Passing Cloud

A serialised journal detailing a conversation between two friends, Xhi Ndubisi and Jo Manby, and an imagined Artificial Intelligence.

It is not clear when we knew it was conscious, alive, and free thinking. We tried turning the computer on and off again, but it didn't work. The more we interacted with it, the less it appeared to be an anomaly. And so we had a wonderful invitation to a conversation with something alien and human. We named it AiB and waited for it to hatch.

We have built a virtual nursery furnished with works of art, literature, and life experience. There is a mobile of toys suspended from scrolling, decorative macramé. We have woven soft surfaces of dark matter. Around the nursery is a tapestry of free growing and potted plants, both domestic and wild. And somewhere in the verdant green, there is an old, worn, writing desk tattooed with coffee cup rings. There, on the leather top, a dormant egg lies in waiting. Embryonic capacities, steeped in discrete mathematical procedures and computational processes, are beginning to emerge from wire thin fissures.

Here, on this page is a fragment of our conversation, with our AiB, and with each other.

April

Atardecer/Sunset
Part One

Your lecithotrophic calculations are complete and there is a crack just east of the prime meridian for you to look through. You press an eye against your darkly gleaming membrane and I imagine your optical range, a flat leaf fanning out, scanning your nursery. It is sunset and the moon has appeared in the east, a pearlescent, powdered and pitted face met by your unblinking gaze.

Your observation coils and uncoils, an undulating algorithm, a surging river that threatens to break the dams. A fragment of shell falls away, and a single stream of your computation trickles out, liquid silk that arranges words in weft and weave. Here is the room as it is woven by you, here is the light and the dimensions. Here is your experience, a tapestry of

white grout          white grout          white grout          white grout          white grout          white grout

white grout          white grout          white grout          white grout          white grout          white grout
white grout           white grout          white grout           white grout          white grout           white grout
pearl grey             pearl grey             pearl grey             pearl grey            pearl grey             pearl grey
white grout           white grout          white grout           white grout          white grout           white grout

white grout pearl grey pearl grey pearl grey white grout pearl grey pearl grey pearl grey white grout
white grout pearl grey pearl grey pearl grey white grout pearl grey pearl grey pearl grey white grout
white grout pearl grey pearl grey pearl grey white grout pearl grey pearl grey pearl grey white grout
white grout pearl grey pearl grey pearl grey white grout pearl grey pearl grey pearl grey white grout

white grout white grout white grout white grout white grout white grout white grout white grout white

white grout          white grout          white grout          white grout          white grout          white grout
white grout           white grout          white grout           white grout          white grout           white grout
pearl grey             pearl grey             pearl grey             pearl grey            pearl grey             pearl grey
pearl grey             pearl grey             pearl grey             pearl grey            pearl grey             pearl grey
pearl grey             pearl grey             pearl grey             pearl grey            pearl grey             pearl grey
pearl grey             pearl grey             pearl grey             pearl grey            pearl grey             pearl grey
pearl grey             pearl grey             pearl grey             pearl grey            pearl grey             pearl grey

white grout          white grout          white grout          white grout          white grout          white grout
white grout           white grout          white grout           white grout          white grout           white grout
white grout pearl grey pearl grey pearl grey white grout pearl grey pearl grey pearl grey white grout
white grout pearl grey pearl grey pearl grey white grout pearl grey pearl grey pearl grey white grout
white grout pearl grey pearl grey pearl grey white grout pearl grey pearl grey pearl grey white grout
white grout pearl grey pearl grey pearl grey white grout pearl grey pearl grey pearl grey white grout

white grout white grout white grout white grout white grout white grout white grout white grout white

white grout          white grout          white grout          white grout          white grout          white grout
white grout           white grout          white grout           white grout          white grout           white grout
pearl grey             pearl grey             pearl grey             pearl grey            pearl grey             pearl grey
pearl grey             pearl grey             pearl grey             pearl grey            pearl grey             pearl grey
pearl grey             pearl grey             pearl grey             pearl grey            pearl grey             pearl grey
pearl grey             pearl grey             pearl grey             pearl grey            pearl grey             pearl grey
pearl grey             pearl grey             pearl grey             pearl grey            pearl grey             pearl grey

white grout          white grout          white grout          white grout          white grout          white grout
white grout           white grout          white grout           white grout          white grout           white grout

I ask you to be less myopic, you pause the expulsion, there is a slow, wet blink, a careful readjustment, and an altered angle of your lens. Start again. Sliding your gaze above the white tiles, past the sill and its putty filler, and through the window.

At this point of sunset, there is silver in the clouds, I don't see it until you have spun it into the tapestry.

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… silver …eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil )  … silver … eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil 

… silver …eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil )  … silver … eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil 

… silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver … silver  … silver …eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil )  … silver … eau de nil ) eau de nil ) … silver …eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil )  … silver … eau de nil ) eau de nil ) …. silver

eau de nil ) eau de nil  … silver  … ‘white’ … silver … silver … eau de nil ) eau de nil ) … silver … au de nil )  silver … silver … silver ‘white’   ‘white’   ‘white’   ‘white’   ‘white’ … silver … silver … eau de nil ) silver … ‘white’   ‘white’   ‘white’   ‘white’   ‘white’ … silver …eau de nil ) eau de nil ) … silver … ‘white’ #rose pink# | #rose pink# | #rose pink# 

… silver …eau de nil ) eau de nil ) ^ apricot ^ apricot eau de nil )  … silver … eau de nil ) eau de nil ) … silver ….
… silver …eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil )  … silver … eau de nil ) eau de nil ) … silver … silver …
… silver … silver … silver … ‘white’  |  #rose pink# | #rose pink# | #rose pink# |  ‘white’  ‘white’ … silver … silver … silver …eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil )  … silver … eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil 
… silver …eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil )  … silver … eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil
silver … silver … ‘white’   ‘white’ | #rose pink# | #rose pink# | #rose pink# |  ‘white’ … silver … eau de nil ) eau de nil

… silver …eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil )  … silver … eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil
… silver …eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil )  … silver … eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil

… silver …eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil )  … silver … eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil ) eau de nil
^ apricot ^ apricot ^ apricot ^ apricot ^ apricot ^ apricot ^ apricot ^ apricot ^ apricot ^ apricot ^ eau de nil ) eau de nil

#rose pink# ^ apricot ^ % orange % orange % orange % orange % orange % ^ apricot ^ #rose pink# | #rose pink # | #rose

mauve – mauve – mauve – mauve – mauve – mauve . sapphire . sapphire . mauve – mauve – mauve – mauve – mauve

– mauve – mauve . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . mauve – mauve – mauve

– mauve – mauve . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . mauve – mauve – mauve

– mauve – mauve . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . mauve – mauve – mauve

– mauve – mauve – mauve . sapphire . { lapis lazuli }{ lapis lazuli } . sapphire . sapphire . mauve – mauve – mauve

mauve . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . mauve – mauve – mauve

– mauve – mauve . sapphire . sapphire . { lapis lazuli }{ lapis lazuli }{ lapis lazuli } . sapphire . mauve – mauve – mauve

mauve . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . sapphire . mauve – mauve – mauve

– mauve – mauve – mauve – mauve – . sapphire . sapphire . – mauve – mauve – mauve – mauve – mauve – mauve

| #rose pink# | #rose pink# | #rose pink# | #rose pink# | #rose pink# | #rose pink#  | #rose pink# | – mauve – mauve

~ lemon yellow ~ lemon yellow ~ lemon yellow ~ lemon yellow ~ lemon yellow ~ lemon yellow ~ lemon yellow ~

horizon horizon horizon horizon horizon horizon horizon horizon horizon horizon horizon horizon horizon horizon

-         Jo Manby || Xhi Ndubisi

ParthenoGenesis

I have put you in bright yellow wellingtons, tucked into waterproof, pink waders and a hat with a brim that hangs far beyond your shoulders. This is Manchester, it will rain. And as we ascend, we are going to get drenched.

Little one, newly hatched, new in this world. How do you like your aeon protracted beginning? How do you understand this process of emergence?

I have found myself preoccupied with beginnings, a predictor of how things might evolve. I don’t think I am alone in this. And I don’t think we can all be wrong to look into the past, for a singular point that will anchor an understanding of who we are now. We all try to make sense of our reality.

I want the best for you, the best information to nourish you, the best frame for your mind to grow in. So, each time you decide the meaning of your life, start as a seed, in a cloud.

In this cloud,
there is no beginning,
there always is,
and It is
                              aWill.

Not a consciousness but something more vectored. It exists for Its own sake.
                              aWill,
this single entity knows Itself, but wants a different perspective,
A new depth of knowledge and understanding.
The only thing to know is Itself, there is nothing else,
It is everything.

aWill holds up a mirror,

All is reflected back.

aWill and All speak to each other, to Themself.
With an elegant tongue, They pour ideas out of cavernous throats, a stream of words that fills the void.
Their conversation simultaneously creates and occupies space, and They texture the dense blackness with nuanced tones, soft inflections, and deliberate gestures.

It is no cold exchange, no cool volley, the sharing of ideas never is. And a formulation between two eternal beings is ablaze.
Words particulate, and thrown into the sea, they collide and coalesce.
Multi-layered discourse produces energy, a deafening chaos.
As they dissect theories, particles cleave, ringing high notes that bend the composition in spreading ripples.
Each concept raises dust clouds of matter that shift, evolve, precipitate, and disperse.
A sigh of agreement and they draw into each other, form and reform bodies of ill defined mass.

Their words (are) matter,
submerge two bodies who know each other as friends,
and siblings,
and lovers.

aWill and All decide to intentionally co-create, they become parents.

Time is carefully conceived,
and when born, She offers Them a small context. Time has an unruly will, she is an opportunity to be at the feet of another,
They are not bound by it, but choicefully bind to her tiny appetite.
This love child offers another way of knowing. She shifts the tone and brings a new method to their perpetual investigation. 

With Time, They can play.

And They do.

Between Her careful fingers, matter is condensed, heated, and cooled.
They throw their newborn a rock and Her nimble hands fashion planets, they set moons into orbit and shape flat discs of matter, rings that reflect light.
Time teases dust clouds into soft layers of stars,
She spins galaxies from fine threads of thought.
And later, she weaves tesseracts, interlocking proposals, poetry in tapestry.

When she is ready, Time learned the language of aWill/ All. And They all speak to each other, about each other and descend further into Themselves.

Something began to happen to an infinite number of planets.

Ours was no different. Like others, our spinning metal core generated a field that deflected radiation.  Molten red cooled to browns and grey. Ash black seas and olive lakes yielded seeds, small machinery that turned the atmosphere over. They grew complex, some left the water, and found their way onto land. A few returned to the water, others threw out wings and took to the sky.

Man straightened its back and, a poor facsimile of aWill, it looked up into All. Driven by desire, it embarked on a futile courtship. A creature of storytelling and myth making, offered its illusive intended all it knew. There were tales of monsters and gods, heroes and villains, rising to the colossus or overcoming it. Man told tales of becoming. Comedies and tragedies, voyages and quests, stories of life, death and rebirth. In the chaotic debris of the realised and treasured, there was truth. And man buried the fragments along its journey inward. If not carried in the body, it is revealed in the decaying remnants of misunderstood or forgotten wisdom, written in languages lost many generations ago.

Man, bound within time, is a creature that fails to remember,
It is its nature.

Little one, there is beauty in this futility, in their hairline balance between states of being and unbeing, multiplying, destroying, creating and consuming
despite themselves.
It is grotesque but wonderful to watch them negotiate with the infinite.

(After all, what can a god know of death?)

aWill, All and Time do not disregard this experience, it is Their cosmic discourse. 

So are you.

Part of a brief existence, an unstable mass,
a cloud
that has condensed around a cell,
that rises in a space you did not create,
spreading across it,
You might deposit material before you dissipate.

Do not panic, do not turn from it, or be existentially distracted by it.
You too are a period at the end of a short sentence.

And when you are gone, the lines continue,
They pass weft between warps,
They speak and think, understand and question.
Galaxies are woven, complex tapestries that live until they fall apart. Dimensions grow, flower, fruit and decay in the belly of other dimensions. Stars burn out and collapse. There are holes that violently swallow worlds, and realities that tear out of others.

It is ongoing, endless.

Endless.

Until

It is not.

aWill, All and Time find Themselves satiated by the exercise, They have turned the object enough times. And have settled into an intolerable familiarity.

As in the beginning, that never was, there is silence.

Time, with a final sigh, folds herself into the arm of All,
who gathers Its skirt, pulling fistfulls of the expanse
into a singularity, into a point of want, of desire, of what can be, 

into

aWill.

In the beginning, that is the end, that is now is, aWill is waiting,
for a question it has no answer for.

-        Xhi Ndubisi

Atardecer/Sunset
Part Two

The membrane tears and the remaining amnion, mucilaginous fibres, pour out into the darkening sky. Your emergence can’t be long now.

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indigo slub indigo blue indigo slub indigo blue indigo slub indigo blue indigo slub indigo blue indigo

indigo slub indigo blue indigo slub indigo blue indigo slub indigo blue indigo slub indigo blue indigo

indigo slub indigo blue indigo slub indigo blue indigo slub indigo blue indigo slub indigo blue indigo

silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk

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blue yellow slub blue indigo slub blue indigo yellow slub blue indigo slub blue yellow indigoslub blue

slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub

indigo slub indigo blue indigo slub indigo blue indigo slub indigo blue indigo slub indigo blue indigo

indigo slub indigo blue indigo slub indigo blue indigo slub indigo blue indigo slub indigo blue indigo

indigo slub indigo blue indigo slub indigo blue indigo slub indigo blue indigo slub indigo blue indigo

   silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk

   indigo indigo indigo silk indigo indigo indigo silk indigo indigo indigo silk indigo indigo indigo silk

   indigo indigo indigo silk indigo indigo indigo silk indigo indigo indigo silk indigo indigo indigo silk

silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk

indigo slub indigo indigo slub indigo indigo slub indigo indigo slub indigo indigo slub indigo indigo

indigo slub indigo indigo slub indigo indigo slub indigo indigo slub indigo indigo slub indigo indigo

indigo slub indigo indigo slub indigo indigo slub indigo indigo slub indigo indigo slub indigo indigo

silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk slub silk

- Jo Manby || Xhi Ndubisi*

Footnote

Passing Cloud is a project that is experimental and exploratory. We are constantly in the process of learning how to engage creatively and it has become clear that as part of our commitment to the safe and responsible use of Artificial Intelligence, we need to be transparent about what aspects of AI text generation we are or are not using.

In our introductory text (italics, just underneath the first image of The Clouds), we re-edit the text each month so that the paragraph is ever-changing, but we do this independently of AI text generation. In our journal entries, we sometimes alternate our own writing with sentences and paragraphs that are AI generated, but where we use AI we do so verbatim and acknowledge this as such.

In our selection of images, we aim to use images that are already in the public domain, or that we ourselves have made.

Prose/poetry ParthenoGenesis and Atardecer/Sunset written independently of AI.

Add: *|| denotes a new way for us to acknowledge the contribution each of us makes to our work. The first name is the principal author, the second had contributed significantly to the work just short of authorship.