When confronted with the blank page I find myself at risk of the seduction to explain. To give context to an imagining that exists (or will in a few weeks) in another space and time. This would feel like a departure from the ethos of Contemporary Practice: Personal Project. Since September 2023 I have excavated, interrogated, perforated and experimented. On occasion just plain ‘messed about.’
Here is a remix. A re-presentation of what might or might not exist in the City Lit gallery from the beginning of June. I intend that this page will change in the coming weeks.
Traces
Re-presentation
Re-mix
Re-mediation
Appropriation
Artificial
Simulated
Synthetic
Generative
Copy machines
What separates humans from machines?
The impression of creativity
Pre-programmed or probabilistic
Largely still a mystery
Jumbled word soup
Scribble ink
Simply copying
Making connections
Learn a set of rules
Known as a prompt
One trillion parameters
Built from blocks
Carved out of data
An emulation or illusion
The original source
To do with our humanity
(found poem, 2024)
…a copy must be something other than a model or, by definition, it cannot be a copy of a model.
Neil, 2019, Theory of the Image. OUP: Oxford