21st Century Creative Writing Manifesto: Allan McBride

As part of a split advanced creative writing workshop and graduate seminar I taught this spring on A.I. and creative writing, I posed my students a challenge in the form of a question: What would a manifesto of creative writing look like in the 21st century?

The class itself centered around some foundational explorations. What does it mean to make art in the age of machines attempting to do the same? Is art inherently a human pursuit and domain? How is the digital exploration of creativity recasting the work of art as it has been perceived? And what might we learn as artists if we engage the strengths and limitations of machine art?  

From these angles, we dug into a number of conversations surround the intersection of art, human consciousness, and machine learning/expression. These manifestos, then, are my students’ expression of what art and artists should do in our context. We referred to older examples of the form (Dadaist, Surrealist, Feminist, Fluxus, and Oulipian among others). But I left the final form up to them, knowing that I would be making them public via my blog. The following series are the of what they came up with. I encourage you to sit with their ideas over the next couple weeks.

The fourth entry in the series comes from Allan McBride, who ponders the notion of identity in a post-human world and the role of art in making who we are.