About
For my final project I built off of my NaNoGenMo project (which you can read more about in my previous blog post here).
My goal for the final was to make my NaNoGenMo visually more interesting, improve its structure and coherence. I did so by doing the following:
Added chapters, one for each month of the year
Assigned the objects into months using the correct number of calendar days
Use these month groupings to generate images (using AttnGAN in Runway)
Reflection
Because of the difficult nature of narration and infinite ways novels can be computationally produced, I’m not sure if I will ever feel done with this project. I have really enjoyed working on it and learned a lot in the process (technically and conceptually). I found it to be an interesting exercise to try to break down a novel this way and think about applying the concepts we had learned in earlier on in the semester using other tools. I also found it a refreshing way to make a project around questions I have about human-computer collaboration and attitudes/approaches towards technology, algorithms and decision making. Although this project was meant to be subtly critical, it was also a curious project in terms of seeking to know what we have unknowingly taught “computers” and one that I felt had a positive, warm and nurturing attitude towards “computers” - similar to Karl Ove Knausgard’s sentiment in his letter to his daughter.
Links
Here is a link to my presentation slides.
You can see the result on Github here.
My python code is also on Github here.
The novel formatted as a webpage is here.