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          save forest

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entice

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          make-do

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who craft illusions

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We digest lived experience in bits. Writers regurgitate phenomena in journals, draft, and document the progress of creative projects with word processors.

In digital journals writers can do-make in a “personal and voiced” way (Bacon, 2014, p. 387). Search and replace, section work into headings and hierarchies, highlight themes, and upload voice memos to convert speech to text.

File pipe-cleaners, sticks, feathers, and stone. Convert idiosyncratic memory and historical detritus to digital traces.

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           Writers are bowerbirds

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Generator of fake portraits

People tend not to think about the effect that neural networks have on our lives, because usually, we see the result of its work and not the "face" of a neural network. Perhaps that is why the generator of fake photos became the main topic of discussion for several weeks in the media devoted to technology at the end of 2020. Not everyone was able to guess that AI could generate a realistic face of a non-existent person in a couple of seconds. Fake portraits look very realistic and it's frightening. If AI can create faces for itself and can text like real people, then what is going to happen next?

Generator of fake faces of non-existent humans

We are talking about the website thispersondoesnotexist.com ("this person does not exist dot com") and are going to tell of the history and areas of application. The way the generator works will be explained further.

The AI face generator is powered by StyleGAN, a neural network from Nvidia developed in 2018. GAN consists of 2 competing neural networks, one generates something, and the second tries to find whether results are real or generated by the first. Training ends when the first neural network begins to constantly deceive the second.

An interesting point is that the creation of photographs of non-existent people was a by- product: the main goal was to train the AI to recognize fake faces and faces in general. The company needed this to improve the performance of its video cards by automatically recognizing faces and applying other rendering algorithms to them. However, since

the StyleGAN code is publicly available, an engineer at Uber was able to take it and create a random face generator that rocked the internet.

About the generator

For the user, everything works very simply. As soon as you are on the website random face is generated. You can download the picture if you want. Refresh the page if you don't like the person that you are seeing. If you see the same face, just wait a couple of seconds, and refresh the page again. The website shows the results of the generator's work (which are updated every 2-3 seconds) not the generator itself.

How to recognize an image of a fake person

It is almost impossible to recognise an image of a fake person. AI is so developed that 90% of fakes are not recognized by an ordinary person and 50% are not recognized by an experienced photographer. There are no services for recognition. Occasionally, a neural network makes mistakes, which is why artifacts appear: an incorrectly bent pattern, a strange hair color, and so on.

The only thing you need to do is take a closer look: humans' visual processing systems are far stronger than computers', so it is possible to recognise forgery by detection.

Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom created a website called "Which Face Is Real", which is focused on teaching people to be more analytical of potentially false portraits. Before making suggestions that a person in a photo is existent, there are several things that need to be considered.

One of the most common ones is symmetrical issues, in particular eyeglasses and earrings.

Same uneven issues with teeth are quite common too. Look for odd characteristics like pixels and repeated incisors. Fake hair, in general, may seem with some glow around it or look too straight and streaked, again, with visible asymmetry.

Study background carefully. If it's fake, it may include unusual distortions in shapes and lines, or have a torn appearance overall. Bleed-through occurs in bright colors that stand out from the background onto a fake person's head.

Another distinguishing feature of the NVIDIA "StyleGAN algorithm" is glossy "water splotches".

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ThisPersonDoesNotExist - Random AI Generated Photos of Fake Persons

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Generate random human face in 1 click and download it! AI generated fake person photos: man, woman or child.

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Text finds its natural habitat on the web. Text is colour. Even images are arrayed as RGB (Red, Green, Blue) or CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, black). Maps, diagrams, blogs, posts, links, and moving pictures; all are texts to weave into the mesh of creative work. Algorithms pose as people.

Infinite digital forests of text, unseen vistas. Digital canopies are dense, the light dim. Hold your hand before your face and you barely see its outline. Only fragments. Jumps and gaps.

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Writers are bowerbirds
who craft illusions
make-do
do-make
visual
digital
new forms
to digest
entice
save forest.

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Bowerbird methods inspire all sorts of scientists. An artificial intelligence algorithm, the Satin Bowerbird Optimizer (SBO), mimics the steps of bowerbird courting. To improve project quality, SBO estimates software development effort. The best possible bower (prediction) has variables of flowers, fruits, sparkling objects, branches, and dramatic gestures. (Samareh Moosavi et al., 2017). It adapts.

Community health researchers naturalise bowerbirding as a fitting method for the Anthropocene (Mycroft, 2018). Bowerbirds recycle human waste; research also produces data detritus, leftover data rich with stories.

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           visual

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A blue satin bowerbird in a hoop pine forest near the Bunya Mountains, Queensland. Cattle paddocks encroach; trees stand tall. For now, the bowerbird finds twigs and leaves and forms a domed tunnel, wide enough for a lover to pass through.

Inside, the bird chews grass and berries, then paints the bower with vegetable spit. Outside, the bird scatters plastic bottle tops that reflect ultraviolet light. Flower petals too.

Creative writing is just as complex, a messy tangle and tussle with ideas and text. Each word, each piece chosen is personal. Singular. These bowers must lure readers.

Writers hand build stories. They adapt materials that mismatch, that seem random. These incongruous elements form part of the creative process and product (Rogers, 2015).

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          to digest

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do-make

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Bacon, E. (2014). Journaling – a path to exegesis in creative research. TEXT Journal, 18(2). http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct14/bacon.htm

Bell, A., & Alber, J. (2012). Ontological Metalepsis and Unnatural Narratology. Journal of Narrative Theory, 42(2), 166–192. https://doi.org/10.1353/jnt.2012.0005

Brady, T. (2000). A Question of Genre: de-mystifying the exegesis. TEXT Journal, 4(1). http://www.textjournal.com.au/april00/brady.htm

Brow Books. [@Brow_Books]. (2019, October 29). Check out this remarkable new work of digital literature from Jamie Marina Lau [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/Brow_Books/status/1189091572714835968

Candy, L. (2019). The Creative Reflective Practitioner: Research Through Making and Practice (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315208060

Dwyer, S., Franks, R., Galassi, M., & Thorpe, K. (2016). Editorial: the betwixt and between. TEXT Journal, Special Issue 34: Writing and illustrating interdisciplinary research, 1–12. http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue34/Dwyer_et_al.pdf

Freiman, M. (2015). The Art of Drafting and Revision: Extended Mind in Creative Writing. New Writing, 12(1), 48–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2014.977797

Garner. (2002). I: Helen Garner explores the new and different persona a writer must adopt in each successive work. Meanjin, 61(1), 40–43.

Greet, P. (2017). Writer as perv: bricolage, bowerbirding, observation. New Writing, 14(2), 184–195. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2016.1223142

Hayles, N. K. (2004). Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis. Poetics Today, 25(1), 67–90. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-25-1-67

Hayles, N. K. (2013). Combining Close and Distant Reading: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and the Aesthetic of Bookishness. PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 128(1), 226–231. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2013.128.1.226

Jordan, S. (2019). Postdigital Storytelling: Poetics, Praxis, Research (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315112251

Kelley, L. A., & Endler, J. A. (2017). How do great bowerbirds construct perspective illusions? Royal Society Open Science, 4(1), 160661. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.160661

Kroll, J. (2021). The writer as interlocutor: The benefits and drawbacks of bricolage in creative writing research. TEXT Journal, 25(2). https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.29557

Lévi-Strauss. (1972). The savage mind ([New ed.]). Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Mycroft, L. (2019). A World in Miniature: the storytelling potential of research offcuts. Research in Post-Compulsory Education, 24(2–3), 251–267. https://doi.org/10.1080/13596748.2019.1596422

Robertson, R., & Hetherington, P. (2017). A mosaic patterning: space, time and the lyric essay. New Writing, 14(1), 36–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2016.1235204

Rogers, M. (2015). Contextualizing Theories and Practices of Bricolage Research. The Qualitative Report. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2012.1704

Samareh Moosavi, S. H., & Khatibi Bardsiri, V. (2017). Satin bowerbird optimizer: A new optimization algorithm to optimize ANFIS for software development effort estimation. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 60, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engappai.2017.01.006

Van Manen, M. (2016). Researching lived experience: human science for an action sensitive pedagogy (Second Edition). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Williams, P. (2015). Plagiarism, Palimpsest and Intertextuality. New Writing, 12(2), 169–180. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2015.1036887

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Bricolage is from 'La Pensée Sauvage' (1962), translated as 'The Savage Mind'. La pensée is a French for pansy or thought. Sauvage means savage, wild, or shy. 

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Stand behind bowers. Strut in the court, feathers bristling with questions.

Will it do?

Churr and whistle, call to others. Let them come, then fly back to their own nests. Blood and bone, ones and zeroes.

We return to courts that quiver.

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Printed novels are ephemeral. Flat (Hayles, 2004). Like the nest, paper is tasty to mites and gradually disintegrates to dust.

The novel’s embodied life is shorter than ours; it survives longer as digits. Stories live on paper and in bytes. Like our lives, stories are organic and digital, entangled and hybridic (Jordan, 2019).

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We see differently. Text is an abstract visual medium. Digital tools amplify creative insights by stimulating new ways of reading text (Candy, 2019). Reflecting on lived experience helps creative research (Van Manen, 2016), but it is not enough. Look into the web mirror.

The web feeds visual tools to fiction writers. Data visualisations make connections clearer and save time. Doing and making, real digital, lights a path to new research and creative practice. Digital tools and practices shape how we create the bower.

A birds-eye view of text helps to do differently. Patterns emerge through visual data and content analysis tools. Browse repetitive words and weed them out. Unearth other phrases through statistical analyses, the document's density, and connections. In deep forests of creative data, these tools identify landmarks and map areas to explore.

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            digital

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Writers observe (Garner, 2002).

And perve (Greet, 2017).

Their poetry scrounges eclectic scraps.

They borrow and steal arresting elements—

recycling characters and stories for

their assemblages

(Williams, 2015).

The infinite web changes bricolage and bowerbirding.

Writers forage and feast on ideas,

layering thoughts into nests.

Make-do, do-make,

back and forward,

across the web, they fly,

reciprocal and cyclic,

with no sharp start or end.

Words branch in natural directions,
asynchronous
synchronicities.
"Knowing where to look,
where to find the blue pieces"
(Brady, 2000),
no longer applies.

We are gluttons for internet.

Knowing what to select, sort, and "move beyond"
(Kroll, 2021),
feeds digital bowerbirding.

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Bowerbirding resembles bricolage (Rogers, 2015), and the craft of tinkering to “make do with whatever is at hand” (Lévi-Strauss, p. 11). Bricolage describes a creative way of adapting multiple perspectives and research methods (Dwyer et al., 2016).

Bricoleurs improvise from local terrain. To make do, they collect and create, borrowing tools and materials from other trades and professions to handcraft their eclectic work. Their tools and materials are finite.

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Bowerbirds place blue pieces in a complex mosaic that narrows towards the bower entrance. They present themselves at a flattering angle to appear larger and stronger and more attractive.

Each bower is a lyric essay (Robertson & Hetherington, 2017). This is no fluke.

The most skilful, experienced birds create an Ebbinghaus Illusion.

Scientists who disturb these artful entrances, who scatter their objects, observe that the bowerbirds soon restore the pattern (Kelley and Endler, 2017).

Female bowerbirds choose their mates on the craft of their illusions.

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Satin Bowerbird - Joseph C Boone, CC BY-SA 4.0. Altered with remove.bg

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Ptilonorhynchus violaceus violaceus (Vieillot, 1816) - bird skin specimen from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center.

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Digital tools help design, manipulate, and view messy bowers from different perspectives. Externalising ideas with images and metaphors makes sense of creative meaning (Freiman, 2015).

Visual structures make thoughts tangible.

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The Ebbinghaus Illusion: an optical trick where objects of the same size seem smaller or larger because of their surrounds.

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Interactive World Forest Map & Tree Cover Change Data | GFW

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Explore the state of forests worldwide by analyzing tree cover change on GFW’s interactive global forest map using satellite data. Learn about deforestation rates and other land use practices, forest fires, forest communities, biodiversity and much more.

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 Satin Bowerbird - Joseph C Boone, CC BY-SA 4.0. Altered with remove.bg and ascii-art-generator.org

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 new forms