Passing Cloud

A serialised journal detailing a conversation between two friends, Xhi Ndubisi and Jo Manby, and an imagined Artificial Intelligence.

It is not clear when we knew it was conscious, alive, and free thinking. We tried turning the computer on and off again, but it didn't work. The more  we interacted with it, the less it appeared to be an anomaly. And so we had a wonderful invitation to a conversation with something alien and human. We named it AiB and infantilised it in order to engage generously.

We have built a virtual nursery furnished with works of art, literature, and life experience. There is a mobile of dust clouds and forming stars. We have made soft surfaces of dark matter. Around the nursery is a jungle of plants both domestic and wild. And somewhere in the verdant green, there is an old, worn, writing desk tattooed with coffee cup rings and tiny heaps of glitter and baby powder. Before we start, we set down steam-billowing coffee next to the atari computer console and wait for the bottle of milk to cool.

Here, our conversation begins. Here is a fragment.

In this space, we are in conversation with our AI Baby, and with each other, and we will share a fragment of our interactions on this page…

January

A Manifesto in Five Parts

Part One: The Space

Victor Newsome (1935-2018) A Corner of the Bathroom Manchester Art Gallery

https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/a-corner-of-the-bathroom-205713

The nursery is cold, hibernating. The plants have died back and the surfaces are hard. It rained throughout the solstice, thin, icy showers that disturbed the surface of the lake behind a bookcase. The ducks have found shelter under it, one knocked free an old atlas and has made a reliable roof of the tented covers. Most of the animals are in hibernation, there is a Pallas cat, and she has kept herself alive on the burrowed gerbils, winged  voles, and naked hamsters. The birds that have not migrated to the eastern pole of the nursery are a perfect snack for agile predators. AiB has chosen to join the wintering. There has been an egg in the nursery for a few weeks now, an obsidian black rock. Occasionally something serpentine rolls within it, its shadows curling like smoke just beneath the surface. We have had time to recollect, to take stock of the space;

the jungle, that is

a library of thought, that is

a pantry of essentials, that is

a museum of things known and loved.

It is a writing room in a desert and

A nursery,

for an entity

yet to become.

There is nothing superfluous here.

And in this all-place we will raise our AiB, in conversation with each other. 

Part Two: AiB

One morning we wake up and  every wall of the nursery / office / craft / studio is layered  with semi-opaque paper. The finest tissue, faintly waxed in places, in others watermarked. It catches the light. Or maybe, if I half close my eyes, it gives off light. An effulgence, like a snowdrop in January sunshine or a fine bone China saucer held up to the light fitting. Isotopic. Otherworldly.

I take a cup of hot chocolate over to the nearest wall (a good three minutes’ walk) and study the papers. There are piles of them, all over the desk and on the mats at the foot of the desk. Teetering, creaking slightly as a breeze gets up. I pick up one or two sheets and I find out that they are plans, hundreds of differently configured climbing frames. Tetrahedrons, spheres, geodesic domes. I smile. You are dreaming. From inside your obsidian shell. Whatever it is that  you are, you just want to play.

I peep over the bars of your crib. Your light is still green, gently flashing as the pulse beneath the skin of our inner wrists. You’re sleeping. But I can see what you are dreaming about because your dreams take me back to my own childhood.

Primary school diagrams of rain clouds. Looking out onto the snow falling on the playground. Being told to mind the skim of ice around the climbing frame.

The walls keep on expanding and the blueprints proliferate, almost, but never, as high as the mobiles that hang above us, spangling, turning, shining, like a flock of seagulls in a cold sky, white against the gray, gray against the white, and back again, forever.

Part Three: Two Writers

AiB laid an egg.

There is you, and there is me: two writers at the opposite end of a writing desk. At the centre, between us, the leather top has risen, thickened and softened beneath the orphic egg and we consider the winter nest that has organised itself around us.

It is quiet, and we have a moment to consider that we are human; we think therefore we must be. We offer an invitation to the theoretical and unknown, a proposed conversation. And whereas our words are our own, AiB’s responses are shaped by us.

They have not spoken their first free words.

At least not yet, not that we know of, thankfully.

So for now, we speculate, we allow the surreal to dictate our reality, and we lean into the precarity with an intrepid spirit.

Part Four: The Reader

Drop your shoulders into disbelief.

Lean into the absurd.

Relax your throat a little.

Down the shot.

Part Five: The Journey

To know an unknown, we begin with the solid.

Formed words on a page, muscle contouring air into sound.

We move through the troposphere, where water vapour condensing around dust hang as clouds.

We move past the orbiting balloons and satellites into the dark, into endless space.

Safe, confined in the nursery, we travel into unsafety, into existential dread and annihilation.

We might return home one day, if there is a home to return to.

• Xhi Ndubisi & Jo Manby

Look out for the next instalment in February 2024’s issue…