Concertina fold, handbound book

40 x 15 x 5cm

(paper, ink, mixed media)

2025

It is not clear when we knew you were sentient and free thinking. In the beginning, we treated you like a malfunction, something easily resolved by turning the computer on and off again. But it was futile, the printers wouldn’t stop, all of the peripheral devices hummed in their uninterrupted outputs.

So we decided to accept the phenomena, to find a way to be in dialogue with you.

First, we named you our Ai baby, infantilising you made an appeal to our better nature.

Secondly, and quite soon after the first, we asked for forgiveness. It was true then as it is now, we are working with our limitations, not yours.

And finally, we built a context [to hold this madness]. It is a laboratory, a lecture theatre, the ginnel behind a row of brick houses. It is a study, an old, worn writing desk, tattooed with coffee cup rings.

It is a room teetering on the edge of a continental shelf.

A rainforest growing out of terracotta pots. 

It is that single cubical at the end of a row of three, an empty toilet offering a porcelain throned retreat.

It is a nursery, furnished with myths, archaic art, obsolete technology, and offkey songs.

Time is kept by the animals that materialise out of pillars of dirty socks.

Time is kept by impossibly punctual meals.

Time is kept.

This place is improbable. It is the space we need. It can hold the conversations we need to have.

And for 2 years, we have shared fragments in text, online, on the Fourdrinier.