Speculative Storytelling with Machine Learning | Lucas LaRochelle

Participants

 

Thursday, December 12, 2019
1 pm – 5 pm
At Studio XX
FREE WORKSHOP

As part of its Slow Tech programming, Studio XX welcomes Lucas LaRochelle, in residency from November 1st to December 13. They are developing QT.bot, an artificial intelligence trained on the textual and visual data of Queering The Map, a community-generated mapping platform of 80 000+ stories of LGBTQ2+ experience, that produces an endless stream of speculative queer futures.

In this workshop, participants will learn the basics of machine learning through developing their own text generating recursive neural networks (RNN). The group will begin with a brief overview of how neural networks function, before diving into the hands on creation of its own RNN using Tensorflow and Python. While their RNN’s are training, they will be invited to think conceptually about the possibilities of storytelling in collaboration with machines.

Step by step instructions will be given, and no prior experience with coding is necessary for this workshop.

*Please come to the workshop with text you would like to play with, saved as a UTF-8 txt file (at least 50KB). The longer the input text, the more interesting the output text! Some examples of what to bring: a book, a television show transcription, your twitter feed, your WhatsApp message history – any text that can be saved as a .txt file will work!

LIMITED SPOTS AVAILABLE – To register, contact atelier@studioxx.org
The workshop will be facilitated in English.