Interview by Sarah-Clare Conlon.
To celebrate 100 years since mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing was born, MLF have teamed up with independent Manchester-based publisher Comma Press to launch Turing Text - a new experiment in social narrative. This micro-blogging game will apply the iconic Turing Test to the social media context and will be open for everyone to take part. Turing Text aims to create new pieces of fiction and the project will officially get underway at the Blog North Awards, on 17 October (click here for more). Here, Comma's Editorial Manager Ra Page explains a little more about the experiment and tells us about some of the other events he's looking forward to at MLF 2012.
MLF: You’re launching the Turing Text during
MLF. Can you explain what this is and how people can get involved?
RP: One of the many
fascinating by-products of social media is the way in which authors and
aspiring writers now find themselves talking to readers (and other writers) in
an incredibly regular and personal way, sharing their experience of the writing
process, and every last detail of how they get through their working day. What
was once, presumably, a very private process has suddenly become a completely public
one. I wanted to know how, if at all, this has affected the author’s voice, and
I also wanted to commission pieces of writing that reflected the growing
presence of social media in their characters’ lives.
Quite separately from this, I’ve always been
interested in the Turing Test as a definition of artificial intelligence.
Facebook and Twitter allow us to acquire so many friends, it’s very possible
that we’ve never actually met some of them, and therefore in theory, that they’re
not actually who or what they seem. (Facebook recently estimated that they have
around 83 million illegitimate accounts, and ‘illegitimate’ is a broad term.)
The
idea with this project was to put these two ideas together – social media and
the Turing Test – and to see if any new pieces of fiction could be teased into
existence through a very new route. The rules are (fairly) simple. We ask
players to sign up to a specially created social media space in the weeks
leading up to the festival, but to choose a pseudonym, and they can then play it
one of two ways:
(a) carry on ‘being themselves’ – making
status updates, comments, likes, etc, as themselves and as they would normally,
but under this pseudonym, or
(b) use the account to play out a fictional
character’s development; ie write all his or her updates and comments from
the point of view of a fictional character and start a story within the medium
(note players may need to create other fictional characters to ‘engage’ with
them, and create dialogue, etc).
Additional
to this, there will be a third category of accounts on this network – namely
one or two ‘chatbots’ – these being computer programs disguised as actual
people, writing all their updates and comments in the style of humans (indeed
human authors!).
At
the end of the project we will all get together and vote on who we think is
real, who we think is fictional and who we think is a robot.
For more details on how to take part, go to www.turingtext.com.
MLF: Could you give us a bit of background on
Alan Turing and his importance to Manchester’s history, and what is significant
about 2012?
RP: Well, obviously 2012 is the centenary of
Turing’s birth, so there have been myriad events taking place in the city
throughout the year. Although Turing wasn’t born in Manchester and arguably did
his most important work elsewhere – in Cambridge, Bletchley Park, and famously
thought-experimenting about David Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem in a meadow in Grantchester
(his Newton’s Apple moment) – Turing did spend his last few years here in
Manchester, working at the University. So to summarise: that’s inventing
computers, cracking the Nazi Enigma code, and devising the Turing Test – elsewhere. Check, check, check.
Formulating morphogenesis, his mathematical approach to pattern formation in
nature (through reaction-diffusion equations) – here. Check. His unhappy demise came about whilst working at the
university also, so there’s a double-edge to our civic appropriation of him.
MLF: How do Alan Turing and the Turing Text
experiment link back to Comma Press?
RP: Comma has always been interested in the
relationship between short fiction and ‘science narratives’ – be these thought
experiments, case studies, discovery myths (‘Eureka moments’), or cautionary tales
of future technologies. There’s a great deal of traffic between the two
categories – more than scientists are often aware of. Indeed if scientists
don’t take command of their own story-telling, their stories will only be told
(and simplified) by others – namely politicians and the media who, of course,
have other motivations.
For this reason, Comma has commissioned a whole series of ‘science-into-fiction’
anthologies, where scientists have consulted very closely in the composition of
short fictions featuring scientific ideas, and have accompanied the stories
with afterwords, explaining the science in greater detail. This series started
with When It Changed, edited by Geoff Ryman,
which was launched at MLF in 2009, and then continued with Litmus, which explored discovery
stories from the history of science, and the forthcoming Bio-Punk, which extrapolates possible
‘cautionary tales’ from current bio-medical research (this book is being
launched on Saturday 13 October at this year’s MLF; click here for more). We also have a collection of
stories from Sara Maitland, due out next year, which is entirely based on
science consultations.
The Litmus book also featured
a story about Turing’s last Manchester-based theory, morphogenesis, so we’re
not completely new to Turing territory as a publisher.
MLF: What other events is Comma connected with
during this year’s Festival?
RP: As well as the Bio-Punk launch, we also have launches of four new single-author
collections, from David Constantine and Pawel Huelle (Monday 8 October),
and Adam Marek and Guy Ware (Sunday 21
October); four books we’ve been working on for a long time and perhaps represent
what Comma is about better than anything else.
MLF: What has Comma got planned for the rest of
the year that we should be looking out for?
RP: Our first smartphone app – provisionally
called ‘Tramlines’ – is currently being devised by us in partnership with a
company called Toru Interactive, with support from Literature Across Frontiers.
This will be launched in April hopefully. There will also be a teaser event for
it with Michelle Green and Roman Simic at this year’s MLF (Saturday 20 October). Next
year we’d also like to commission our own Comma app for Android phones, and maybe
a Comma Film app the year after that.
We also have a host of new Comma Film commissions (short film
adaptations of poems) which will be premiered at MadLab on 6 December,
in conjunction with Bokeh Yeah. We’ve also got the second collection of stories
from the Kafka-esque genius that is Hassan Blasim, titled The Iraqi Christ. Hassan is coming over for a series of readings in
December to launch the book. Early next year we’ll be launching books by Frank
Cottrell Boyce, Sara Maitland and Michelle Green. We also have our first new
writer anthology in a long time (get your submissions in soon if you want to be
‘discovered’!), plus a second collection of poetry from Gaia Holmes, an anthology of Dystopian short stories (‘Ten
Years Asleep’) and a book of essays on short story structure. So lots to look
out for!
