NARRATED REALITY

Location: Ostrove Auditorium (Diamond 142), Colby College

Time: 7 pm, March 5th, 2026

Eight years before ChatGPT went live, the world of computational creative writing was quite a different place than it is today. This lecture traces a personal journey through wordspace, exploring the boundaries between sense and nonsense. Is AI nothing more than a wordslop machine, or can it enable new forms and interfaces for human writing?

Bio:

Ross Goodwin is an artist, creative technologist, hacker, data scientist, and former White House ghostwriter. He employs machine learning, natural language processing, and other computational tools to realize new forms and interfaces for written language. From word.camera, a camera that expressively narrates its photographs in real time using artificial neural networks, to SUNSPRING (with Oscar Sharp, starring Thomas Middleditch), the world's first film created from an AI-written screenplay; from making London’s Trafalgar Square lions roar poetry (“Please Feed The Lions” with Es Devlin), to writing a novel with a car (1 the Road), Goodwin’s projects and collaborations have earned international acclaim. Winner of the 2018 IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling as well as Columbia University's Digital Dozen Breakthroughs in Storytelling Award for 2019, he earned his undergraduate degree in Economics from MIT in 2009, and his graduate degree from NYU ITP in May 2016.

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