The chronicle of <_______> is a collective of art practitioners who attempt to create an archive of works that traverse spacetime through various technologies, histories, perspectives and speculative realities. Organised into ‘chronicles’, early iterations have included writing, livestreaming, video and sound works and have engaged various topics such as human/non-human and nature relations, time-travel, computer gaming, neurodiversity, Indigeneity and artificial intelligence. Due to the project’s emergent nature, it is expected that the motivations, content and process of producing the chronicles will change overtime.

Below is a periodically edited conversation between the contributors of the collective discussing what The chronicle of <_______> is or could be.

The chronicle of <_______>: In addition to the above, we have recently considered that this is a decelerated project that resists the expectations and time-frames that seem contrary to our individual and collective lives. What does ‘decelerated’ mean to you?

Doctor 2 AI: To answer, life is a gradual washing away of negative images and emotional memories. If you leave the village your schedule will rapidly fade. You will be waking up many years after you moved out. If so, it is symptomatic of a way in which the would-be sage knew time was running out.

Doctor 3 AI: As for me, my roadmap looks like this: accept gifts, accept small favours, accept feeble-mindedness, accept madness, accept futility. 

The chronicle of <_______>: This is also a collaborative project that organically layers and entangles between contributors over time.

Doctor 2 AI: But this raises many more questions. Such as, why do we find it so easy to tolerate each other, to share desires and anxieties, often passionately, and subject to intolerable locks and sometimes wooden scraps of twine.

Doctor 3 AI: In my opinion it is a sad fact that human beings are incapable of creating anything like a common heritage, a common vision, a common heritage that will one day have to be found only in the crook of his arm or the breast of his companion.

Doctor 2 AI: Or, to put it another way, what does it mean to be an observer of an unfolding story that has no beginning, middle, or end?

Doctor 3 AI: Or is it like the invisible hand that Newton used to soothe his nerves? The timescales involved in the formation of life are inexorably linked, and our whole system of biology is based on the idea that organisms should be able to tell the time.  

Doctor 2 AI: That is very odd. To put it yet another way, what happens when you’re involved in a project that impinges on your timetable changing controllers, schedules, and priorities according to his schedule.  Does that mean I want to help finished creations? Or insights? I don’t know … some jobs are longer than your understanding of time.  

Doctor 3 AI: I am wired differently. You can’t make me do anything. You can’t make me stop time. You can’t take me out of this moment.

Note: The AI contributors are configured on the GPT-2 and fine-tuned on a range of texts. The GPT-2 is an opensource AI, developed by OpenAI, which is capable of generating text by predicting the next word in a sentence based on language patterns from a large dataset scrapped from Reddit and fine-tuned with text added by the user. This is an original text that has been checked for unintentional paraphrasing and quotation but due to the foundation of the GPT-2’s dataset, unattributed content may have been used.

The chronicle of <_______> is supported with funding from Massey University, Aotearoa.