Who Makes the Story?

Johannes Heldén and Håkan Jonson’s Evolution explores the concept of authorship and the roles of the audience and computer in digital narratives. As an “artwork-in-progress designed to emulate the texts and music of poet and artist Johannes Heldén”, it was created with the ultimate goal of passing the Turing Test and imitating human composition. The piece facilitates reflection in the user on their role in the process of creation, as well as that of a machine. Evolution introduces a new standard of authorship an art, one in which the creator or designer can take a more distant role, leaving not only the mediation, but the composition and symbolism of a digital narrative to the computer and audience. It establishes a new paradigm in narrative exploration: raising all participants to equal responsibility.

Evolution is a generative poetry piece that shifts constantly as it is viewed. The piece loads to a single page with an image of an open book. The left leaf offers the user settings for pause/play, resetting, and speed management, beneath which is the copyright information for the piece and links to the abstract, artists’ information, and documentation. After selecting a language, a poem appears on the blank right leaf and immediately begins to shift. It is unlikely that the audience will be able to pause the poem on its first instantiation; the initial changes are fast and hard to notice, but a generation counter on the bottom reveals how many times the piece has been altered. The process is accompanied by music: computer-generated remixes of Helden’s compositions. Even as a digital piece, Evolution is remarkably reminiscent of reading a book of poetry.

Evolution relies heavily on remediation in making users comfortable with it — it’s code disguised as a familiar, tangible medium — but it serves to do more than just provide an approachable format. Laying out the site like a book evokes the perceived value of a concrete work and lightens the frivolous and low-culture tones that are often associated with digital media objects. More importantly, the book format emphasizes the existence of an author. For a work to reach print, someone must compose and edit it. In this case, the audience is intended to reflect upon that. Who is the author? In a digital narrative, is the person programming the narrative the author? Is Heldén still the author if the program is imitating his works? Is the computer allowed to be an author? This is the crux of the project’s significance: the inevitable conclusion that every stage of interpretation is essential to the piece. Evolution suggests that the creators of a narrative, however distant, can still claim some authorship over it, but that authorship itself takes on a new meaning. Heldén and Jonson are the authors, but in an artistic sense. They are defining what the framework of the narrative should be, but the computer is responsible for actually assembling the narrative. The computer, too, becomes an author.

In Evolution’s discussion of creation, the computer cannot be ignored. As a digital piece, and with algorithmic generation and regeneration of the narrative, the computer is a crucial element. It becomes more than a medium of presentation, and the technology involved is manipulated into a larger role in the definition of a narrative. It is the composer, and is distinct in offering a series of features that cannot be matched by a human. A machine can have a completely consistent style as it’s programmed to engage with specific patterns. It moves constantly and quickly, editing second by second in a process that’s faster than human editing and doesn’t require any attention; it can change while no one is watching it. A computer is able to be truly random, and this is where its position may become a problem. The detached nature of computation may not allow a machine to claim the title of author.

A computer simply choosing from an array of formats, words, phrases and permutations may not seem to do any true composition. Where a human author imbues symbolism, creates a message, a theme, a computer doesn’t. Especially in the case of Evolution, where the computer is emulating “vocabulary, the spacing in-between words, [and] syntax,” the product can begin to resemble an abstract narrative, but is that enough for it to qualify as a narrative piece? Does the computer deserve the title of author if its decisions are dictated by an algorithm written by a human? Evolution exemplifies that it does. Even if the computer is merely altering a series of different variables to create the narrative, it is still creating one. In the same way that remix on the part of humans still creates a new piece of art, Evolution is constantly remixing the style of Heldén into new interpretations. This is the demarcation of authorship: the point at which the computer can continue on convincingly in place of Heldén. Evolution directly relinquishes his role to the computer; “The release of Evolution [marked] the end of Johannes Heldén writing poetry books. He [had], in a sense, been replaced”. While absent of the intent of Heldén, the computer does all of the technical legwork, passing on collaged snippets of meaning for the final human participant to decode.

The final checkpoint of creation is the audience. Reflecting back on remediation, the left “control” leaf also makes a statement regarding the hierarchy of authorship in Evolution. Positioning user controls where there would traditionally be in-depth copyright information makes a commentary on the audience’s agency in this specific piece. The audience decides when to wipe the slate, how fast they want to turn over the contents of the page, when to stop the generations. Evolution offers the audience a unique sense of control: they get to decide when and if the poem is complete, and they may be the only participants to see this permutation of words and spaces. This establishment of audience input balances the technical nature of the computer’s authorship. Mediation occurs on the output side of every media object as well as on the input side. The audience’s interpretation has always played a role in determining the meaning of a piece, but is now placed above the interpretation of the initial author. If this crucial authority over the work is tipped more from the “creator” in favor of the computer and “audience”, the balance of mediation also tips in favor of the output side. This shift in authorship is what allows Evolution to still be a narrative piece, despite the distance of its creators.

Humans are natural creators of narrative. While the computer is responsible for the arrangement of words and spaces and may not have any intentionality with regards to what those words and spaces mean, the audience is left to decide when the piece is complete. This instinctual desire for narrative means the user is likely to stop the piece when they find a coherent story in it. Heldén and Jonson retain authorship of the piece in the sense that they created it, but the computer has some in the composition and arrangement — the creation of a remix piece — while the program’s user receives credit for the meaning of the narrative. Evolution is a complete, though unusual, digital narrative and offers a unique reflection on involvement and authorship in digital media. By including the computer as a player in creating narratives, Heldén and Jonson effectively mix existing expectations of narrative with software structures and lean into the definition of new media, demonstrating that the growing role of technology is compatible with traditional human authorship.