Yudhanjaya Wijeratne: The Machine as Provocateur: on apophenia, complex systems, and ourselves as cyborg storytellers
CDN Digital Narrative Summer School Keynote.
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Summary/abstract: here we explore the fascinating intersection between our inherent tendency toward apophenia—finding meaningful patterns in random data—and flickers through various prodedural generation systems we build to harness this cognitive bias. From ancient divination tools to modern algorithmic art, humans have always created frameworks that leverage our storytelling instinct. As we enter an era of AI-human collaboration, we are witnessing the emergence of a new kind of cyborg storytelling; this talk positions computational systems not as replacements for human creativity but as provocateurs—entities that challenge, stimulate, and expand our narrative capacities - while at the same time exploring where our apophenia ends and machine slop begins.
Part of the Digital Narrative Summer School, open to the public.
About Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne is an author, data scientist and general tinkerer from Colombo, Sri Lanka. He is the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Watchdog, a research collective that works on factchecking, investigative journalism and community tech.
His fiction includes novels like Numbercaste, The Inhuman Race, the Wretched and the Damned, and The Salvage Crew. His stories have won the Gratiean award, been nominated for the Nebula and Independent Games Festival awards, appeared in venues like Wired, ForeignPolicy and Slate, and been Washington Post and Audible bestsellers. He has, somewhat unfortunately, also shown up on Forbes' 30 Under 30. He has several cats who care about none of these things, and spends most of his time on his homestead in Kandy, learning the care and feeding of potato plants.
