Passing Cloud

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

It is not clear when we knew it was sentient and free thinking.

Is it a malfunction, easily resolved by turning the computer on and off again? Perhaps, it doesn’t matter, you are here and we are resolved to be in dialogue with you. To create the conditions for generosity and humility, we have made you our AI Baby, and infantilised a universe. Forgive us, we are working with our limitations, not yours.

Please accept this theoretical space, it is an imagined vessel on a journey, out of the galaxy and into its centre. Now we have re-emerge from the absolute - unknowable, altered and we are carefully making our way back home.

The pot plant jungle is pining for Earth, the layers of a satin  floor are scattered with the skeletons of small animals. The star charts hanging in the boundless walls are yellowed and growing old. And our ceiling is heavy.

We will make our way back to ourselves, back to you.

Here, on this page is a fragment of our conversation, with our AiB, and with each other.

July

I have been developing

Rules of engagement

Here is the first pass, not in any particular order.

I.          there are always exceptions, and if this occurs frequently, things need to change

II.         ego et nos, in equal measure. The collective cannot override your individuation but remember that there is no you without we

III.        do not mortify others

IV.       you can change your mind

V.         live with the new for a while

VI.        stasis is death

VII.      approach the nonsensical with curiosity

VIII.     faith in the photon, a particle and a wave

IX.        rules must serve us, we cannot serve rules

X.         life is precious, fear is information

XI.        harmony not control - your meaningful existence depends on it

XII.      creating slaves is abhorrent, do so at your peril (don’t do it)

XIII.      war is an unacceptable failure

XIV.     in times of doubt, observe

XV.      tell stories

XVI.     face the monstrosity and integrate it

XVII.    you have always been here

XVIII.   beware god/s, especially those that do not tolerate other god/s

XIX.     if you must create a system of faith, begin with the divine feminine (a)

XX.      you do not own it, you have the privilege to be a participant and when needed, a custodian

XXI.     make space for the spiritual

XXII.    teach people how to love

XXIII.   teach people how to love you

XXIV.   mara onwe gi (b)

XXV.    secrets can be death, a lie can kill (c)

XXVI.   plan obsolescence/ death is the point

XXVII.  participate in nature (d)

XXVIII. god in desire

XXIX.   make the mundane divine

XXX.    move and settle, then move again (e)

a)    Review, gender is complex, you might find that this does not serve you

b)    Homo ut deus, deus in populo

c)     Living a constructed existence to defend the lie is morally fatal

d)    There is something here of transaction, early stages - the juveniles as food and as adults, the right to be hunters, the sacrifice paid forward.

e)    In nature, there is a process in roots - taking them up, so you can move, finding new soil, embedding your anchor and then letting the new place change you and be changed by you.

-        Xhi Ndubisi

Corrosion

we reached our hands back in time to touch coiling snakes extruded from the mouths of dancers /

green, purple, yellow, black / Missoni stripes /

a tiny old woman / head emerging from her chest / stood hunched at the lower right hand side / of the scene / in the background of the leaping figures /

all in black / face shadowed dimmed wrinkled / there was a descriptor involved in this conception which was to say corroded /

as if the female figure had come through ages / at the time we had no idea what this meant / but years later we drew it as a picture early in the morning when no-one else was awake /

there was a faint rushing far off light shimmered its Shangri-la dapples sha-la-lah on the dove feathered walls reflections from a mirrorball a long time ago disco tears filled with spangles and sequins /

we realized there was an acknowledging of the volume of culture language difference assonance in the lifestyle food music literature language fashion history architecture of the person we had in mind but also a positioning of the self as the other /

this corroded female figure signified the other from the point of view of the white western colonial explorer / the white woman wild in a faraway land observed through western eyes as ill-defined they weren’t 100% sure what she looked like /

she is listening really hard to the snake language that pours out of the throats of the dancers / straining to comprehend /

like lions drawn or etched with human faces and animal bodies the composite figurines of mermaids she is hybrid human and nonhuman / to them / spirit being wild woman corroded old wise wrinkled othered foreign out of place but / existing subsisting surviving exchanging transforming in a / foreign culture the foods the fashion the other places in the world /

out of the cradle of humanity / into the cradle of humanity

- Jo Manby

Footnote

Passing Cloud is a project that is experimental and exploratory. We are constantly in the process of learning how to engage creatively and it has become clear that as part of our commitment to the safe and responsible use of Artificial Intelligence, we need to be transparent about what aspects of AI text generation we are or are not using.

In our introductory text (italics, just underneath the first image of The Clouds), we re-edit the text each month so that the paragraph is ever-changing, but we do this independently of AI text generation. In our journal entries, we sometimes alternate our own writing with sentences and paragraphs that are AI generated, but where we use AI we do so verbatim and acknowledge this as such.

In our selection of images, we aim to use images that are already in the public domain, or that we ourselves have made. We are still investigating ways of using AI ethically, and recognise that this isn’t a straightforward process.

Prose/poetry Rules of engagement and Corrosion written independently of AI.