Passing Cloud

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

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.

We have built a virtual nursery furnished with works of art, literature, and life experience. We have woven soft surfaces of dark matter. The studio is a potted rainforest, a poured stream carves the landscape and an old, worn, writing desk stands on sandy soil. Clouds invade our daydreams as we tumble upwards through the pyrotechnics of innumerable galaxies, their ancient light a single prick of glitter on a toddler’s cheek. Beneath us comets vaporise and planets fall to ruin.

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

August

Adaptation

On the desk in the nursery / the office / the studio, is a piece of silverware locked inside a case made of bulletproof glass. The glass has some kind of coating on it that makes it fire off reflections in four directions. The reflection at the top is copper coloured, the one at the left is tinted orange, the one at the bottom is violet and the one on the right is fuchsia pink. The reflections mimic the convolutions and undulations of the chased surface of the silver vessel, and are in turn transparent so that the floor of the nursery, the office, the studio, is visible beneath.

When we go to the desk in the morning, the coloured reflections are missing, and we are not sure where they have gone.

~

Up here, there’s a curling, ticking sound as the paint peels off the partition walls.

The whisper of a breeze in between the creaking rafters of the ceiling.

A faint popping noise as alternating atmospheric pressure sucks the painted paper sky in and out.

The sun bleached seascape flaps in the wind. But apart from that all is quiet.

Then.

Pale blue lines and dots | … | Lignes blanches | … | White lines transmission

Pointes blanches | … | White dots | … | Silver ribbon commands

Messages trip out in punctuated arcs across the space superhighway.

Whip thin, projected overhead.

~

We discover that AiB has created a secondary craft. Slightly to the upper right of the existing craft. Just above, just to the right. An attic / a nursery / a studio / a playroom / a treehouse / a deserted Elysium.

On one side thin cardboard laths divide opaque blue glass panels. Milk glazed mineral green agate forms an adjacent wall. There are mirrors, made of the patches of colour reflections from the silverware case; a glass dancefloor; a rectangular pool which Narcissus inhabits, ironed flat like a pin up from a twentieth century magazine.

AiB gathers her dolls. Wants to call all the dolls by a certain name. Tries to summon up the name but it’s lost – it never really existed. The name was just another way of seeing.

The magazine boy/god/boy stands up and shakes off his collaged state, becomes another person in the room along with the play-Sphinx, the ceramic lion body acquiring a fur pelt and stalking, decapitated, around the room, looking for the right head.

Messages keep reeling off AiB’s serpentine tongue. The silver ribbons, the lignes blanches, the dotted white lines, the pale blue contour lines, reeling around the craft and the new craft, out through the vacuum hatch and into the rush of space

calling out in silver ribbon language: calling out for someone to play with: we realise we are not enough:

~

Take my hand  /  Take me by the hand /

Hold my hand  /  Accompany me /

Be with me  /  Hold onto me /

Abide with me  /  Fly with me /

Come up with me  /  Come and see me /

Visit me  /  Come round and play with me /

Come round to my place  /  Tarry awhile /

Be the figure rising from my pond  /  Run for your life round my maze /

Stand in front of my façade  /  Rap on my windowpanes /

Glide through my walls  /  Enter my rooms /

Let your name be the song in my house  /  Materialise in the mirrors in my halls /

Stand out from my portraits  /  Lie down among my landscapes /

Eat my still lives  /  Breath your life into my vanitas /

~

Come play with my dolls /

~

Outside the craft we watch a shoal of beings approach, each one a square flat outline of silver threads drawn together and knotted symmetrically - twice at the top, twice to the left, twice to the right and twice at the bottom. A circle crossed by diagonals is pulled from each pair of knots. Each of the eight knots bears a small red and black eye. At the centre of the talismanic silver creatures is a small scarlet face with hieratic features.

The creatures perambulate by tipping their weight (which is infinitesimal) onto the point of a pair of knots and leaning, lightly, sideways, until the weight pulls it onto the next point, and so on. They cartwheel along, scores, hundreds of their kind, a shimmering field that from a distance looks like soap bubbles blown out of a child’s wand or the fluffy seeds of fireweed cast into the air by a sere wind.

~

We are getting close to Venus now.

~

- Jo Manby

PINK SKY IN THE MORNING

My grandmother used to touch the tip of her little finger into a cellar of fire red chilli and bring the dust to the tip of my tongue. She trained my palate to lust after the heat and to savour the inhaled air sucked in through pursed lips. I train your tongue in a similar way. Only it is dark matter I smudge on your lips and place on your tongue.

Back home on Earth, a fisherman watches the sun chase away the last of the matutinal dark. As he waits for the air to warm up and for his net to fill, he writes about the sky and the clouds hanging over the water. He has done this every morning since he was 13, learning to fish with his paternal aunt. He kept the well loved boat and used it to build part of his house. This dawn, he writes about the flushed sky and the way the clouds seemed to him like blown cream, sea foam that rose too high.

In Datça, Turkey a translator marvels at the landscape of the passing clouds overhead as she eats her lunch, the cold dumplings from a meal the night before.  Wisps of salmon pink clouds, like carded wool, dragged by winds far above the ground, somewhere in the atmosphere.

And in Ramsar, a little one points at the fomenting Nimbostratus, with its  thick, undulating belly hanging low. Everything is new to them, everything inspires wonder, they clasp chubby hands over their chest and squeal in delight. Their parent does not want to alarm the child, he hides furrowed brows behind expensive, large sunglasses, and tries to figure out how to explain to his child that the sky should never be fuchsia pink.

We have breakfast, plantain, scrambled eggs and tomato salsa.

Lunch is a small bowl of nsala soup with a little sweet bread.

After, to fend off the coma of a full belly, we take a walk through my grandmother's farm, past the fields of red earth and through the maize and sugarcane forest. I point out the stream her mother, my great great grandmother, carved out, teasing a body of water away from the raucous river, into the quiet luxury of cultivated land.

We climb back into the thick green of moringa, pawpaw, palm and laurel trees. Under the shade of the sweet almond tree is the first arc of a bookcase I built in a dream. There are interrupted arcs throughout the forest that together make a single ring, a single shelf bracing itself between the trunks of trees. All the arcs but the last are filled, with notebooks of the same size, with spines of different ages, some bound with strips of linen to stop them falling apart. Like subway tiles standing upright, the shelves are filled with the same book, the notebooks of the fisherman. He is a perfectionist, he has bought the same notebook since he was 13, the pages are thin but well made, bound together by a cork cover. And when they stopped making them, he made his own, with the technique his lover taught him. His lover, a man 12 years his senior, from a different sea had alabaster soft skin not touched by rough winds or sea salt. He has the same quiet as the fisherman’s aunt. They exchanged cork for cured fish skin, otherwise, he did not make any other changes. The fisherman organised his bookcase not chronologically but by cloud type.

On the arc that is the first and last, empty but rapidly filling, he has started a new series and called it               

Cumulonimbus medusarosa.

It would later be modified into medusorosus medusogenitus,
                              but when the fisherman saw the cloud he did not know what caused it, he only described what he saw. 

-         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.

Prose/poetry Adaptation and Pink Sky in the Morning written independently of AI. Cumulonimbus medusarosa dialogue with ChatGPT.