21st Century Creative Writing Manifesto: Heather Buck
Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash
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.
In the next installment in this series, Heather Buck explores the old question: can the creation create or merely recreate? And what becomes of the creator in either case?
Cyborg as Art
Writing exists to accomplish one task, the transferring of information. There are several ways to communicate your intentions and desires, body language, small sounds, gestures. Animals use these as well. But to communicate complex and abstract thought we need more than rudimentary implications. This is where language comes in. We began by just speaking it, but as our thoughts became more complex we needed a tool that would keep up with us, the written word. And now, in the twenty-first century, new tools of communication are developing to keep up with our complexities.
I began with the claim that writing's main purpose is to transfer information, but I must elaborate. Writing was invented for the purpose of communicating, but that is not as narrow of a scope as it may appear. Humans are notorious for complicating things and communicating is no exception. The thoughts that one individual desires to impart to another can range from simple facts to deep hypothetical and philosophical wonderings. It is in this second category that most of what we know of as literature falls into.
These writings expand on deep thought and aim to use a limited faculty to explain the furthest reaches of our minds. They desire not only to leave us with the emotion of something but also understanding. That requires a mastery of the language and an ability to use it artistically and analytically in tandem. This is what makes writing and communication literature, the ability to express complex ideas with skill and artistry.
Modern technology does not remove this vitally important form of communication, rather it enhances it. New technologies simply allow for more complex communication. In situations where simply word alone isn’t impactful enough, we now have the option to interchange mediums. Tools that may have been closed to you before because all you could access was paper and ink are now wide open and ready to use.
No matter how far technology advances, the artist will still be needed. There may be certain tasks that artists will no longer need to perform, like searching thesauruses, or finding minor stylistic mistakes in their work, rather, AI and other software can take on those tasks. But what this does is create more of an opportunity for an artist to hone their craft and create work that they are proud of. These technologies may attempt to replace the author, but they will never be able to analyze the deep theoretical questions humans encounter. A human– no, an artist is needed for this.
Technology being able to replicate the formation of language and basic stories should not scare us. These “new” ideas being made by these programs are not in fact new, rather they are a cumulation of all ideas related to that topic that already exist. Computers are not capable of new thought, though they may be convincing. Only the artist is capable of new postulations. We may be doing something similar to the software, taking all of our previous knowledge and experience and compiling it into something else, but we are capable of giving it meaning and a purpose, of infusing it with an underlying purpose. Computers take no pride in what they have made, nor do they recognize purpose. They simply register if they have completed the task they were asked to or not. Artists are different. They create with an intent and desire to create something with meaning, regardless of how trivial it is.
Technology should not scare us. Rather it should push us to do things that cannot be surveyed and replicated. The artist is no longer concerned with the trivial, rather they can use the technologies available to them to increase their complexity of communication. Use technology as a vehicle for your art, not as a replacement.