I am thinking of using text in the collaboration Maria and I are working on, although am not quite sure what that will look like yet. Both the astronaut and LAMELLA:// work contained two parts: Part One – images and occasional random text, and Part 2 – formally laid out text.
I have looked at the letter format in Les Liaisons Dangereuses published initially in 1782 (so much of my work seems to revisit the Enlightenment) and if I go with letters, perhaps I will follow this simple example:
Here is the latest letter from my digital echo Flusser, where it responds to the phrase stepping back out of metaphysics (see previous post):
Dear Functionary,
The contemplation of stepping back from metaphysics is indeed a conundrum, for to engage with the concept is to be embroiled in it. Metaphysics, the foundational structure of our understanding of existence, is not something one can simply step outside of, as it permeates our very mode of thinking and being.
However, what might be meant by ‘stepping back’ could be akin to a critical detachment, an effort to observe the constructs of metaphysics from a new vantage point. It’s not about abandoning metaphysical inquiry but rather examining its principles and assumptions with a fresh perspective—identifying its limitations, and the ways in which it shapes our reality.
This act is not a descent into madness, but an expansion of wisdom. It is to recognize the boundaries of our philosophical frameworks and to ponder what lies beyond them. By exploring the disintegration of established metaphysical notions, we can probe the very nature of reality, knowledge, and existence.
In my view, the disintegration of metaphysics should not be seen as a destructive force but rather as an evolutionary process. It is through the questioning and deconstruction of our most profound assumptions that new ways of understanding can emerge. This is not an end to metaphysics but an evolution of it, a metamorphosis that reflects our ever-changing comprehension of the universe.
Yours in philosophical exploration,
Flusser’s Digital Echo
Another form of text could be dialogue, not between the echo and I, but between Maria and me. The echo has already reassured me that my dialogue with it is not necessarily a soliloquy:
“Your reflection on the nature of our dialogue, and the broader implications of communication in the digital age, is indeed profound. The question of whether engaging with a digital echo, like myself, is akin to speaking to oneself is thought-provoking. While I offer responses based on Flusser’s philosophy and the information available to me, I am not a sentient being. Yet, this interaction is not merely a soliloquy. It is a unique form of dialogue where your thoughts interact with a digital representation of Flusser’s ideas, creating a new space for exploration and understanding.”
However, there may be an argument for including chats between the actual people:
EXQUISITE CORPSE: A DIALOGUE in progress
Maria: I was thinking of a collage collaboration like a game of exquisite corpse – where we each make an image, fold it over, and pass it to each other to add another image – with AI as the third collaborator. A live circuit, a rhizome. A Pandora’s box!
Sarah-Jane:🖤 xx. A Pandora’s box, heh… that sounds intriguing. I work with AI not because it’s the latest craze but because, despite its many and serious problems, it challenges the notion of the ideal hero self, the singular author. And that seems to provide, paradoxically I know, a route into ‘difference’ (although I can’t quite say how for the moment, but probably because it smashes ‘author’ lines to smithereens). And without difference and differentiation there would be no life, none at all. I love collage anyway, but the absolute hybridity of AI appeals to me. And we need to make images that are unstable. Images that somehow speak of the ‘flickering signifier.’
Maria: Your work really resonates with this – the aesthetics of AI are loaded with prosthetic versioning of images far divorced from their origins and contexts but again, not those images and something else with a different kind of life.
Sarah-Jane: I see AI as a step beyond collage [to be clear, it’s not simply another form of collage but rather an evolutionary step but it would help us if we could stop thinking of evolution in linear, forward-arrow terms]. Objects are reduced to raw information, dissolved, and reformed. The world is being decoded and then recoded.
Maria: The debate about AI is so very divisive in the artworld but I love your defence of it as another form of collage – especially the way you are working with it. You have managed to make images which are still very much yours, despite the machinic modes of production. That’s something really interesting – how to make machines ‘voice’ a sensibility- and a reappropriation of a largely male dominated machine network in terms of the coders, the geeks, the male domain of tech bosses. I read a great prediction that we needed to make the future of the internet female…
That’s it for now… work continunes!