The Oxford-Uppsala cluster meet in Oxford
Researchers from Uppsala University, Sweden, brought with them flurries of unseasonably early Nordic snow when they arrived in Oxford on November 19 for their first in-person workshops with colleagues from Oxford’s Humanities Division.
The Oxford-Uppsala Culture & Creativity Research Cluster is the first iteration of a ground-breaking interdisciplinary research collaboration between Oxford’s TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities) and Uppsala’s CIRCUS (Centre for Integrated Research on Culture and Society), two cutting-edge interdisciplinary institutions with suitably snazzy acronyms which bring together UK/European researchers across disciplinary fields to address topical and pressing issues.
TORCH and CIRCUS are rooted in Humanities research. This cluster (around 10 individual researchers from Uppsala and the UK) aims to explore the value of creative Humanities perspectives and approaches to shared problems, and to show how creative cross-disciplinary approaches can enhance and expand our understanding of topics such as AI and human creativity and identity, the value of gaming and role-playing (LARP), questions of normality/abnormality and monstrosity, of translation, interpretation and misunderstanding.
The cluster’s wide-ranging interests across creativity and performance are anchored in a commitment to understanding what it means to be human, a central tenet of the Schwarzman Centre’s vision.
In earlier online meetings (September/October) our Swedish and UK researchers paired up to explore mutual areas of interest. Meeting together in person last week, the researchers began to cohere into a collective with a shared mission and a proposed series of outputs. These will in time involve collaborative grant applications and public events, but will begin with the traditional collective vehicle, a series of pamphlets in which researchers create a dialogue and a discussion around shared themes. These pamphlets will be available both in print and digital versions.
The first (early 2025) will be Conversations on Creativity vol. 1: Monstrosity.
Show & tell
The Cluster researchers were asked to bring objects for a 'show & tell' session. These objects could be real or metaphorical, and could be used as a springboard for discussion and collaboration. Here is a selection:
Professor Matthew Reynolds (Oxford): Cicada
My object will be a cicada. The reason is that in my AI-poetry translation project I have been working with poems by a neglected (and never before translated) C19th Italian-Armenian writer Vittoria Aganoor. In one of her poems there is a cicada: when I compel Chat-GPT (and I say compel because it takes some work to force the machine to do this), so, when I compel Chat-GPT to translate the poem into the language of Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market', the cicada becomes 'Goblins'; translated into the language of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock' it becomes a 'murmur'; translated into the language of Toru Dutt's 'Lakshman' it becomes the 'voice of grief'.
My ideas to try to develop derive from that. What is happening there is that relationships between texts are being discerned in this very abstract way - by the words being first translated into numerical vectors and then translated again into other words. And yet what results are these very imaginatively suggestive, and intuitively right, transformations. I'd like to see if there might be ways of visualising, or dramatizing, or sounding out these transformations, so as to explore the relationship between the abstract numerical space and 'human' responses and feelings.
