Narrative blocks

Hit a block in my project.

It’s a narrative block and a logic block.

The world in which narrative logic is the apex conductor of visual art outcomes is a situation that I’ve created for myself that, because I am deep in it, feels real and correct, and miraculous, but it might also be a room without windows, a Stockholm syndrome-ed darling I should kill in favour of a different conductor. If only. Each creative practice has its rules, what is reasonable, what makes sense, what is valued, and the one I have chosen values linear narrative.

The reason I love making generative art is because I vibe exactly with the action and format of writing text on a page in the sequence that someone reads it (the format of linear narrative). I have felt this alignment from the first euphoric/frustrating attempts at making a circle appear to move side to side across a digital canvas 2 years ago, and since then all my progress as a creative person and as a technical coder has been in service of this bias. The evolution of my gen art point of view has traveled from ‘gen art as drawing’, to ‘gen art as math‘, to ‘gen art as machine‘, to ‘gen art as toy‘, to ‘gen art as container of rules‘, to ‘gen at as characters interacting‘, to ‘gen art as a story told about a very small and specific world’. My current framing is:

‘It’s not a machine that you poke and press, it’s a mystery. You make the mystery and then it talks.’

This is resonant for gen art, in which strictly programmed behaviours generate consequences just slightly beyond intuition or prediction, where the container is not inert, and where a visual output is simply one way (one fleeting, random, insufficient and kind of dumb way) that the mystery talks. It is the act of programming that gen art is interested in, the hand-making of the mystery.

So when I can’t get it to talk sufficiently, it’s not only my serious aesthetic or technical limitations that are responsible, but logic failures in the construction of the mystery itself. The mystery is not yet ready, and no amount of visual reference studies, or Nature of Code breakthroughs will fill the narrative gap.

How can I learn to construct the mystery?

It’s easy to see it as a screen-writing practice; building up the elements and getting to know their behaviours, visualising and describing their setting and reason for being, plotting out the main interactions and the small moments that get you there. But if I have something to say, why not write it in words instead of code? Obliquely, I’m reminded of artist 0x113d’s response to the question ‘why even bother learning to code [in the context of AI takeover]’:

Because it restructures how one sees the world and advances a literacy comprehension <> composition feedback loop, but for the medium of systems/dynamic models/ behavior. Because it’s just like literary humanism but for the media native to computing, and one still wishes to read & write.

Also, there is something about the materiality (programming, touch-screen, web page) that enables the construction of less linear mysteries. Stories with a glimpse of multiple parallel realities, with a dynamic beginning and end, the past leaning backwards into the future.

I’ve recently started reading three books at once (life hack), and there is an unexpectedly solid mirage of connective meaning that appears between each trio. Not unexpected. The selection of three books, chosen by a specific person at a single moment in time is not random at all, and yet the overlap and synchronicity surprises me. Themes in Book A suddenly revealed from a different position through a character in Book B, then illuminated again but backwards in Book C. While each book, individually, follows the format of its linear reading, fully complete and controlled from beginning to end by the author, there is now a new format that is very very real to the reader, with outputs that are interpretative and conditional, fleeting, kinetic, ephemeral, their replication not possible nor necessary.

I would love for this three-book way of reading to unblock my gen art process.

In this scenario I’m the author of three completed scripts, told from beginning to end, having mapped out their worlds and their mostly familiar rules in a collection of sequenced lines of instruction. That part should be straightforward: three completed stories as texts / raw materials, able to function and be held independently. Then brought together visually and experientially for the reader, on a web page on a phone screen, and in the intersection of three extremely linear stories, is created a fourth; less linear, incomplete, interactive, dynamic and open. Loosening a little the sting of inadequacy of using, or even selling, a single visual outcome to approximate its generative world.

Two formats that already mirror this are the triptych and the tarot spread.

The triptych had/has a material and narrative purpose. Three panels, hinged to allow the work to be closed like a package and safely transported to church, presented as a narrative arranged in symbolism’s favourite number. Father, son, holy spirit. Heavenly, earthly and hellish gardens. Later, a structure for thematic unity and/or contrast, sequence, perspective. Three sides of a multifaceted concept (plus their exterior panels).

Tarot spreads build meaning through the placement and interaction of cards. Position, orientation, relationship and flow creates a narrative where the single card’s meaning (itself a vignette story with a character, setting, action and conclusion) is modified by its position in the overall. The three-card spread tells a story in past, present, future. Amongst the varied cruciform and radial arrangements, the central card generally means YOU, or BODY, or NOW. As with the triptych, three (or more) aspects of a multifaceted journey (plus the back of the card).

Applying these notions as structural crutches to hold amorphous ideas in digital format (the browser window and smartphone) leads to a figmesque setup that looks something like the below, with three panels containing three stories, each with their own rules and mysteries. Why does it have to be a story? Why make it in code? Why make anything? Why write this? Ok, but why publish it? All terrific questions. One still wishes to write.