Farinity’s Journal

Stories and travelogs from virtual worlds

Book Design and Artificial Writing

This book doesn’t exist.
This book is an arti­fact from a virtual world.

Travel­ling the earth is more feasi­ble than ever but it might become more proble­ma­tic in the near future with ongo­ing and follo­wing pande­mics, climate crisis destroy­ing whole areas of land and decli­ning fossil fuels. At the same time, virtual reality and the ‘meta­verse’ are rapidly evol­ving. Today, we can visit distant and fantasti­cal digi­tal worlds without even leaving our homes.

How do we remem­ber those places?

When the Covid-19 pande­mic began in 2020, I star­ted explo­ring and trave­ling the virtua­lity. I made new friends there, disco­ve­red favo­rite places and expe­ri­en­ced things that aren’t possi­ble in reality. Whene­ver I went there, I took pictures and looking back at them feels like any other collec­tion of photo­graphs from real events. Are virtual expe­ri­en­ces real? Is there anything that makes them less real?

What if an arti­fi­cial compa­n­ion would record those jour­neys? Sorting your photo­graphs, captu­ring them, or even taking own ones? Writing down your perso­nal expe­ri­en­ces, proto­col­ling who you were with, and what you saw and talked about? This book is an expe­ri­ment of what such a jour­nal could look like, taken from the virtual world and placed in the physi­cal one.

Virtual photos are captu­red with an analo­gue instant picture camera. Compu­ter fonts are turned into indi­vi­dual letters based on my perso­nal hand­wri­ting. AI gene­ra­ted text is writ­ten down by a machine using a physi­cal ink pen.

Down­load the book here.


Texts writ­ten in colla­bo­ra­tion with
Gene­ra­tive Pre-trai­ned Trans­for­mer 3 (GPT-3) crea­ted by OpenAI, Proces­sing deve­lo­ped by Ben Fry and Casey Reas, and AxiD­raw SE/A3 made by Evil Mad Scien­tist.

Used social VR plat­form: AltspaceVR by Micro­soft.

Class: Post­hu­man Compa­n­ion. Imagi­ning, Writing, and Coding Science Fiction with an AI taught by Guida Ribeiro.

Univer­sity of the Arts Bremen, April 2022