Verona Gryshchuk

The Ending of Beginnings or What’s Inside the Egg

Small language model  

Ursula Le Guin famously said, "Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive." People who don't read sci-fi might assume that it's about utopian/dystopian future, but it actually estranges reality so we can see it in a new light. Some of the most common story unfoldings destabilise what we perceive as reality, what we see as technology and what counts as time, leading to the construction of alternative ontologies and the shudder of social systems.

When reading books, we either anticipate the ending, don't want to end it at all or while being caught in the flow, spontaneously realise that we just finished the whole book. End lines always give a last taste of the book, but the story might cease to exist outside of semantic frams and if a book was a good one, we spend the rest of remaning day thinking about it. For me, sci-fi books have a special way of endings, they don't particularly serve as closure, but create thresholds. This brings me to Deleuze and Guattari's model of the rhizome. It's a non-linear structure that allows any point to connect to any other point (thinking of a potato). Sci-fi endings often behave rhizomatically, creating nodes from which multiple speculations emerge.

And the most fun part-- visuals on the egg. Egg has long been associated with initiation, rebirth and transformation. There are many speculations that can be put forward when we ask what is inside the egg, and when it cracks, a new becoming form of plasticity emerges(thinking of Difference and Repetition by Deleuze and Guattari).

Last but not least, the use of a small language model (Markov chain) gives an opportunity to explore new forms of semantic arrangements. By getting lost between the last sci-fi sentences, the model makes probabilistic differentiation that serves as an incubator of speculative thresholds<3

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