21st Century Creative Writing Manifesto: Nathan Foster
Photo by Markus Spiske 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.
The seventh entry in this collection of manifestos comes from Nathan Foster and seeks to untangle art from content and human from machine, at least in conceptual terms. And art, it would seem, requires this disentangling.
Art in the 21st Century Manifesto
This is the day we’ve been waiting for, the age which we’ve feared: obsoletion.
Man has made machines so powerful and efficient that it has rendered its creator obsolete.
Except it hasn’t.
We are not machines. We are not machine men with machine minds and machine hearts.
We are artists.
Manmade art has not become obsolete, nor will it ever be. Even as laborious jobs from factory working to farming fall by the wayside to let machines do them in a cheaper manner, art is thriving in the digital world.
Technology does not replace art. It empowers it.
Before the 21st century, literature was limited by the confines of paper and the shipping industry. It was indebted to trees being felled and booksellers making massive purchase orders to meet customer’s needs. Consumers had to wait days, weeks, months, and sometimes even years to get their hands on books they so desperately desired. Plebeians—the lot of them. Not because they were destitute. Indeed, many of them paid quite the pretty penny for a hardcover bound piece of literature that had to cross the world before they could lay eyes on what lay within. But they were rendered servants to the time it took for books to get to them and stores that may never carry the titles they were longing for.
No longer.
The digital age has empowered people to get their hands on literature instantaneously, with the tap of a button. Anyone can read any book they desire at any time on any screen they so choose. The power technology has given literature and the artists that create it is limitless.
But as Peter Parker’s uncle infamously said before getting shot, “With great power comes great responsibility.” This begs the question—what is the responsibility of the artist in the digital age?
This answer is quite simple, yet complicated at the same time: artists are responsible for creating art that cuts through the noise, that stands out in a world full of mediocre content, and that will be remembered and have an impact on the reader long after they’re done reading. In short, we must create art that causes people to pay attention.
While technology has been the great empowerer of our generation’s literary artists, it has also been their biggest enemy. Because literature is so easily accessible, there is a superabundance of it never seen before by mankind. The internet is not limited by the physical confines of a bookstore and self publishing has cut out the necessary refinement of editors. This distinct lack of boundaries has enabled people to push out crap in the form of content.
Content is not art.
Content is capitalism.
Every company is begging for your eyes on their ads or their sponsored influencers to get you to spend your hard earned dollars on their products. The average American sees nearly 10,000 advertisements a day. We are literally inundated with content that tells us our lives would be improved in some marginal way. Because of this, people have become numb to all the things set before them, even art.
With streaming services pumping billions of dollars into thousands of shows that nobody can possibly keep up with, people have become more resistant than ever to devote the time and energy it takes to appreciate a great piece of art. They want to shut their minds off by turning content on. They have forgotten how to pay attention.
We must remind them.
We must create art that disrupts—literature that spits in the face of content and causes people to remember how to slow down and appreciate the story in front of them. Art is not conveyed in fifteen second clips. Art is slow in its nature.
We must take advantage of the kinds of technologies that encourage slowness. These technologies do exist. Ereaders encourage it. They do nothing more than present a screen to read on, a screen behind which endless pieces of great art can exist. If we create great literature that encourages slow reading, thoughtful attention, some people will stop to take it in.
We can’t expect every person in the world to take the time required to read great literature. That is a fool’s errand.
But we can create great art and make it widely available so that those few who do have the wherewithal and disposition to pay attention have a reason to do so. We must devote our time on earth to creating these kinds of stories that enrapture the soul, like Kafka said, the kind that “wound and stab us like a disaster, the kind that grieve us like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves.”
We cannot expect our art to make people happy. That is content’s job. Our art must sting, causing the pain that in turn causes people to give us the greatest gift they could ever give—their attention.