Panel #3 Session 4
Wednesday 29 November - 15:00
Building 25, Teal Room
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Chair: Alex Cothren
Creative labour and experiments with AI in the Creative Writing Classroom
- Roanna Gonsalves
University of New South Wales
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In an educational environment where algorithmic technologies such as AI are freely accessible and constantly generate not just new text but also new challenges for educators, little is known about the problems as well as the potential of such technologies in the learning and teaching of literary craft. Working with Bourdieusian field theory, this paper draws on some early experiments with AI engagement in an undergraduate Creative Writing classroom at an Australian university. In doing so, this paper aims to address two sets of questions: about Creative Writing pedagogy and its relation to the configurations of identity of the teacher and the students, and about the value of human creative labour in interaction with the tools provided by technology.
Roanna Gonsalves is the author of The Permanent Resident (UWAP), published in India and South Asia as Sunita De Souza Goes To Sydney (Speaking Tiger). She was born and brought up in Mumbai, India. She attended St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and came to Australia in 1998 as an international student. The Permanent Resident won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award Multicultural Prize 2018, and was longlisted for the Dobbie Literary Award 2018.
Analostalgia: Audio storytelling through analogue technology as a vehicle for time travel
- Raelke Grimmer
Charles Darwin University
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Digital and analogue technologies exist not in opposition to each other but along a continuum, with iconography from the analogue world ever-present in our digital spaces (Goldsmith, 2011; McLuhan & Fiore, 1967). Each domain continues to exist because of the other, creating opportunities to use a mix of analogue and digital tools in storytelling. This paper shares my process of creating an album of the sounds of analogue technology (typewriters, film cameras, biros, ink pens and telephones), inspired by inheriting and using analogue film cameras belonging to my great-grandfather and grandmother. Walking their cities with their cameras grounded me in a specific time and place, allowing me to time travel and physically connecting me to them in a way I’ve not previously experienced. To capture this experience through storytelling and ground the reader/listener in the physical world, in early 2023 I recorded a nine-track album, titled ‘Analostalgia’, in my late father’s recording studio and mixed the sounds into tracks that take the listener on a dérive through the analogue world of the past (Goldsmith, 2011; Debord, 1956). The album will be released on Spotify and pressed onto vinyl in late 2023. Ironically, it is only because of the affordances offered by digital technologies that made recording the album, and releasing it on both Spotify and vinyl, possible. Fusing the digital and analogue in storytelling enables us to not only see into the future, but time travel back to the past. Without our physical world, our digital worlds would not exist.
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This project was supported by the Australia Council for the Arts through a 2023 Digital Fellowship.
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References:
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Debord, G. (1956). ‘Theory of the Dérive’, Situationist International Online, https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html
Goldsmith, K. (2011). Uncreative Writing. Columbia University Press.
McLuhan, M., & Fiore, Q. (1967). The Medium is the Massage. Penguin Books.
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Dr Raelke Grimmer is a writer, linguist, analogue photographer and Senior Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at Charles Darwin University. She was a 2023 Fellow in the Australia Council for the Arts and Creative New Zealand’s Digital Fellowship Program and is President of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association. Raelke edits Northern Territory literary journal Borderlands. Her creative work has been published in Griffith Review, Kill Your Darlings, Meniscus and Westerly. Raelke’s research explores regional storytelling practices, literary journal ecosystems, and the intersections of analogue and digital storytelling.
Queering transreal narratives: storying that navigates boundaries between fiction and reality for transilient emergent identities
- Gil Douglas
University of the Sunshine Coast
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Transrealism includes writing about perceptions of immediate realities augmented with fantastical qualities (Broderick 2000). While plausibility validates realist fiction, fantasy deliberately violates any shared empirical reality of its readers (Easterbrook 2012), celebrating what Ursula Le Guin has called the ‘shamelessly fictive’. Queering the transreal within the expanses of fictionality encompasses multiple dimensions that can reconcile postmodernist ontological disruptions with realist pretences to promote new comprehensions of reality. Transreal changing of, and crossing between, fluid fictive frames can evoke active reciprocity between text and audience, opening up the idea that the world is the product of the way we imagine it, and we can imagine something different. The insertion of queer failure and fluidity into the triumphant, traditionalist claims of identities in fiction can redistribute power, creating an agential model for social change with a capacity for inclusivity and diversity. This paper explores the mechanisms in queer transrealist experimentation that suggest the certainties of worldly selfhood are constructions open to change in the post- and more-than-human milieu. Authors can exploit these propensities to bring a plurified connected awareness to the perception of fictive and real-world existence into the cultural imaginary of the transmodern era.
Gil Douglas has worked in the creative industries as a performer, creative director and producer for many years and has a degree in Creative Writing from the University of the Sunshine Coast, graduating with an academic medal and the Chancellor’s medal. After achieving Honours 1st, he completed a Master’s in Writing, Editing and Publishing at UQ and is currently undertaking a PhD exploring the myths that underpin human realities. He teaches History, Sociology, Creative Writing and Poetry and in his spare time, writes and performs at spoken word gatherings on the Queensland Sunshine Coast.