Co-creative multimodal authorship as procedural performance with DALL-E
Astrid Ensslin, Jason Nelson · 2024
This chapter engages with the symbiotic relationship between AI and Literature from the vantage point of digital-born, multimodal fiction and its intersection with Large Language Models or, more specifically, with text-to-image models. Through the vignette of Australian-American digital poet Jason Nelson’s co-creative interaction with DALL-E, and specifically his newly co-created genre of Ultra-Large Digital Narrative Images, it demonstrates how AI shapes not only our notion of digital-born art as a consumable product , but equally as a posthuman performative process that integrates dialogic interaction and renders co-creation as a form of posthuman theatre. This chapter sets an example of how this triadic form of research-creation-cum-AI will lead to new, potentially and actually multilayered forms of animated and ludic texts that blur the boundaries between machinic and human creativity as well as between verbal and pictorial narrative. It also demonstrates the fluid and quasi-mimetic workings of the quaternary co-creative process, which is inherently open to further pluralisation. Ultimately, this contribution confirms that user-centric and machine-centric models of historicising digital-born writing need to be brought into productive dialog to account for the shape-shifting complexities of literary-AI co-creation.