[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 2023, and became a top seller on Itchio in 2022. In 2023, it also became one of the top performers on the Wonderbox Publishing platform.

--

Reviews:

"'[Por]TrAIts' is an incredible contribution to creative applications in AI, especially for the thoroughly designed characters, collaborative images, and stories offered here. This contribution should serve as a standard of cutting-edge work to the field." - Reviewing Judge from The Digital Review, 04 Issue.

"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.

--

Featured In:

• The 2022 Future of Text Symposium at the Linnean Society, London UK and online. Participants included Jaron Lanier, Stephen Fry, 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.

• The 2023 More Than Meets AI Exhibition as part of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen's joint AI Narrative research project with UC Berkeley, running from October 2nd to October 14th at the Worth Ryder Art Gallery. The exhibition delves deep into the artistic exploration of artificial intelligence and its profound influence on creativity, narrative, and artistic innovation, and is part of the broader research initiative titled Transformation and Disruption: The Challenges and Opportunities of AI for Human Creativity. The project will have an expanded version of this exhibition travel to Bergen in 2024.

• The 2023 International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling Exhibition titled Traversing Boundaries, Barriers, and Borders, November 11 - 15.  Held at the Kobe Design and Creative Center in Japan, the exhibition was curated by Iva Georgieva, Assistant Professor at the Philosophy of Science at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Design Lead at Studio Bahia, and Mondheera Pituxcoosuvarn,  Assistant Professor at the Social Intelligence Laboratory at Ritsumeikan University.

• The 2024 Issue of The Digital Review themed Augmenting Creativity. '[Por]TrAIts' was accepted unanimously for its distinct alignment with the theme and utilisation of AI-driven creativity.

• The 2024 International Digital Media and Art Association (iDMAa) Conference and Exhibition, June 27 - 30. Held at the Laird-Norton Center for Art and Design, Winona State University, Winona, Minnesota. Included an artist talk on the creation of AI characters and their stories.