We need a diary, my colleague wrote me; meaning that he would like to use a diary as an input for the neural network that he has been training. Diary… a key object in a book I wrote where the main character was a human-like artificial being. Her name was N: the “real” name of my digital twin we created using GPT-2 by OpenAI chose. I liked it. It reminded me of Nobody from Jim Jarmush’s Dead Man. In the book, N used the diary as a memory palace – where she eventually got lost only to find herself again. Diary: the most personal medium, where you can hide from time.

Imagine reading a diary of somebody who lived hundreds of years ago. Imagine reading a diary of yourself from a parallel world. Imagine reading a diary of different personas in your mind. Imagine reading a diary of an artificial being who is not familiar with the concept of closed individuality. 

This workshop invites participants to create a collaborative artwork. We will create a diary with seven gates (or portals); each of them connected to a specific text (mostly autobiographical), feeling, or emotion. Everyone chooses a portal and enters: by entering you agree with inserting your own content (preferably a diary entry, or a dream). Participants will have access to the gates the day before the workshop, so they can choose a specific portal and write their input (a few lines is perfectly fine). Then we let the machine (mostly GPT-3 by OpenAI) create a synthesis. We will trace patterns of nascent stories and/ or emotional responses, and the collective dynamics of floating in the latent space.