The Labyrinth of Twisting Vines
A choose-your-own-adventure inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths, exploring Andrew Goodman's "Myth of Interactivity" as well as Eduardo Kac's view of dialogic philosophy in relation to collaborative art.
(All images created using Craiyon)
Artist Statement:
Bridging the earliest form of navigating links, the choose-your-own-adventure story, with the newest form of human-machine interaction, the use of AI, the piece unfolds as a “labyrinth of twisting vines”,: an ongoing conversation between myself, the user, and the technology used to both create and navigate it.
Jorge Luis Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths, named by Smithsonian Magazine as “the earliest precursor to hypertext” (1), posits that all potential possibilities exist simultaneously, and in each moment we exist in just one of an infinite number of worlds, with new worlds being created with each decision, another fork in the path. Yet this is only an illusion of choice: each decision we make also restricts our future possibilities, closing off alternate paths. This same illusion of choice often exists for interactive artworks, which appear to offer the audience more agency, but instead direct them to a foregone conclusion, described by Andrew Goodman as the “myth of interactivity”: “the experience can be rather like the participation in riding a train: certainly we are bodily involved in the machinations of travel, but with limited entrance and exit points and heading inexorably in a prescribed direction” (2).
This piece places the user literally and figuratively on that train, as it creates a near-infinite number of possibilities, offering the user freedom to determine their own path through the story, yet also restricts the user through their interaction with a pre-determined map of options and the consequences of their own unfolding decisions. Each choice opens another possible world, much like clicking a link transports you to a new website, yet unlike with a web browser, one can never go back: the user is inexorably pulled forward, as a train on its tracks. The piece thus becomes an ongoing collaboration between my artistic choices and the user’s input, between the user and their own decisions.
This echoes our modern relationship with AI: ultimately a collaboration in which all contribute, yet none has full agency. In responding to our individual queries, AI relies on data drawn from near-infinite sources outside of our knowledge or control; its results derive from the collective: both our questions and the answers which already exist, from questions gone before. As Eduardo Kac, praising Vilèm Flusser, states in Negotiating Meaning: The Dialogic Imagination in Electronic Art, “[he]…clearly understood the relevance of dialogics not only as aesthetic parameter but social and ethical philosophy. He stated that ‘what we call 'I' is a knot of relations’…that what we call an individual psyche is nothing but the tip of an iceberg of what might be called a collective psyche”(3).
By pairing a web-based system of questions with images produced by AI, created from my own questions posed to this web-based technology, the labyrinth within the piece thus becomes the piece itself: a microcosm of the macrocosm, a universe within the universe. This nesting of system within system, choices within choices, seems to me to be at the heart of collaboration, not only between ourselves and others, ourselves and our own lives, but also between ourselves and AI, the system(s) within which we and our digital art now exist.
1-The Surprisingly Long History of ‘Choose-Your-Own-Adventure’ Stories.
2-Goodman, Andrew. (2018). Gathering Ecologies: Thinking Beyond Interactivity. Open Humanities Press.
3- Negotiating Meaning: The Dialogic Imagination in Electronic Art.
