Passing Cloud

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

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  of both domestic and wild fauna. And somewhere in the verdant green, there is an old, worn, writing desk tattooed with coffee cup rings and spilt red wine. There, on the leather top, are teetering piles of books; dictionaries filled with the words of a lost, ancient language, manuals detailing instructions for machines yet to be built and travel guides for distant star systems. 

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

June

Black Abstraction, Georgia O'Keeffe, 1927

Image of the artwork can be accessed by the embedded link.
Image description available here, at the Gallery of Things We Know and Love.

Pupil

PART TWO of THREE:

(7-12km high troposphere)

10km

… When you send it flyin' up there

An airplane cuts through unstable, chaotic skies; we ascend followed by a corvid. She goes as high as she could go, we watch her now a bright, black point descending below.

The ground is silent and ordered. It is a tapestry of agriculture, there are rivers of tarmac and dust, blocks of colour, knotted slub in bowed hessian, lives reduced to pixels 10km wide.

All at once you're lighter than air

Around us, the clouds move like water, rippling, rolling over each other.                                                                                                                                         

As we plunge up, tumbling out of jet streams and further into the atmosphere, we leave a trace in the clouds, a charge, or spark that catalyses an evolutionary event. By the time we leave orbit, a larva has developed and clotted water vapour against her membrane. Now, she is a microscopic, pearl-opaque seed; when she reaches full maturity, they will call her Medusa.

The egg came first.

We boil one and eat it as an instrument laden, silver balloon passes by.

(10-50 km: Stratosphere)

A mountain is carried in the back of a cop car, she is singing an old song to comfort herself. It is the story of how Papahānaumoku (Earth Mother) and Wākea (Sky Father) meet on mount Mauna Kea. The summit is the centre of the universe, the endless source. They have already put a cluster of telescopes there without permission. Squat cyclopean masses were built where their elders are buried. Their flat, white faces are turned up and out, to the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, our destination.

Her song ends, his tears blind him, and the pain tastes bronze where he bites down.

In his rear view, Mt. Mauna Kea grows smaller.

(50-80 Km Mesosphere)

             Below, thick, fluffy sheets of clouds hover over water.

 … When you send it flyin' up there

Far in the distance, the sun hangs within a gold annular. Ice crystals organised into thin wisps of noctilucent hair curl around us as we continue our descent into the dark.

From here, it is all ocean, an orb of water, a blue planet. Land emerges where it is grown, pushed up or spewed out.

All at once you're lighter than air

Our path is vast, an endless midnight, Po-Wehi.

From here, nothing belongs to anybody.

100km

The clouds form tight spirals, I see a flick of something moving against the grain, like sand pulled by an invisible tide.

 You can dance on the breeze

We are floating in vespertine warmth, turning in the darkness, watching the sun set.

Earth. Sky. Earth. Sky.

A hypnotic rocking as we draw further and further away.

Hawaii is a wrinkle of the seabed.

There was a token offered, they allowed a Hawaiian scholar to give the image a name.

Powehi.

It comes from the Kumulipo, an 18th century Hawaiian creation chant.

                   Po: Meaning profound dark source of unending creation

and

                   Wehi: honoured with embellishments.

The image of Sag A* that they call Powehi was made with data from the Event Horizon Telescope, eight radio telescopes trained to one point.

It will take us over 3 millennia to reach that point. It is the same time it took for stone to become a tablet in a shallow cupped palm. If we reach Sag A* and return, 6000 years would have passed. What will remain of holy ground? How many more images of the black hole will be produced? Will each reproduction of nothing at higher resolutions carry the name of the people obliterated for its creation?

[https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/39717]

• Xhi Ndubisi

Variation

It took months for you to stand still months till you could walk as soon as you stood up on your own your arms were out in front of you a chimera materialised above your head /

a rectangle tilted slanted into a different format a screen without a picture plane you could put your hand through it clutch tight the doll with rose mauve hair pink cheesecloth blouse salmon satin skirt /

take a hold of their left hand and project it flat as if patting the head of an invisible dog or I don’t know maybe one of the heads of Cerberus the other hand raised in greeting and farewell the iron men part submerged in the sands and further out the turbines their thick stanchions hundreds of metres deep in the sea bed /

a little way out from the shore the sea a grit blown oil slick methylated blue wiped over the sands shells cast up glittering on a driftwood bench far off a primrose sun waning sickly in the petrol sky once there was earth now your terra firma is a quicksand of your own creation /

your imagination projected above your head a speech bubble you can reach into it like a magic box and pull out your dolls /

when the doll cocks their head to one side listening to our voices as we talk through the night and into the next day hands on hips in a red and white flounced dress hair cinnabar curls at their back brass instruments fallen declamatory scraping on the beach the sky oxidised /

patinated sun or moon or planet circled by rings of sage green spores /

we wondered if you would ever learn to walk or only parade about inside your chimerical box you and the dolls talking among yourselves in a language only you all could understand /

that you had all the ingredients but not the recipe the components dispersed and disassembled spells unformulated though the constituents lay arrayed all around /

when I’m bored I ask you a question the same question but no matter how many times I ask it I always get a different answer /

the great thing is there’s always a different answer /

time and again in my space caged sundown state I say if I asked you to build me a blue house, what would you use to fabricate it /

with your patience born of mathematical processes rather than empathy I can pretend that your responses are always comforting /

• Jo Manby

Dream House

AiB:

“I had a dream of building a blue house and the only material I had to work with was sand, shells, and ocean foam. So I went to the beach and asked a wise old man if he could help me build it. He agreed and said he would use sand sculptures to create the walls, shells as windows, and ocean foam as insulation to keep it warm.

The old man was very crafty and creative in his designs. He used shells of different sizes to make windows that gave off rainbow-colored light when the sun shone through them. He even found a way to sculpt a front door made from sand that resembled a castle door complete with intricate details.

The old man worked tirelessly for days until the blue house was complete. I was amazed at how beautiful it looked in the sunlight. It stood strong against the elements even though it seemed fragile due to its material makeup. The house became an oasis for me in my lonely moments as I could look through…”

• Rytr

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 Pupil PART TWO of THREE and Variation written independently of AI. Dream House written by Rytr AI text generator.