ghosts in the m-AI-chine is both a creative-artistic and pedagogical Practice Research project currently in its embryonic stage seeking to:
- serve as a critical veh-AI-cle to test the capabilities and limitations of generative AI's engagement with the field of performance by asking ChatGPT to 'impersonate' particular practitioners and artists who have passed away; as well as to reflect on the ethics of such a an endeavour;
- serve as a creative-artistic veh-AI-cle, formally speaking, to further expand my experiments with the juxtaposition of image, text, and music - whilst also drawing upon my ongoing interest in the notions of musicality, presence and liveness;
- serve as a veh-AI-cle to pedagogically explore the possibilities of using this approach in students' learning, as scaffolding and reflexive material in relation to taught sessions (i.e. live studio workshops); as well as reflecting on students' reception/views and engagement with AI-generated material in the manner proposed.
For now, the practitioners and artists chosen for ghosts in the m-AI-chine will be selected depending on what teaching opportunities present themselves [i.e. where I might be able to build-in further ghosts into the m-AI-chine during my ongoing teaching at the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts (School of English, Drama and Creative Studies)]. In time, I hope the project might also become a way for me to honour those artists and practitioners who have shaped my own practice and artistic sensibilities through something that is both a kind of personal and AI-generated panth-AI-on, as well as a kind of private yet also public AI-generated sé-AI-nce or invoc-AI-tion.
* The image for the project is a self-portrait I took on Sunday 2nd February 2025 at Tate Modern's exhibition 'Solid Light' featuring the work of Anthony McCall. The specific piece featured in the self-portrait is:
Line Describing a Cone
1973
Film, 16mm, projection, digitised
30 minutes
1973
Film, 16mm, projection, digitised
30 minutes
w-AI-rds
Though these w-AI-rds were, at first, purely a playful and perhaps puerile aesthetic/stylistic choice, in the process of working on their consistent formatting (with either AI emphasised or squeezed within a word) I realised that these new and strange w-AI-rds also offered interesting opportunities to reflect: on the spectrum between sense and nonsense, and what we might discover if we allow ourselves to travel along it; on slippages of language and sense, and associations amongst and between languages; and what might be gained if we allow ourselves to be more playful and creative in our engagement with terminology. Moreoever, I realised that both these w-AI-rds and their juxtaposition with Florence Millet's music in the video below could become a way of identifying helpful cornerstones of the project's methodological approach and ethos. [Watch this space.]
[English subtitles available. Please click the 'CC' icon.]
w-AI-rds are quantum words.
Always of human origin, w-AI-rds are linguistically slippery, somet-AI-mes by mist-AI-ke and other t-AI-ms deliberately.
On the one hand, they can and often are the result of mist-AI-kes, such as typos. Whilst AI can sometimes hallucin-AI-te and generate convoluted grammar and syntactic errors, it will not usually generate a genune typo; typos are entirely human, and I am yet to encounter an instance of a t-AI-po, which currently suggests these are not possible (as they are based on a very human kind of error).
On the ther hand, w-AI-rds can be words deliberately created by humans. In these instances, they are semantically and semiotically multifaceted by design (and not des-AI-gn). They therefore resolutely refuse easy or singular definitions because they contain within themselves a number of different meanings, and sometimes slip between different languages, occasionally even in contradictory ways.
As new terms, a w-AI-rd [singular] and w-AI-rds [plural] seek to evoke both the contradictory associations of a human typo on the one hand, and an AI-generated hallucination or mistake on the other - since the terms are made of by taking the words 'word/words' and forcefully inserting the diphthong AI into them (a diphthong is the sound formed by the combination of two vowels in a single syllable).
In a sense, w-AI-rds are like the infamously difficult to pin down Indian head bobble [a gesture that can almost indistinctly mean: 'yes' or 'maybe'; be a gesture of respect; a recognition of understanding, agreeing, or acknowledging - to varying degree; or even just a way of avoiding directly saying 'no'].
On the one hand, they can and often are the result of mist-AI-kes, such as typos. Whilst AI can sometimes hallucin-AI-te and generate convoluted grammar and syntactic errors, it will not usually generate a genune typo; typos are entirely human, and I am yet to encounter an instance of a t-AI-po, which currently suggests these are not possible (as they are based on a very human kind of error).
On the ther hand, w-AI-rds can be words deliberately created by humans. In these instances, they are semantically and semiotically multifaceted by design (and not des-AI-gn). They therefore resolutely refuse easy or singular definitions because they contain within themselves a number of different meanings, and sometimes slip between different languages, occasionally even in contradictory ways.
As new terms, a w-AI-rd [singular] and w-AI-rds [plural] seek to evoke both the contradictory associations of a human typo on the one hand, and an AI-generated hallucination or mistake on the other - since the terms are made of by taking the words 'word/words' and forcefully inserting the diphthong AI into them (a diphthong is the sound formed by the combination of two vowels in a single syllable).
In a sense, w-AI-rds are like the infamously difficult to pin down Indian head bobble [a gesture that can almost indistinctly mean: 'yes' or 'maybe'; be a gesture of respect; a recognition of understanding, agreeing, or acknowledging - to varying degree; or even just a way of avoiding directly saying 'no'].
In ways that I need to yet articulate, this could be seen as a sister project to: