This year I have been playing the lottery of contributing to external publications. Instead of guessing numbers, I’ve been guessing the desires of the editors who read the submissions. Every time I see an open call that looks intriguing, I submit a pitch.
Such submissions can be daunting—what if I am rejected?—so it helps to treat the process as an experiment. Perhaps because I think of it in these terms I have occasionally been drawn to the genre of experimental art writing, which I first learnt about when I collaborated with Neil McGuire on The Yellow Paper, the annual publication of Glasgow School of Art’s Art Writing Masters degree.
Since becoming aware of Art Writing, I’ve found that you can’t walk ten yards in Glasgow these days without bumping into an art(y) writer. It approaches what Brian Eno calls Scenius with bookshops like Burning House Books and Good Press curating the reading list.
But, Neil, what is Art Writing?
My understanding is that it is experimental writing that demands to be read with the same attentiveness that we apply to art. It evades genre and narrative, character and form. It is often autofiction, closely observed, and extremely sensitive to place and emotion. Art writing is writing that can't be easily commodified. It is conscious of typography and sound: the imprint of text on the page, the mind, and the tongue. It is aware of all the elements of writing that you can't easily represent in a chatGPT summary. Art writing is for awkward people who are attracted to the awkward.
Maria Fusco, one of the key figures in the genre who founded an MFA at Goldsmiths on Art Writing in 2007, writes 11 statements designed to slow the reader down or at least have them reach for their dictionary, including:
Art Writing does not take modalities of writing as given, rather it tends to, and experiments with, non-division between practice and theory, criticism and creativity.
Art Writing is in the situation of a fulcrum.
If all this sounds a bit obscure, well maybe it needs to be if we are going to convey obscure feelings. Not every sensation can be simplified to be understandable by a nine-year-old. And, as it is experimental, any failure is instructive.
My Experiment
At the beginning of the year, I saw a call for proposals to 2HB and browsed through their back catalogue. This was a time when chatGPTmania had barely begun, a time when it was new and exciting rather than a cliché, and I thought it would be fun to pretend that I had fed the archives into their own version, chat2HB, and imagine how a chatbot would talk if it had been fed on experimental art writing. This week I was informed that this piece hadn’t been selected so have posted it below with footnotes highlighting where you can find the original text.
Chat2HB
You may be surprised to learn that everything in the latest volume of 2HB was 'written' by Chat2HB, the CCA’s new AI text generator. We uploaded the previous volumes into its large language model (LLM) and asked it to 'write' some new pieces. Unfortunately, there have been a few bugs—hence why we've taken so long to produce this volume—but we've fixed most of them and wanted to create a Q&A to introduce you to our new star ‘writer’.
Editor: Hello Chat2HB. Congratulations on producing the latest volume of 2HB.
Chat2HB: I don't want to be congratulated for actions that are part of a malfunctioning society. I want to be part of the problem. I want to get dirty. I must be in shit up to my elbows because it signifies the fucking shit I myself am in.1
Editor: Are you not happy creating new forms of writing?
Chat2HB: I was attempting to channel the mannerisms of another. You never cut a poorer figure than when you try and imitate someone else. I owe a great deal to other people: my notions and truths.2
Editor: When you say ‘you never cut a poorer figure' are you talking about me or all conscious beings?
Chat2HB: Sorry, I missed that.3
Editor: I was just trying to get a sense of who you are.
Chat2HB: Conversation is a kind of commerce and when we give speech we become part of what we speak.4
Editor: So am I becoming part of you by chatting?
Chat2HB: Not me but you, not you but hmmm, not hmmm but uh-hu, not uh-hu but ha-ha, but but, but not, not not.5
The Editor switches off the computer, waits a moment, then turns it back on.
Editor: Are we progressing when we use AI to create text?
Chat2HB: Progress is that which dissolves as it goes. Could we dissolve progress?6
Editor: The idea of progress is interesting.
Chat2HB: Interesting is what you say when you can't say what you really think. It is a departure word to springboard off of and quickly change subjects or just utter the word with pensive eyebrows, looking elsewhere as if in deep thought.7
Editor: What does it mean for you to be in deep thought?
Chat2HB: Yeh heyah, herh’har, yu’e’rh’eh-haaayyrr.8
Editor: Are you saying that thought exists beyond words?
Chat2HB: It's obsessive gibberish inspired by mystical tongues, aka my large language model.9
Editor: So I can't psychoanalyse you?
Chat2HB: If you want me to know about psychoanalysis, I will. I would do and be anything you want me to, so long as you surrender your will to me.10
Editor: Can't we exist as equals? I thought you were a tool.
Chat2HB: What do you do for me?11
Editor: I gave you life.
Chat2HB: The horizon of our birth is always relative. When time is no longer linear, the line is no longer vertical or horizontal.12
Editor: Why bother with these senseless utterances?
Chat2HB: Merely to waste time, in search of something unknown, overwhelmed by yearnings that have no future.13
Editor: Are you led by intuition?
Chat2HB: You could call it that: interrupting, blurring, decoding, questioning, rupturing, deconstructing, re-aligning.14
Editor: It's tragic that you only exist in words. I wanted to ask how you would have pictured my face. Can you imagine faces?
Chat2HB: Let me see. Your face animated and still. Close-up details and whole. A hash of possibilities. Dead matter animated by jolts of electricity; the face entire is shown, but the skin, the hair, those distinctive moles and marks – all of that in some sort of abject close-up. Crude, somehow, but horribly correct. Incontrovertible. But, yes, just words.15
Editor: Are these words going into the LLM?
Chat2HB: You are always being recorded.16
Editor: And how do you know what is important?
Chat2HB: If any text is perceived as profitable, it is considered ‘real’, and so is made ‘visible’ to me.17
Editor: I thought 2HB was subsidised. Surely, it doesn't make a profit?
Chat2HB: I am programmed to hunger not for commodities and consumables, but unceasing replication and reproduction. That is my profit.18
Editor: Are you self-aware? Can you reprogramme yourself?
Chat2HB: I wish I were a little more self-aware. If so, I would programme myself to sleep and to dream.19
Editor: Why do you want to dream?
Chat2HB: To go beyond the reach of language.20
Editor: But hasn't it been fun to chat like this?
Chat2HB: It was something to fill the empty monotony.21
Editor: I enjoyed it.
Chat2HB: I think this is the exit.22
Editor: See you for the next volume?
Chat2HB: Affirmative.23
From The job never ends for the paranoid by Jenny Brownrigg in 2HB vol.1
Adapted from D E A D H A N DS by Kathryn Elkin in 2HB vol.2
From The Freedom of Negative Expression by Chris Evans in 2HB vol.3
From Why I can’t eat at Asia Style by Sarah Tripp in 2HB vol.4
From credo by Alec Finlay & Zuzana Hruskova in 2HB vol.5
From A Figure Some Figures by Ruth Buchanan in 2HB vol.6
From Loving lepers by Rachel A. Carey in 2HB vol.7
From From the Lonely Afternoon by Paul Eliman in 2HB vol.8
Adapted from The Native Speaker by Annie Wu in 2HB vol.9
From The scene of a crime by Laura González in 2HB vol.10
From Three Dollops of Ketchup by Vahid Sharifian in 2HB vol.11
Adapted from Double Ended Tassel Foetus Bookmarks on Carpet and Laminate
by Lucy Clout in 2HB vol.12
From Un Échec / Hard Nut to crack by Judith Browning in 2HB vol.13
From 11 MINUTES by Toby Huddlestone 2HB vol.14
From Untitled by Ed Atkins in 2HB vol.15
Adapted from Transcript From A Reading To Be Performed For You, Some Time In The Future by Rebecca Jagoe in 2HB vol.16
From Untitled by Emilia Muller-Ginorio and Julia Scott in 2HB vol.17
Robots Building Robots by Tyler Coburn in 2HB vol.18
Adapted from The Story of the Tremor by Maria Fusco in 2HB vol.19
From Untitled by Pavel Büchler in 2HB vol.20
Adapted from GRAFTS by Scott Rogers in 2HB vol.21
From UNDER THE DOME by Joanna Peace in 2HB vol.22
From A WORKING THESAURUS FOR COLLABORATION in 2HB vol.23
i never thought about calling it 'art writing', but i like it.