Exhibit Introduction

What is the Future of Writing? And who is best equipped to answer that question?  Futurists? Capitalists? Elon Musk?

We say: Artists!

Along with the many scholars educators gathered at the Symposium, the collected artists have taken time to meditate on issues surrounding the future of writing. Theie responses gathered here show a creativity that will, at least for now, give AI a run for its money. The works include Siobhan O'Flynn's works of memory, fantasy, and family born of AI-generated illustrations. Sometimes I am... moves users from the subject to object of discourse as mouse movements move the soundscape from symohony to cacophony. In Operational Poetry, Nimrod Astarhan shows the executability of lanugage, showing how contemporary language can also has a machinic audience. Erika Fülöp and Serge Bouchardon crowdsource the question, asking interactors to create meme-like image texts. Finally, the netprov Pr0c3ss1ng: a support group for AI assistants fully anthropomorphizes AI software and asks, who supports Alexa. And more so, who supports the ones who support Alexa. This ironic take on compassion fatigue and the personification of AI turns lik Writing is... to collaboarative human writing. These works complement the many sessions of the Symposium by offering digital objects that challenge the pessimism and fatalism of those resigned to a predictable LLM future, even as they offer new visions of what it might mean to talk and write with machines. We hope you delight in them as much as we have. 

Curators: Mark C. Marino and Maddox Pennington