fictionality

This presentation provides an overview of Hatsune Miku, a virtual pop idol, and showcases a work by the speaker that uses her image and voice as platforms for the creation of electronic literature. Hatsune Miku is a multitude of things at once: a pop star, a software product that uses Yamaha’s Vocaloid text-to-song technology, a fictional character, and ultimately a global collaborative media platform. The electronic literature project presented, “Miku Forever,” uses Miku’s global fanbase as a kind of raw material. An endlessly recombinatory pop song, the lyrics sung by Miku for “Miku Forever” are algorithmically generated from a corpus of songs she has previously sung, and her digital body and dance moves are sourced from open-licensed, fan-created assets available on the web.

As a writer of electronic literature who is also deeply engaged with computational narrative, my goal is producing work both engrossing to read and also engaging to play. How can (and why should) we expand an e-lit reader's affordances beyond selecting what lexia to view next, to take on a more active role of creator and co-author? For the past few years my work has been exploring these questions in a series of experiments towards an aesthetics of sculpturalfiction. By "sculptural" I mean to suggest that an encounter with such a work has qualities similar both to the act of sculpting-- playful exploration, encompassing many small acts of expression and decision-making-- but also the way asculpture is encountered: on the audience's terms, without a set script, for as much or as little time as the viewer is interested. Sculptural fiction implies continuous interaction with a piece where exploration and self-expression are both integral to the experience. I believe it illuminates an interesting corner of existing e-lit work in a new way, and provides an intriguing direction for future exploration.

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