Katarina Rankovic
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Scripting for Agency
Scripting for Agency addresses how disciplines such as art, AI, the life sciences, psychology and critical theory all imply assumptions about the prerequisites to make a person, or agent. A key cross-disciplinary feature of these points of view is that a person may be thought of as “written” or inscribed, albeit in a manner resulting in unpredictable, autonomous behaviour. But how are we to intuit this? To what extent is something as close to home as the human mind, written – inscribed by ancient grooves of genetic memory, articulated by chains of DNA text and ventriloquised by a culture of stories?
Through a comparative study of characters born under vastly different circumstances, whether genetic, literary or computational, the project will examine how the virtual properties of narrative fiction may be manipulated to probe and exacerbate the trembling boundaries between ‘authentic’ and ‘fictional’ beings in light of contemporary AI research.
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Supervisors:
Michael Archer
Grace Schwindt