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Work Diary: Theatrical Machines Main Menu Contents

Judith Butler's "Theatrical Machines"

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This week we were instructed to create some kind of project integrating the use of Copilot into our reading of Judith Butler's "Theatrical Machines." For my work, I chose to have Copilot create images based on prompts that were made up of words pulled directly from the text.

Inspiration

My inspiration for this project came from my laptop's text-to-speech function. In doing so many readings for all of my classes, I wanted to experiment with listening to the readings to see if I would better retain information. Along the way, I noticed that the computer's text-to-speech function had a fatal flaw: if a word was started at the end of one line and continued at the start of the next, my laptop would treat that one word as two separate words. I was fascinated by this technological failure, and so I decided to apply the idea to my project.

The What

For this project, I went through each page of "Theatrical Machines" and took the first word, or chunk of a word, from each line to input into copilot. For example, if the final word of a line was "accomplice" but only "accom-" was present at the end of that line, then i took "-plice" as the first word of the next line.

I prompted Copilot one page at a time, directing the system to create an image based on the words I had shared. After all images had been created, I decided to create a political spectrum-inspired visualization of the images that Copilot generated.

The Prompts

The following page includes information on all of the words used to prompt the Copilot image generation:

The Final Spectrum

References

Butler, Judith. "Theatrical Machines." differences, vol. 26, no. 3, 2015, pp. 23-42.
Microsoft CoPilot. https://copilot.microsoft.com/.

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"Theatrical Machines" Copilot Prompts Laine Matkin
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1. Judith Butler's "Theatrical Machines"
"Theatrical Machines" Visual Spectrum Laine Matkin
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1. Judith Butler's "Theatrical Machines"
Random Number Song Laine Matkin
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Contents Laine Matkin
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