Factitious Residency Open Studio

Generative language refers to text generated by artificial intelligence or related cognitive technologies. Advances in generative language have been rapid and unsettling.

What happens artistically and culturally when the volume of “artificial” language far outpaces that produced by human beings?

How might these tools be leveraged in service to creative work?

UKAI Projects invited ten artists to participate in our in-person Factitious residency to explore the cultural implications of generative language.

We are excited to share the participants' hopes and imagined responses that both leverage and critique the current development path.

The open studio is licensed and will be followed by SoundBath.002 and tickets are available at Resident Advisor at: https://ra.co/events/1904393

Esther Greenwood’s college professor describes her writing as ‘factitious’, meaning contrived, or perhaps in the language of today, performative. Esther dreams of being a poet but struggles with issues of identity and with social norms and these struggles show up in her writing – unconvincingly it would seem. She is eventually admitted to a mental institute.

Of course, Esther Greenwood is the creation of Sylvia Plath and is the centre around which Plath’s thinly veiled autobiography, The Bell Jar, revolves. Published in 1963 under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas, it was attributed to Plath only after her death, a month after The Bell Jar’s release.

2024 is the year of Shipwreck at UKAI Projects. We are exploring the experience of being adrift, of sloughing off the “parasitic and lymphatic matter” that Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset identified a century ago. If being alive is to be shipwrecked, then human culture is the swimming stroke. However, over centuries, we lose the sense of shipwreck, and are burdened by objectifications and behaviours that no longer serve us.

We are being asked to deal with a world where language created by machines may soon surpass language created by human beings. It would be relatively easy to dismiss all of it as ‘factitious’, as a sham or artifice. Language is tricky though, and it is mediated and masked in ways that defy easy categorization.

So, launched an online community, a series of workshops, and a residency to explore being shipwrecked on this island with nothing but the accumulated knowledge, beauty, bile, and vernacular detritus of human history.

What can artists build with it? How might we rearrange it? How can it express our condition? How might we reveal the procrustean bed from whence it was birthed?

Join our Discord community

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Bridge, 379 Adelaide Street West, Toronto, Canada