11 / Poetics
Poetics of Technological Generation
The Poetics of Technological Generation is an analytical system that extends existing narrative poetics to explain how narratives in generative AI and interactive digital media are not completed as a single fixed text but generated, selected, revised, regenerated, branched, and explored.
1. Definition
The Poetics of Technological Generation is an analytical system that extends existing narrative poetics to explain how narratives in generative AI and interactive digital media are not completed as a single fixed text but generated, selected, revised, regenerated, branched, and explored.
It does not abolish existing narratology.
2. The continuing validity of Genettean narratology
The arrival of generative AI does not eliminate duration, frequency, or order. Within a single generated version, the classical temporal categories remain valid. An AI-generated flashback is still an analepsis; an ellipsis remains an ellipsis; repeated narration remains iterative or repetitive narration.
A new analytical level is necessary not because the existing categories fail, but because the very object of analysis—the version—is continually generated, adopted, discarded, and branched.
3. Two levels
Level 1 — Narrative within a version
- duration
- frequency
- order
Level 2 — Generative relations between versions
- speed
- response
- transition
- overlap
- exploration
4. Five extended categories
Speed analyzes how the tempo of generation and regeneration affects the formation and reception of narrative, rather than merely measuring narrative speed.
Response analyzes how user input changes subsequent narrative generation.
Transition analyzes how characters, settings, memories, and contexts generated in one version move into and transform within another version or media state.
Overlap analyzes how candidate outputs, adopted versions, discarded versions, and remembered past versions operate simultaneously within a present narrative.
Exploration analyzes how readers go beyond following a completed text to select, discover, and generate paths through a space of possible narratives.
5. Meaning of the 3+5 structure
The three classical categories are not replaced by the five extended categories.
duration · frequency · order = narrative structure of an individual completed version
speed · response · transition · overlap · exploration = higher-order processes through which versions are generated and transformed
Without this distinction, multiple AI responses to the same prompt may be mistaken for narrative frequency, or technical processing order for narrative order. These are category errors.
6. Relation to the media aesthetics of technological generation
If the media aesthetics of technological generation explains the memory, drive, and value of generative media, its poetics analyzes how that aesthetic experience is organized through time and changes between versions.
Media aesthetics of technological generation = what is experienced and valued
Poetics of technological generation = within what generative, temporal, and narrative structure it occurs
The two theories are complementary rather than competitive.
Core Structure
- LEVEL 1Within a version · duration · frequency · order
- LEVEL 2Between versions · speed · response · transition · overlap · exploration
KEY PROPOSITION
The Poetics of Technological Generation is a two-level analytical system for generative narrative that preserves the traditional narratological categories of duration, frequency, and order for analysis within an individual version, while adding a second level of speed, response, transition, overlap, and exploration to analyze transformations between versions specific to generative media.
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