Welcome to the 16th (5+5+5+1) writing club update. Looking at the intro to the 16th chapter of Procedural Generation in Game Design: Generative Art Toys by Kate Compton, we find the somewhat quaint observation:
Everyone loves being creative. And everyone likes discovering that they’re more creative than they thought they were. For many years, people have enjoyed crafts like pottery wheels, Spirographs, Mad Libs, spin art, paper marbling, and tie-dye. These artistic toys helped everyday people make interesting artworks (even if those people lacked creative talent or inspiration) by producing surprising and emergent results from simple choices.
Now that we have digital systems, we can make art toys with even more surprising and emergent behaviour. […]
This book (edited by Tanya Short, and Tarn Adams) was first published in 2017, long before the term “generative art” would take on a very different insinuation. I’ve certainly got some strong opinions on the subject of both interpretations, but this is a writing club update not my personal soapbox.
Having now fulfilled my self-imposed rule of introducing a quote related to the number of WC updates since we started, I now turn to an observation about my local climate/weather, before introducing our writers, and finally extending a friendly invitation to any lurkers in our midsts. :)
Up here in the Northern hemisphere, at the heel of October, it’s starting to get chilly. The ideal weather for reading and writing probably varies as much as the individual writer, but for me this feels like book weather.
Speaking of individuals, here is the call for our regular writers to share their updates!
I think I’ll move this list to the main Writing Club sticky post next update, since the @s don’t seem trigger notifications consistently across applications. Let me know what you think, if you have an opinion on this.
As is forever the case, passers-by are very welcome to come on in and lurk, comment, or post their own updates.
If you don’t mind taking point on the wiki, that would be great! Makes sense that there would be solarpunk writing resources associated with the solarpunk writing community.
I agree it would be nice to let anyone at least suggest changes without being a mod, but I guess this is just what we have to work with for now.
Speaking of thinking ahead though, what do you think about a rule against LLM generated content? Not to pass judgement on the technology even, but just to prevent blatant content turfing.
Hi, I’d be happy to help with that! I think it’d be great to make this a community-based resource rather than something fragmented into individual websites!
As for LLM stuff, I don’t see why not. Solarpunk is about imagining and working towards a better future and imaging a better future takes a careful consideration and examination of how we do things, knowledge of alternative ways of doing things, and an evaluation of whether those ways will work in this situation.
I’m mostly familiar with AI attempts at solarpunk art but one of the things that always strikes me about it is how frequently it slips in present-day defaults. AI is trained on reproducing stuff that already exists, and it’s fed on the status quo. I don’t think you can put in decades of car commercials, capitalist realism, and dystopian fiction, and get a radical re-imagining of the infrastructure and workings of society back out. Basically it makes thousands of tiny decisions for you that you might have done differently had you planned it from scratch, and its default decisions push back on some of the central themes and goals of solarpunk. It’s almost insidious.
I’ve seen fewer examples of AI attempting to write solarpunk but when I have, I have the same complaints. Maybe it could be done differently if there was a massive library of solarpunk media to train it on, anarchist and socialist and other revolutionary works, permiculture and agriculture and forestry research, green energy and public infrastructure, architecture and urban planning, DIY and salvage tutorials, and broad swaths of history and alternative ways of doing things, not rewritten from a colonial lens. But from what I’ve seen that doesn’t exist yet and the genre isn’t big enough to get more than a surface level visual back out of the current models.
In the end, I think the imagining should be done by humans, though we can certainly try to centralize some resources to help them with that!