Fantasyland Autofiction

This essay explores a return to hope and romanticism by contemporary artists looking at themes of fantasy worlds and mapping imaginary lands as a type of autofiction. These fantasylands are created in collaboration with hallucinating machine learning platforms, as a tool for contemporary art-making. Seen through the framework of Metamodernism, how does AI hallucination contribute to Metamodern structure of feeling? AI, as part of the metacrisis, places society and culture in a type of no man’s land or in-between, where rapid and unchecked advancements in machine learning and generative technologies are a further addition to an already complicated time, while simultaneously being a new and useful tool for contemporary artists. Introduction While high on opiates in 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the well-known writer and philosopher, channelled a 349-word poem Kubla Khan, about the construction of a palace by the Mongol ruler in the fantastical utopian land of Xanadu. Coleridge was the founder of the Romantic movement that became prevalent from the late 1800s (Haekel). Historical romanticism originated in a time of great changes and conflicts in Britain, Europe, and America. Some of these included the American Revolution and the loss of the Thirteen Colonies, the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, the beginning of political change in Britain, with power beginning to be taken from the monarchy, the Industrial Revolution, and the pro-independence and revolutionary movements in Ireland (Sedlmayr). The “end of history” (Fukuyama) during the romantic period is comparable with the metacrisis that humanity has been dealing with since the late 1990s, if you take into account the rapid development of technologies and the political, economic, and social changes of the time (Christensen). As defined by Bhaskar et al., the metacrisis is “a singular socio-ecological crisis” that is described as a “complex multiplicity” that requires an interdisciplinary point-of-view (5). Bhaskar et al. go on to say that these interconnected crises are also situated in a(n) (inter)subjective context of ‘interior’ meaning making (semiosis), construal and response that includes philosophical, scientific, religious, existential, worldview, and psychospiritual dimensions that are essential to include in an adequate understanding of the complex dynamics in play in order to facilitate more effective responses. (5) A shift towards idealism or the “utopian turn” (van den Akker and Vermeulen 55), in addition to a return to sincerity, hope, and a neo-romanticism can be found in cultural artifacts (van den Akker et al. 4). These help to form what is known as a structure of feeling and is part of a new era beginning to be known as Metamodernism. Metamodernism Metamodernism is a broad and currently evolving term that emerged in the 1990s. Using the definition of Metamodernism proposed by the Dutch school, the term includes ideas that originate in Modernism and Postmodernism, which respond to, then move beyond to encompass, a wide range of recent and currently occurring cultural shifts (van den Akker et al.). ''The use of the prefix meta here derives from Plato’s metaxis, describing an oscillation and simultaneity between and beyond diametrically opposed poles” (Turner). Metamodernism explains the culture shift away from postmodernism in terms of a ‘structure of feeling’ arising out of the ‘dialectical oscillation’ between modernism and postmodernism (‘metaxy’), it sees a ‘romantic turn’ in the newly arising works of literature, art, media productions and so on, and it includes a sweeping cultural critique of politics. (van den Akker et al. 199) Some themes that can be found in contemporary cultural artifacts include ironic sincerity or ironic honesty (Ironesty) and neo-romanticism or the new romanticism. Indeed, “‘Utopia’ – as a trope, individual desire or collective fantasy – is once more, and increasingly, visible and noticeable across artistic practices that must be situated in, and related, to, the passage from postmodernism and metamodernism” (van den Akker and Vermeulen 57). For example, a group exhibition in 2022 titled The Black Fantastic, held at the Hayward Gallery in London, with the curatorial theme of a fantastical Afrofuturist realm, featured the work of 11 artists that use a wide variety of media (Southbank Centre). Described by Obuobi as being an exhibition of “Black artists who use fantastical elements to address racial injustice and explore alternative realities”, they go on to say that two of the curatorial themes include “the multi-dimensional aesthetic experience of real and imagined worlds” and “contrasting utopian and apocalyptic views on time with regards to the past, present, and future” (Obuobi 136). This return to romanticism could be seen as facilitating a form of escapism from the metacrisis, but Vermeulen and van den Akker argue that utopia “should be understood as a tool, say, a looking glass, for scanning this world and others for alternative possibilities” (65). Vermeulen and van den Akker highlight the term ‘utopistics’, a word coined by sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, that combines ideas associated with utopias, statistics, and logistics to imagine ideal societies created using practical information combined with idealistic hope to achieve them (Wallerstein). Examples of these ideas can be found in the use of “postmodern melancholy in order to invoke hope” in contemporary art (55) or the New Romanticism that focusses on the beauty of the “world while recognizing its ugly reality” (Aziz 28). This idea ties in with the idea of fantasy lands as they include imperfection, as opposed to a utopia, or “the good place that is no place” (Marks et al. 1), that is perfect in every way. In contrast, Santambrogio states that the meaning of utopia contains two aspects that oscillate between “eutopia, or good place; and that of outopia, or non-​place” (148), or in other words “the ultimate in human folly or human hope” (Mumford 1). These definitions of utopia, align with the central idea of oscillation in Metamodernism. Autofiction and Fantasy Lands The aim of autofiction is to present an authentically relational experience for viewers. Autofiction is an in-between medium that blends reality with fantasy. Gibbons describes autofiction as an explicitly hybrid form of life writing that merges autobiographical fact with fiction. The autofictional mode is not restricted to writing; it has been observed in the visual arts, cinema, theatre and online. (Gibbons 120) One of the main attributes of autofiction is that the author is featured in the writing as a narrator, in the first person, or as a third-person character in the story (Gibbons et al. 176). The artist establishes “their self corporeally in the world, including in relation to others”. In addition, Gibbons goes on to say that “identity is also acknowledged as a social category that is constructed by subjects and by larger structures of social power” (120). This affectual aspect of the work, combined with the oscillation between the personal and impersonal, the real world and a fantasyland, establishes autofiction as a Metamodern form of storytelling and contributes to a structure of feeling. AI as Muse The use of hallucinogens by Coleridge and the other Romantics to aid in the creation of their literary works is very well known (De Quincey; Dormandy; Vickers; Schäfer). Opium and other drugs like hashish have been seen to be a type of muse or collaborator in the creation of their work (Partridge 104). In Lamuse: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence for Sparking Inspiration, a conference paper on AI and artists, Lamiroy and Potier describe a project that used AI as an inspiration for work. “AI is not creating art in any way but is merely a muse to the artist, a tool” (3). AI hallucinations develop due to computational errors, while drug-induced hallucinations develop from biochemical alterations in the brain (Rolland et al. 1). Like Coleridge’s dream of the imaginary land of Xanadu, experiencing illusions, nonsensical output, or things that don’t exist, the artist uses these hallucinations as inspiration in the creation of work. According to Maleki et al., the definition of an AI hallucination varies (6), but the most cited, originally coined by Koehn and Knowles (3), is that “AI hallucination occurs when the output of the Neural Machine Translation (NMT) system is often quite fluent but entirely unrelated to the input”. In the text-to-image process, a machine learning platform may add unrelated subject matter to the image or make errors in the appearance of the intended subject. Fig. 1: Adobe Firefly. Prompt: ‘Sue Beyer Land’. Text-to-image machine learning, August 2024. In fig. 1 the prompt used to make this image was ‘Sue Beyer Land’. The example image appears to display a landscape combining three different landscapes that make up the back, mid-, and foreground. Mountains form the backdrop to green rolling hills of a rural landscape that features a dog sitting in the foreground, wearing a hat, with an Australian flag placed over the bottom half of its head. Different lighting is used in each section of the image. The strange and humorous aspects of this image are considered to be an AI hallucination. Fig. 2: Runway ML. Prompt: ‘The Land of Sue Beyer’. Text-to-image machine learning, August 2024. In another example, shown in fig. 2 using Runway ML and the prompt ‘The Land of Sue Beyer’, the AI produced an image that resembles a black and white Ansel Adams photograph of a dirt track with wooden fence posts, heading straight through a field towards mountains in the distance. The image, when examined closely, is obviously generated by AI. There are repetitive marks and errors along the length of the road, and inconsistencies in the light. The AI has generated an idealised land that exists outside of reality through an attempt to emulate an Ansel Adams photograph