Riverrun (fascistchicfascistquick)

Link: https://vimeo.com/1128965342

Artists: Scott Rettberg

Description: Riverrun (fascistchicfascistquick) is a film about contemporary American authoritarianism, produced using text generation, text-to-image generation, text-to-video generation, and text to speech generation. It is loosely based on the prologue to James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.

Artist Statement: An experiment in literary satire through generative cinema. The script was developed by prompting ChatGPT to rewrite the opening of Finnegan's Wake as a critique of American politics, sports, and media, using multiple languages. Importantly, it was written in the same context window of the Republicans in Love project, so the LLM was also developing the text based on my prior conversations with it use in the development that parodic text-to-image generation project. The generated text was edited as a long poem, narrated with an ElevenLabs clone of James Joyce's voice, and visualized through text-to-video prompts in Runway. 

Video: 

Bio: Scott Rettberg is an American digital artist and scholar of electronic literature based in Bergen, Norway. He is the co-founder and served as the first executive director of the Electronic Literature Organization. He leads the Center for Digital Narrative, aNorwegian Centre of Research Excellence from 2023 to 2033.Rettberg is the author or co-author of novel-length works of electronic literature including The Unknown, Kind of Blue,and Implementation. His work has been exhibited online and at art venues, including theBeall Center, the Slought Foundation, and The Krannert Art Museum.