This project was made in 2020 for a class project. The elective was centered around a method of iterating on ideas which involved using various tools to influence those ideas, such as a Markov chain generator, an inaccurate voice to text program, predictive text, a word association list generator, and Oblique Strategies. We began by playing a session of The Quiet Year with classmates which was meant to be the basis for this project in some shape or form, and we were also told to incorporate aspects of our earlier projects from the class, one of which was a character we created based on ourselves, and the other of which was an artwork that was created through crowdsourced contributions. The other focus of the class was learning to use HTML and CSS in service of hypertext fiction.
In my story, the setting and the four main players are loosely pulled from our Quiet Year game. I went through a process of writing plot summaries and garbling them with some of the tools we were given, then writing new plot summaries where I tried to make sense of strange elements that the corruptions had introduced, repeating until I had something I was satisfied with. My self-insert character from the associated project was a species of animal instead of an individual. For the crowdsourced element, I made one of those “let’s make an OC” memes and dropped it in a Discord server. I let my mom pick out names for Mark and Sam, meanwhile Mike and Fred were named after (but not based on) a couple of livestreamers who I wrote the project while listening to them look at that one weird house. The Oblique Strategies card I got said something about idiosyncrasies, so I made the story take place in a mall, which I had also introduced as a landmark for our Quiet Year game, and I’d probably have made it take place in one anyway, cause I like malls. One of the tools we had to use was an anagram generator, which I technically used with the name of a local mall to create the title, but I did heavily modify the results.
At the time, I was inspired by the garbled nonsense-text from the Markov chain generator to incorporate AI generated images, because they gave me a similar uncanny feeling. The people images are from thispersondoesnotexist, the props are from what was then known as GANbreeder, and some of the images have been warped by Deep Dream Generator’s image styles. The public opinion of and broader conversation around AI generated images has changed wildly since this project was made, thanks to the introduction of tools like MidJourney and ChatGPT. I have been fascinated by machine generated images ever since DeepDream when I was a teenager for their creepy nightmarish quality, but of course that was never the intentional endpoint of the tech. I wrestled with keeping the AIgen images in this project, not wanting it to look like an endorsement of the tech or the direction it is headed, but ultimately I decided it might have some intrigue as a time capsule, and that critique of AI may compliment the setting of the story- a derelict structure composed out of melded junk that came to life and went insane.
I’m making this project public now because the concepts I developed in it and the ethos behind it have stuck with me, and helped inspire a bigger worldbuilding project I am working on, with loosely related stories in a similar universe. For this story specifically though, there is one other project from this class which functions as a prequel- The Omnibus.
Thanks for reading!
