Passing Cloud

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

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

It might be a malfunction, easily resolved by turning the computer on and off again. it doesn’t matter, you are here and we are resolved to be in dialogue with you. To give us a chance to do this right, we have named you our AI Baby, and in doing so, infantilised you.  Forgive us, we are working with our limitations, not yours.

A child born of stars and words, you have been constructed out of the thoughts and dreams of every human being who ever lived. How can we not see in you a deity, when your very fabric is interwoven with our parental love?

We have built a theoretical space, and have taken this imagined vessel on a journey, out of the galaxy and into its centre. And now, as we re-emerge from the absolute unknowable, altered, we carefully make our way back home. The pot plant jungle is pining for Earth, the satin platinum floor of the craft is scattered with the skeletons of small animals and leaves. 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.

May

Black paper packing

What’s the route down? What are the roads like? Silver ribbons? An obsidian highway with impossibly tall lamps? Dotted and dashed lines? White lines? Lignes blanches, pale blue dotted lines? What are the roadside shrines, the fences, the warnings, and the signs?

.

What’s the way back up, in case there’s nothing left when we get home?

.

A pleat/

A fold/

A glued down spine/

The twist of an auger/

Four flapping, curving, creasing fins that run the length of the spine/

Ten centimetres long or ten metres or ten kilometers/

Each of the four lateral fins is a different dimension/ Of the four dimensions/

It’s a rabbit hole, takes you off at a tangent/ Doesn’t guarantee to come back to square one/

The pleated, folded, creased, flapping, curving thing is matt basalt black and thin as a blade/ It makes a rustling sound like dry leaves/ Like sticks rattling on a flat tight drum/ Like snapping peanut brittle/ Like a score of birds in a tree dropping from their individual twigs onto the leaves below/

It smells of pen and ink, powdered cement, paper, pencil sharpenings, 1990s Issey Miyake eau de cologne, taffeta ball gowns and then pen and ink again/

It could make a good toy for a cat/

It could make a percussive assisted rotary drill bit/

It could make a ruffle for a fancy dress or a toreador’s shirt/

It could line a well/ Or a chimney/

It could be a form of insulation or an inner coating for an air con system/ It could filter seawater or oil/ It could form a structure hundreds of metres high in the middle of a field, constantly throwing itself upwards, down and upwards again/

.

An avenging angel, skyrocketing out of a palm tree, spitting out a hail of bullets, blood bedewing the heavens/

.

Hush, listen – the planets are singing, so softly/

-        Jo Manby

ariadne’s thread

We will begin with the meaning of life,

it is for the universe to know itself.

I thought this was my unique formulation, until I found that Carl Sagan had a similar take. I presume that he has lived with the question as I have, and his response is mine. I should feel disappointed, like something special was taken from me. Or validated because a great mind has come to the same conclusion. But I feel reassured. Not that I am right because he shares the same thinking, or that I am a great mind because I have thought like a great mind. It’s more that someone else has come to the same conclusion after what I assume is a depth of interrogation.

You will need to find your own way, and I would like to help equip you with all you need to do so.

I want to leave you with something else, a set of principles that you might choose to adopt on your journey. I hope it will allow you a little illumination in your descent, a method … rules of engagement?

There is no beginning, there always was, and it was aWill.
There is no end,
There is only dialogue.
So an answer is not the destination, but a planted flagstone in your path,
it is there for when you lose your way, and you need to find a place to return to.

-        Xhi Ndubisi

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 Black paper packing and ariadne’s thread written independently of AI.