[Por]TrAIts: AI Characters + Their Microstories

‘[Por]TrAIts: AI Characters + Their Microstories’ is a collaborative effort between Mez Breeze (a human) and DALL-E2 (AI), with the book comprised of a fusion of AI-generated art and microstories written in the English/code-hybrid language termed Mezangelle. On being invited by the OpenAI team to participate in their AI Artist Access Program (OpenAI being the organisation responsible for creating DALL-E, the AI employed in this Volume) this resulted in the creation of this first book in a series of fiction projects involving AI art generators. ‘[Por]TrAIts: AI Characters + Their Microstories’ placed second in The Loom Art Prize in January 2023, and became a top seller on Itchio in September 2022.

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Reviews:

“This book is mindbogglingly beautiful, evocative and provocative.”  – Dr. Astrid Ensslin, Digital Culture and Digital Humanities at the Universities of Bergen and Alberta.  

“An amazing and groundbreaking series of works.” – John T. Murray, Games and Interactive Media department, University of Central Florida.

"This book is an absolute beauty - '[Por]TrAIts: AI Characters + Their Microstories’ is like nothing you've seen." – Dr Anne Sofia Karhio, Lecturer in Contemporary English Literature, NUI Galway.

“Read ‘[Por]TrAIts: AI Characters + Their Microstories’ on as big a screen as you can. Beautiful, unsettling, and fascinating all at once.”  – Simon Groth, author of ‘Ex Libris’ and ‘Hunted Down and Other Tales’. 

“The images in ‘[Por]TrAIts: AI Characters + Their Microstories’ are captivating!” Henry Warwick, School of Media at Toronto Metropolitan University.  

“‘[Por]TrAIts: AI Characters + Their Microstories’ is a great human-machine collaboration.” – Vladimir Alexeev, OpenAI GPT-3 Ambassador.

“A grand accomplishment.” – Kevin Ang, XR Artists Collective Co-Founder and Bingkoland Director.   

“Mez's latest book '[Por]TrAIts: AI Characters + Their Microstories’ will leave your jaw on the floor.”  – Chris Harris, maker of ‘Out There’.    

“A thing of beauty”.  – Jessica Citizen, author, ‘Player Attack’.

“As usual with Mez's work, ‘[Por]TrAIts: AI Characters + Their Microstories’ [is] breathtakingly beautiful in its visual design and aesthetic effects.” - Nick Montfort and Clara Fernandez-Vara, 2022 International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling.

"Working through ‘[Por]TrAIts: AI Characters + Their Microstories’, I am reminded of Foucault’s theorizations of determining how and when different epochs in epistemology seem to develop... this work provides a clear indication that new epistemologies are actually in play with profound socio-political implications." - Electronic Literature Organisation's 2023 Conference Selection Committee Judge.

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Featured In:

• The 2022 Future of Text Symposium at the Linnean Society, London UK and online. Participants included Stephen Fry, Jaron Lanier, Mez Breeze, Caitlin Fisher, Fabien Benetou, Jim Hollan, Bob Horn, Bob Stein, and Yiliu Shen-Burke (among others). Hosted by the Future Text Lab, an organisation that examines what it's like to work with text in interactive and augmented environments.

• The 2022 ADA Symposium: Indeterminate Infrastructures – Objects, Signals & Architectures, a multiple venue event held in Whakatū/Nelson and elsewhere online. Panelists included Associate Professor David Ciccoricco from the University of Otago, Professor Rita Raley from the University of California Santa Barbara, and Ursula Standring Bellugue from the University of Otago.

• The 2023 Electronic Literature Organisation's Conference Overcoming Divides: Electronic Literature and Social Change, Social Issues Exhibition, Portugal July 12 - 15. This Conference advocates the dismantlement of economic, political, linguistic, and cultural barriers, focusing on the relation between art and society, as well as on the subversive potential of electronic literature.