In: Frank Gadinger, Martina Kopf, Ayşem Mert, and Christopher Smith (eds.). Political Storytelling: From Fact to Fiction (Global Dialogues 12) This essay presents a summary of important perspectives concerning the distinction between what counts as truth or fiction. As a source of inspiration, it starts with two examples found in literature – the first a classical Spanish novel and the second a collection of stories written by the leader of a social movement in Mexico. These two examples of the conflictive relations between truth and fiction, authenticity and imagination serve as a source of inspiration for the rest of this article, which shows that this issue has been a subject of intense debate in philosophy and in the philosophy of science and still presents a challenge in the 21st century. The essay states that absolute, objective truth is a myth. It describes that what counts as ‘truth’ in a particular era, is, among other things, the result of power relations. It suggests productive ways to deal with this problem in modern society, through deliberative, emancipatory processes of reflexivity (Weick 1999), participatory research and dialogue, facilitating innovation and generation of new solutions.
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This paper introduces and contextualises Climate Futures, an experiment in which AI was repurposed as a ‘co-author’ of climate stories and a co-designer of climate-related images that facilitate reflections on present and future(s) of living with climate change. It converses with histories of writing and computation, including surrealistic ‘algorithmic writing’, recombinatory poems and ‘electronic literature’. At the core lies a reflection about how machine learning’s associative, predictive and regenerative capacities can be employed in playful, critical and contemplative goals. Our goal is not automating writing (as in product-oriented applications of AI). Instead, as poet Charles Hartman argues, ‘the question isn’t exactly whether a poet or a computer writes the poem, but what kinds of collaboration might be interesting’ (1996, p. 5). STS scholars critique labs as future-making sites and machine learning modelling practices and, for example, describe them also as fictions. Building on these critiques and in line with ‘critical technical practice’ (Agre, 1997), we embed our critique of ‘making the future’ in how we employ machine learning to design a tool for looking ahead and telling stories on life with climate change. This has involved engaging with climate narratives and machine learning from the critical and practical perspectives of artistic research. We trained machine learning algorithms (i.e. GPT-2 and AttnGAN) using climate fiction novels (as a dataset of cultural imaginaries of the future). We prompted them to produce new climate fiction stories and images, which we edited to create a tarot-like deck and a story-book, thus also playfully engaging with machine learning’s predictive associations. The tarot deck is designed to facilitate conversations about climate change. How to imagine the future beyond scenarios of resilience and the dystopian? How to aid our transition into different ways of caring for the planet and each other?
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"Rising Tides, Shifting Imaginaries: Participatory Climate Fiction-Making with Cultural Collections," is an transdisciplinary research project that merges information design, participatory art, and climate imaginaries to address the pressing challenge of climate change, particularly the rising sea levels in the Netherlands. The doctoral research project aims to reimagine human coexistence with water-based ecosystems by exploring and reinterpreting audiovisual collections from various archives and online platforms. Through a creative and speculative approach, it seeks to visualize existing cultural representations of Dutch water-based ecosystems and, with the help of generative AI, develop alternative narratives and imaginaries for future living scenarios. The core methodology involves a transdisciplinary process of climate fiction-making, where narratives from the collections are amplified, countered, or recombined. This process is documented in a structured speculative archive, encompassing feminist data visualizations and illustrated climate fiction stories. The research contributes to the development of Dutch climate scenarios and adaptation strategies, aligning with international efforts like the CrAFt (Creating Actionable Futures) project of the New European Bauhaus program. Two primary objectives guide this research. First, it aims to make future scenarios more relatable by breaking away from traditional risk visualizations. It adopts data feminist principles, giving space to emotions and embodiment in visualization processes and avoiding the presentation of data visualization as neutral and objective. Second, the project seeks to make scenarios more inclusive by incorporating intersectional and more-than-human perspectives, thereby moving beyond techno-optimistic approaches and embracing a holistic and caring speculative approach. Combining cultural collections, digital methodologies, and artistic research, this research fosters imaginative explorations for future living.
