NEST: Never Ending Story Telling
NEST: Never Ending Story Telling
The Digital Writer project / NEST is the result of a collaboration between the academic and information technology sectors that has been developed during the summer semester 2020 by IT engineers, software developers, audiovisual designers and new media students.
The Digital Writer / NEST is a follow-up to the successful Digital Philosopher project, which won the AI Awards for the Idea of the Year. For the Digital Philosopher, students of the Faculty of Arts (Charles University in Prague) in collaboration with a machine learning expert created virtual personalities of selected philosophers and thinkers to ask questions.
Same as in the Digital Philosopher, the core of the Digital Writer / NEST are neural networks that we use to generate literary texts. While we worked with OpenAI's GPT-2 networks for the Digital Philosopher, this time we are creating our own specially trained neural networks. We are building a new home space where stories and their co-creators can grow.
The title of the Uroboros workshop - NEST - refers to The Neverending Story, a book that on its cover has two intertwined snakes biting each other's tail that strongly resembles the motif of Uroboros. The project was created as a proposal of a future design in which literary texts are adapted to the needs of the reader to such an extent that the contradiction of the writer and the reader completely disappears - as well as the contradiction of natural and artificial intelligence.
Workshop participants will be able to choose a book they would like to read and have it generated by their personal or collectively shared network. Within two hours, participants will create the text of their story accompanied by illustrations, in cooperation with the neural network. The resulting form of the text is unpredictable and dependent on both human and machine factors, as well as on the element of chance (reminiscent of the concept of "oracle", which is one of the distinct lines in The Neverending Story).
Requirements for participants
Zoom.us application for video streaming with free account
Please check your Zoom setting before the event starts - https://zoom.us/test
Dita Malečková & Jan Tyl
Mgr. Dita Malečková, Ph.D. studied philosophy and information science at Charles University. She has worked at the New Media Studies Faculty of the Faculty of Arts and lectures at the Center for Audiovisual Studies of FAMU. She specializes in contemporary philosophy, visual culture and art, (not only) in the context of new media. She is interested in the area of artificial and extended intelligence. She also focuses on literary and graphic works.
Mgr. Jan Tyl, CEO/CTO Alpha Industries s.r.o. has more than 13 years of IT experience as an analyst or scrum master working for large corporations like GE, ČSOB, HB, KB, ALD, ŠKODA, WAG and lecturing for schools, universities and professional public: Futuremed, JobsDev, Startup World Cup Summit, TT 360°, Paralelní Polis. His greatest achievements include the best emotion detector in the world in 2019 and AIAwards Idea of the year for the Digital Philosopher project. Currently focusing on the Digital Writer project, which should take natural language processing a bit further.