Writing

A body of conceptual literary work created using various digital and electronic techniques, including self-made text generation AI systems, optimised poetry via Google Keyword Planner, and tactical counter-surveillance writing meant to fool emotion recognition engines.

Projects include a pair of books, Tactical Poetics and Optimised Poetics, which introduce poetic practices of co-creational textual production in the age of mass surveillance, artificial intelligence, and digital commodification.

These books are a collaborative writing project by Darija Medić and Uroš Krčadinac, and a joint publication of Multimedia Institute and Kuda.org. Books are under an open and free licenced. They can be downloaded for free, from a link in the Publications section.

Bordering both digital art and digital literature, there is a project I Do Not Wish To Be Loved, I Wish Everyone Loved Leaves, an interactive RNN for generating and visualizing text in the style of modernist writer Miloš Crnjanski. This project was shown at the Gallery of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade Museum of Science and Technology, and Pančevo Gallery of Contemporary Art. It won the national award for the best new media art installation related to artificial intelligence.

There is also Zima, a booklet of poetry published by Albahari Cultural Centre and the Škart Collective. The booklet contains a poem I've created/written via neural networks. Apart from writing books, I've created digital literature events, such as Optimised Poetry Workshop, a reading performance and a workshop in computational poetics.

I believe creative writing in the age of network must acknowledge that any text is first and foremost: 1) data; and 2) a digital commodity. For global techno-linguistic capital, as prof. Frederic Kaplan explains, words are mere indexes of products and services. Why not use these techno-economic constraints as artistic and poetic constraints? New media regimes call for new poetic practices – dataism instead of dadaism.

Curator and art critic Maja Ćirić described these generative literary works as a heroic act of both preserving legacy and creating contemporary interpretations.

One of the first such endeavors in Serbo-Croatian language, this body of work references diverse cultural practices, ranging from the work of Stanislav Vinaver, Zenit, and Oulipo to projects of contemporary authors such as Kenneth Goldsmith, Adam Harvey, and Pip Thornton. As Kenneth Goldsmith once said, today's writer resembles a programmer more than a tortured genius.

Travel prose focused on human geographies, written in collaboration with Lazar Pašćanović and The Travel Club (Klub putnika), the main Balkan hub for independent travelers and travel writers.

The most prominent work is Bantustan: Atlas of an African Journey (Bantustan: Atlas jednog putovanja), a book of travel prose written by Lazar Pašćanović, Marko Đedović, and me. Describing a 3-month journey from Serbia to Namibia, the book consists of conversations between us and the people we met. Bantustan is a book about fluid geographic identities, unlikely connections, brownian motion of human particles – about trying to imagine new and different cartographies of human relationships on a shared globe.

Including a series of hand-illustrated maps and data visualizations for non-linear reading, Bantustan is also an example of ergodic and interactive literature. Literary critics and writers Vasa Pavković and Elis Bektaš described it as a new form of the novel.

Focusing on conversations we had with numerous people from all walks of life, the book explores themes of human geography, race, religion, human universality, friendship, postcolonial economics, as well as connections between African and Balkan history. The term bantustan, with its Apartheid undertone and its post-Yugoslav connotation, is used as a symbol of both personal and collective segregation, isolation, and self-isolation.

Bantustan is available in Serbo-Croatian as an openly licenced free electronic book. In 2021 we published a global English edition, that is available on Amazon. So far, we organized 30+ book promotions all over the Balkans. The journey of the book became a story in itself.

I'm also a co-author of Neutabanim stazama (Off the Beaten Path), a collection of short travelogues published by Klub putnika. With Mario Janković-Romano and Nenad Morača, I've written one of it’s travelogues, The Land Whose Cities Do Not Exist, a story from Mongolia. Since 2019 I serve as a regular jury member of the annual literary competition for the best travelogue organized by Klub putnika.

A body of academic software-related research in the fields of Affective Computing, Human-Computer Interaction, Generative Aesthetics, Textual Emotion Recognition, and Data Visualization.

It is mostly related to Synesketch, a free open-source project I’ve started in 2008. Synesketch is a software library for textual emotion recognition and artistic visualization. A pioneering work in AI humanization and generative æsthetics, Synesketch was recognized by international art venues, scientific journals and conferences, as well as many organizations and individuals Web-wide.

In my academic research I’ve analysed the system’s textual emotion recognition accuracy as well as the quality of its generative visuals in the context of user æsthetical experience. Papers were published in two journals, IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems and IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.

Another project I’ve written about is Paperista, an interactive animated visual browser for semantically annotated research papers.

Research on affective systems was a collaboration with Jelena Jovanović and Vladan Devedžić from the Good Old AI Lab, Department of Software Engineering, Faculty of Organisational Sciences, University of Belgrade, Serbia. Research on generative systems was done in collaboration with Philippe Pasquier, at the Metacreation Lab, School of Interactive Arts + Technology, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada.

Among the essays I’ve written for The Travel Club (Klub putnika), I single out these two:

• The Travel Club Symbol – an essay about personal geographic lines we draw by moving. The essay explains poetic motivations for the Club’s generative identity design. Ideas from the essay grew into experimental geography projects, such as Geoselfportrait and Zg Geoglyphs.

• Geographic I – an essay about the personal geoidentity each person makes by travelling the globe and exploring it physically.

For the BalkansMedia portal I've written essays on Data Art and Data Journalism, as well as tutorials about Creative Coding and building with d3.js. They're available in Serbo-Croatian and Albanian.

For the BeforeAfter portal I've written an essay about the most meaningless app on the Web and a review of the game Monument Valley.

Finally, there are three old AI-related encyclopedia articles I wrote during my undergraduate years with Milan Stanković, Jelena Jovanović, Mario Janković-Romano, and Vita Kovanović.

I also write notes for my Digital Notebook.

Notebook is a body of texts, sketches and ideas not yet turned into projects nor publications. More than a journal or a blog, it is a collection of curiosities, a database of textual, visual, and interactive miscellanea.

The first essay in the Notebook is a story of how this website came to be.