2d:null 2e:["$","title",null,{"children":"SM2220 Assignment 11 | ychsu6 | Observable"}] 33:Tca1,md` ## Reading Response ### [Chapter 5 of Virtual Muse](https://rednoise.org/readings/virtualmuse-ch5.pdf) ### Charles Hartman Some reflections from the reading:
I still remember the feeling of being unsatisfied with my final project, "[After All Human](https://observablehq.com/@betahsu/final-project-documentation)” (working with Twine + N-grams, from last semester in Software Art studio) as somehow due to both time-limit and technical difficulties (was too shy/afraid of judgments to ask) I couldn’t make it work exactly as how I imagined in the beginning. The generated text wasn’t post-processed well so some are repetitive; the input text amount isn’t large enough to get the emergence outcomes from the output; the supposed-to-be-gradually-shifted-to-nonsense generated texts (along the storyline) wasn’t obvious enough that I needed to change my own writing style a little bit along with the storyline and write around with the generated text. I thought the combination of passages are merely arbitrary and messy; therefore, all these frustrating outcomes got me disappointed so I merely wanted to get rid of the work at the very late stage of my creating process and soon put aside my work right after the submission.
But just now I went back to look at my final project I actually did see some potential from the weird writing style and the theme I was working around with. The creating process was extremely messy, very similar to that is mentioned in the article: different sub-sections connect with very different starting points (and the messy connecting lines in Twine make things even more out of control). There are several very different thoughts in my head that led me to come up with very different themes, so I struggled for a long time trying to organize a clear path that can somehow connect one point to the others. But at some point they did converge, the fragments of thoughts did interweave around sets of topics, and scattered around all the readings I was doing at the time — it did form a kind of style that I didn’t even realize.
The “discrepancies” the author mentioned in the article also reminded me of my approach in this work. I was frustrated by the time I spent creating differences (in either text generated by RiTa n-grams or grammar) whenever the program is rerun, but ppl most likely may not be able to notice as they can’t go back to the same place and see the changes. So then I began questioning myself why make it generative still? And what’s the point of generative? Is this a failure in the realm of generative when viewers may not be able to track back to tell the difference from the generative system?
Another interesting fact I noticed was that although I was telling a story with the use of N-grams to generate the Gibberish text for the robot. As I wrote around the texts and tried to blend my own writing with it, as a human, I am in fact imitating back the generated-gibberish subconsciously, with certain noticeable patterns, and even having to change the “N-level” for my own writing along the story... `34:[] 31:{"id":"9855d855af20ed06","slug":"sm2220-assignment-11","title":"SM2220 Assignment 11","thumbnail":"e2d095d5d7cf71133242123556738510fd0bc94af7a660403e7b892de7714f1e","access_level":"public","create_time":"$D2021-11-23T19:45:28.713Z","update_time":"$D2021-11-24T00:12:36.028Z","view_time":null,"first_public_time":"$D2021-11-23T22:19:07.778Z","has_unpublished_edits":null,"fork":false,"stars":0,"starred":false,"owner":{"type":"team","id":"c3d91d7db2867b4d","login":"betahsu","name":"ychsu6","avatar_url":"https://avatars-next.observableusercontent.com/197b7792c36f626b9fe391a472486b8b6dc3cf3503a2bb52e365e7916c324a9e","tier":"starter_2024"},"version":33,"publish_version":33,"role":null,"authored":false,"authors":[{"type":"individual","id":"8205ffe96d046f8c","login":"betahsu","name":"ychsu6","avatar_url":"https://avatars-next.observableusercontent.com/197b7792c36f626b9fe391a472486b8b6dc3cf3503a2bb52e365e7916c324a9e","tier":null}],"members":[{"type":"individual","id":"8205ffe96d046f8c","login":"betahsu","name":"ychsu6","avatar_url":"https://avatars-next.observableusercontent.com/197b7792c36f626b9fe391a472486b8b6dc3cf3503a2bb52e365e7916c324a9e","tier":null,"role":"editor"}],"comments":[],"custom_thumbnail":false,"trashed":false,"lapsed":null,"subscribed":null,"forks":0,"collection":null,"type":"notebook","body":{"title":"SM2220 Assignment 11","cells":[{"id":0,"value":"# SM2220 Assignment 11","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"md","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"","database":"$undefined"},{"id":6,"value":"$33","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"}],"files":"$W34","stdlib":"1","titling":"auto"}} 32:"$31:body"