Generative art, Storytelling and Society

Abstract

How can a fictional, artificial society be designed and generated? By creating a design fiction (Dunne and Raby., 2013) of alternative societies and designing a digital world of artificial intelligent species, I try to engage people interested in interactive media and concerned about social minorities and our technology-related future. Digital Leak Responding is a design fiction built upon a digital incubator for artificially intelligent species. Living in the virtual space of the digital incubator, these imaginary creatures can evolve their embedded artificial intelligence by interacting with the environment; Evolution, in other words (Fogel, 1995). Such an adaptive strategy gives them the potential to collaborate (or not) and for artificial society to emerge (Sawyer, 2004). This project is inspired by the documentary from NHK (2018). The production team focused on teenagers in China who choose to live a life in poverty rather than work in intensive factories (like Foxconn). Living in crowded dormitories and relying on cheap supplies, their life situation is remote but relatable. The documentary led me to ask: If an alternative society could accept and encourage more diversity, what would it look like? Collaboration and tool use in the lately developed artificial intelligence (OpenAI, 2019) enabled me to experiment with the possibility of generating the artificial society in a computational emergent social simulation. Using generative methods like computational algorithms to create design content, I am enabled to materialize my thoughts and ideas. It is the attempt to deliver messages and meanings through texts and visual elements in this design fiction. The principal product of this investigating process is a simulation of artificial society, the digital incubator. It is a discursive practice of interactive medium and an alternative implementation of the cutting-edge technique for problems to propose and expose. It is also part of the Digital Leak Responding, which is a design fiction for audiences to resonate and speculate, for curious minds to discover ideas about digital species, and reflective spirits to contemplate and to abstract. In conclusion, it is the research that regards generative artificial society and interactive storytelling.