The ongoing project ‘Climate Futures’ is an experiment in collaborating with AI to shed light on climate imaginaries. In the project, AI functions as our co-author, who has (machine) learned about climate imaginaries on the basis of training sets of climate fiction literature, indigenous climate change stories, climate-themed visual arts, and Hollywood ‘climate disaster’ film trailers. We design queries to prompt the machine to create new climate imaginaries, in text and in visual form. Subsequently, we edit these machine-generated cli-fi narratives and translate them into short stories, podcasts, and artwork.
The following machines and algorithms have been part of the Climate Futures project to date:
Tesla T4 (UUID: GPU-ef1d6b8c-7543-5969-4126-316eabeed5f9)
Tesla K80 (UUID: GPU-c7194ecb-e0a8-c862-1d76-5c6e46847652)
Open AI’s GPT-2 345M language model
AttnGAN: Fine-Grained Text to Image Generation with Attentional Generative Adversarial Networks