“Science, Technology, Society and Culture” Talk Series 08: The Space between 1s and 0s: Intentional Patiency in Computational Creativity

Challenging our kind’s self-reified monopoly over the domain of hermeneutics, computational creativity destabilizes the foundations of its lexical reference to invoke Walter Benjamin’s musings that herald the age of technological reproducibility. How may we delineate the parameters of creativity outside the bounds of apperceptive intent, especially if the generative process is strictly reliant upon conditional expressions of correlational nature rather than the transcendental aura of instantaneous inspiration? Should procedurally derived computational outputs deserve the label of creativity, then how does such developments affect and even reconfigure human language to challenge the metrics whereby we inscribe it with social value? By probing the interstitial space between algorithmic design and arbitrary semantics through readings of autonomously written fiction, this talk investigates how computational creativity remediates literary expressivity in text generating models. Based on the concept of intentional patiency, which I propose as an alternative to the agency of the phenomenological sovereign subject in the valuation and appreciation of nonhuman creativity, my talk asks what it means to write, and what writing means in an age when not only artistic output but also their creative agency may be approaching the event horizon of singularity in their technological reproducibility.