Unit 2
‘1_w1ll_b3_c0rr3sp0nd3nt_t0_c0mm4nd’ by Jessica Brauner
About the work:
The title ’1_w1ll_b3_c0rr3sp0nd3nt_t0_c0mm4nd’ is taken from Act 1 scene 2 of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The line is spoken by the character of ‘Ariel’, an airy spirit who serves a sorcerer named ‘Prospero’. The original line in its entirety reads : ‘Pardon, master: I will be correspondent to command,/And do my spriting gently’ (Shakespeare, 1999, 1.2 :295). Here, Ariel appeases Prospero after Prospero has threatened to imprison him in a tree. Ariel takes multiple forms in the play whilst executing Prospero’s commands, including that of a sea nymph and a harpy.
I have collaborated with online AI models to produce this work. I have used ‘Stable Diffusion Deforum generation’ on a Google Colaboratory platform to craft AI generated film images matching the compositions of my original film footage. The new footage has then been re-edited; combining, layering and collaging multiple film frames together. I have also presented the AI model ‘ChatGPT’ with prompts to help script the artwork, alongside my own creative writing and extracted edited quotes from The Tempest. It is through this combination that Shakespeare’s ‘Ariel’ has been depicted as a hybridised being who resists any singular definition of the human, the machine or the animal, whilst encompassing aspects of all three. This concept was partially inspired by Donna Haraway’s definition of the cyborg in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ as: ‘a condensed image of both imagination and material reality’ (Haraway, 1985, p.11), the cyborg acting as a metaphor within her text for an entity freed from binary definitions established by a patriarchal society.
The video work presented in the Bargehouse Exhibition on Southbank has been projected onto a flame-resistant, translucent voile sheet, that has been hung in the dark attic area of the space. This gives the work ghostly connotations in connection to Ariel’s nature as a spirit. The translucent material allows for a holographic light effect to be captured on the surface of the fabric, from a back projection, in reference to the presence of an artificially intelligent entity. The rectangular drapery of the sheet helps to encompass the work’s subtitles to allow for the viewers to engage more directly with the transcript that makes the core of the work, whilst additionally encouraging the connotations of the sail of a ship, linking to the text of The Tempest. Nevertheless, I wish to experiment with different hangings of drapery in any future incarnations of the piece, to allow for further sculptural creativity and otherworldly designs.
By exploring Ariel’s ambivalent relationship with Prospero, this work interrogates our current relationship with artificial intelligence. I act as a metaphorical Prospero whilst also performing the role of Ariel in the footage; I have combined myself bodily with the AI whilst simultaneously commanding the AI tools to execute my vision. Ariel, AI and our own positioning as human beings might be characterised as both vulnerable and all-powerful, as both playful and terrifying. The rise of AI brings an age-old power struggle into new relevance. In such a precarious time, are we masters or servants to the newest technology we create?
