choi.
Curators Yimeng and Elio explained:
“Curating this exhibition has been a great challenge for me, as it was the first time we curated an entire gallery space within such a short period. Despite the difficulties, the experience has been incredibly valuable, and we have learned so much from this journey. As a curator, I am delighted to have been able to contribute my knowledge and skills to the PGR community and to WSA. It is great to see our efforts making a positive impact and increasing the visibility of our community. This experience has not only strengthened my expertise as a curator but also reinforced the importance of teamwork and collaboration in creating something truly exceptional. It has been great to work with Elio too. Thanks a lot for everyone who helped and assisted us!” Yimeng Li
“This is the last year of my PhD, and I have been a student rep for the previous three years, so I think, and I know this is the first time we (the WSA PGRs) have had an opportunity to make and show work in a public space. WSA is an art school, and we pretty much all deal with art or design-related research, and I’m very grateful that the university offered us this tremendous opportunity and the support from many University departments. This is my first time being a curator, and I need to thank Yimeng for taking me on board. It feels very empowering. “Elio Hao
We hope this will become an annual event and would welcome collaborations with PGRs across the University of Southampton.
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 “viable monster robot living in the garbage dump of the wasteland era”, 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.
Ink’s description of this fantastic and thoughtful project can be found here, including the original inspiration as well as the outcomes of the team’s 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 UK’s national Being Human festival in November. I didn’t 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 ‘mash-up’ 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 ‘human’ 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 ‘read’ 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 ‘reading’ 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 ‘being human’ to reflect this year’s Human Worlds Festival theme ‘Being Human as Praxis’.
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
Grimm’s 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 – 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, ‘the computer is processing the text’.
Six different versions of the generated novel were produced and the participants spent a little time ‘reading’ 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 ‘reading’ experience also generated dialogues on practices of reading. ‘Are we reading?’, 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 participants’ names would be acknowledged as ‘authors’ to highlight the collaborative nature of how The Apollo and the Dragon-King: wild and semi-wild rabbits came into being.
Title page
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.
Introduction chapter of the novel
After the opening speech, the link to the submitted novel was shared. This was followed by Lesia’s 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. ‘Maybe generated novels should be read in a group’, 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.
A collective group exhibition organised by Winchester School of Art (WSA) postgraduate research students was held in The Winchester Gallery between 29 June – 26 July 2023. This was the first collective PGR show at the Gallery, facilitated by Professor Louise Siddons, and curated by researchers Yimeng Li and Elio Hao, bringing together the work of 12 students and visiting scholars.
Curators Yimeng and Elio explained:
