What can artists learn from researchers, and vice versa? In this talk, novelist Helen Phillips will discuss the research process for her most recent novel, Hum.
Hum takes place in a near-future world addled by climate change and inhabited by intelligent robots called “hums.” When protagonist May loses her job to artificial intelligence, she is desperate to resolve her family’s debt and secure income for another few months. She becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance. Seeking reprieve from her recent hardships and her family’s addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights’ respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But when her children come under threat, May is forced to put her
trust in a hum of uncertain motives to save her family. Hum explores marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities.
Alongside selected readings from the novel, Phillips will share how her interviews with experts in various fields—such as a sociologist who studies climate change, an epidemiologist who studies global supply chains, and a designer inventing new materials—informed the writing of the book. She will also cover some of the books and articles—including The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells,
Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age by Sherry Turkle, and The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity by Arthur K. Miller—that helped her envision the futuristic setting and world-build for Hum. In addition, she will delve into how she balanced research with invention in the writing process.
In showing how her research about artificial intelligence, climate change,
surveillance, and the future shaped this particular novel, Phillips will speculate about the role that interdisciplinary research can play in creative endeavors; the ways that art can potentially help bring scientific research to life in new forums; and the ways that the sciences and the humanities can work in tandem to increase knowledge and imagination.
Originally published at reilly.nd.edu.