This presentation titled "A Cyborg Creative Coding Practice" is in the context of an MLA 2025 round table titled "Bespoke Platforms and Algorithmic Resistance: Electronic Literary Futures." Here's a link to my slideshow.

Abstract

This brief talk will use Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg to discuss my creative coding practice, particularly to produce code engines for electronic literature and other forms of digital writing. In this workflow, I iteratively prompt Chat GPT to generate valid HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code and modify the resulting output in a code editor to create unique works of electronic literature and digital writing. This practice is an example of Cyborg writing because it integrates human and artificial intelligence to produce code writing that results in electronic literature. I will showcase some of the work I have done to rescue now-inoperable Twitter bots created using Kate Compton’s Tracery JavaScript library, as well as some recent works published in Taper and The Los Angeles Review. The goal is to show how to leverage and subvert black box large language model generators to create open source small language models for computer generated writing.