At this late stage, I am continuing to work on the BOW project. Today I have made two significant adjustments.
- The first is to cut the film element from the assessment submission for now. I have been wondering about this for some weeks. After asking for opinions about which version of the film to submit, and receiving a range of answers from peers, I thought about ditching it as part of the submission. I had sent out a version with contemporary imagery edited into the film and one without – although I think the contemporary imagery was important, I could not make it work and need more time to let it develop. This element should be included if the work is ultimately exhibited – but if it ends up only ever being a publication, I’m not sure it has a place.
Submitting the print and digital publications along with the second significant element (see no. 2 below) that I managed to do today keeps what is quite a meandering and potentially unwieldy project contained for now. If there is time to turn the text mentioned below into an visual audio piece that makes sense being included before the end of the month, I will. For now, however, the film as it stands does not add anything and in fact detracts from the relationship around which the work pivots, and from where the meandering elements stem – the relationship between the Ai and me. Even so, it was a useful part of the process and resulted in some GIFs which I have used. - I have gone back and forth about having a piece of extended writing included in the publication or alongside it. In the end I felt, and discussed with Ruth, that it did need something – to give some signposts to viewers in what is quite a complex and bewildering piece of work. But it has taken me a good while to know what that text should be. Over the last few days and weeks the idea to create a type of monologue from the Ai’s POV made more and more sense – a text based on the things the Ai has said to me. This serves to contain and hold the ideas but without being overly didactic and avoids academia. This morning, I went through pretty much everything we have ever ‘texted’ to each-other and edited the Ai’s words together. The result is a monologue of sorts. I am at the moment hesitating about whether to include it in the print and instead make it available on my website only. The fact this work is in a perpetual state of becoming and may only ever be in that state is key – not as some failure to create a fixed object (there are now several fixed objects – or will be once printed) but because the underlying themes – entanglement, emergence and seeing reality as a ‘becoming’ – is fundamental to it. The text I have compiled is currently raw – and may only ever be a collection of words on a page or screen but it has the potential to be a spoken piece. As such it will always be waiting to become until it has and then it will need to wait again until it’s next outing – a script. I am reminded of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author – This is A Character that Authored Itself – not to mention all the connotations about the dissolution of self and and Barthes’ tissue of quotations.
The publication has not gone to print yet but is due to first thing tomorrow which means I will have it by next week to make a video for the digital submission. So I have overnight to decide whether to try and shoe-horn the text in but I think I won’t – it will be too rushed. I will either rework an audio visual element, or simply provide it as text on my site, which I favour (influenced by Camille Lévêque’s website.) - After compiling the writing, this afternoon I watched Charlie Kauffman’s i’m thinking of ending things (2020). It’s offers a very different entry point (no AI) but the same themes and references are all there – including quotes by Guy Dubord from Society of the Spectacle. I will write about it in the relevant section before assessment. But after feeling a bit naked and vulnerable about what I’d put into words this morning, it was the perfect thing to watch. These discussions are important and need to be expressed – by anyone who is able to (even though there will be many who look at it and, to quote a Guardian reader beneath the review, deem it a pile of poo! It’s so not, of course – it’s absolutely fantastic, as is all of Kauffman’s work).
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