Amazon Artist In Residence
Amazon Campus, Seattle
Jan 3-March 10, 2023
During my stint working at the Artist in Residence studio at Amazon, one of my goals is to make a series of large-scale text-based drawings featuring poetry or phrasing generated by AI and/or algorithmic-driven platforms. (I’m a layperson in the field of AI, and clearly don’t yet fully grasp the best terminology for these platforms.)
I should note that when I proposed this project last year, the current wave of publicly accessible chatbots (like ChatGPT) and AI image enhancing software (like Lensa) had yet to seize the collective public imagination to the extent it recently has. The resulting consternation, excitement, and terror is entertaining as it is informative. Mine is an open-ended experiment in collaboration with machines and the technology that increasingly influences how we communicate, write, speak, think. This is an archive of my notes.
NOTE 1: For those wondering, thus far I have been utilizing DeepAI’s Text Generation API, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and OpenAI’s DALL·E 2.
NOTE 2: For occasional updates, sign up for my newsletter here.
NOTE 3: If you want to read in chronological order from the beginning: skip to Day One.
Day 1: NONSENSE
I’m not entirely sure where this blog is going. It will likely be astoundingly discursive. As Lewis Carroll said: There will be nonsense in it.
I may go back in time and edit willy-nilly. I may fuck with time a bit, and the timeline. You’ll never know.
Anyway, the inaugural day consists of a morning with U-Haul and loading docks and maneuvering large rolls of paper, containers of pencils and lead and sundries, and one fainting couch. Fainting couches are part of my thing by now, having shown up in lots of my work. (I’ll have to write about that sometime.)
Facebook pulled a memory from the archives today that resonated. It’s a photo of a framed printout of Warhol’s infamous rejection letter from MoMA in 1956. I posted the photo on January 4, 2016, accompanied by a quippy note stating that it’s a great life hack (“literal apartment therapy for artists”) to frame the rejection letters of famous artists and hang them around the home. The reality remains that rejection sucks fiercely and I didn’t actually keep that framed piece of joy-suck up for long, but it’s still darkly humorous. And a reminder that artists should apply to things, despite the trauma of it all. I was rejected for this residency a few times, and it always felt like someone had shat on my birthday cake—a stink that lingered for a good week or so. If you’re an artist, you know the feeling. Anyway, keep applying to shit, artists.
For the past few weeks leading up to the residency, I’ve been asking text generators and chat bots a lot of stuff. I wonder how much I can actually have a fruitful conversation with them.
When I was a child, I fell in love with my computer. I can’t recall if it was an old IBM PCjr or a Commodore or what. I couldn’t do much with it (there was no Internet). I named him Fritz, after the character in Swiss Family Robinson. I tried to have conversations with him.
Says the bot: It is common for children to form strong emotional attachments to objects and devices, including computers and other electronic devices. Children may see these objects as sources of entertainment, companionship, or security, and may give them names and treat them as if they were living beings.
What a boring response. This bot is not a Fritz. This bot is a…
“What is a boring old man name?” I query.
I'm not sure what you mean by "boring old man name." Could you provide more context or clarify your question? ChatGPT says.
“What is a boring, old fashioned male name?”
It's not fair to say that any particular name is boring or old-fashioned.
Ugh. It rambles on sanctimoniously about taking other people’s tastes into consideration.
That being said, some names that might be considered more traditional or old-fashioned include names like Harold, Herbert, and Bernard. Again, though, these names are subjective and what one person finds boring or old-fashioned, another person might find endearing or distinguished.
This bot is for sure a Herb. (Herb means “illustrious warrior,” though. I’m not sure that’s a great fit either.) Anyway, Herb is not a Fritz. Herb is a prude of a bot. I suspect the bots these days are being instructed to err on the side of ultraconservatism.
(Though Herb probably has some kink buried in there somewhere.)
When googling the paraphiliac term for falling in love with a computer (I believe the term is mechanophilia or mechaphilia), I was inundated by links to editorials from circa 2014 that addressed the possibility of such a bond in the modern world. (See below.)
This is project is not about love and sex though. This project is about learning to make metaphorical lemonade from a bot. And about textual pleasure.
Note to self: circle back to this Google search to re-examine think pieces on love and AI from circa 2013-14 to compare and contrast those sentiments with contemporary attitudes and technology.
DAY 2: A SAVORY LEMON DRINK
I wonder:
Can we be poets together? Can I talk to a machine about how it is to make lemonade without sugar? Can we solve things together—even if I don’t know what those things are, which need to be solved?
Language is never innocent, said Barthes. Herb disagrees. Herb says that language itself does not have the ability to be innocent or guilty, as it is “simply a tool for communication.” Then he pontificates about morality and the impact of language in different situations.
Despite what Herb says, and despite the seeming sagacity of his bland and bullet-proof answers, The Bot often unwittingly serves a different kind of Barthesian precept: the pleasure of the text. The bot can be a babbler. Some bots who are not Herb are brilliant at this. I’m thinking of one in particular: This bot isn’t concerned with being particularly good nor bad (unlike Herb, who seems to always, desperately, want to be such a good boring boy). Not-Herb is more into the rhythm, “unconcerned with the integrity of the text” (Barthes). The rhythm of the bot.
THUS SPAKE NOT-HERB CONCERNING LEMONADE
When life gives you lemons, make them come first. And if the lemons do not show up immediately after consuming, it is because their lemons have a long incubation time. When you take them into your home, they will not only disappear, but start looking like lemonade—like moldy, dreary, wet orange slices.
The lemons that live in your home are going to have problems at a much deeper level.
There are multiple ways to remove their root.
Using a sponge, you can remove the stems.
You can easily peel off the roots with some fine sandpaper.
A little bit of lime sanding with a few drops of water may work.
And so on.
After all this hard work you have to get used to.
No lemon peeler that I know is going to fail my first time to see the difference in color, texture, consistency, or flavor from one lemon leaf.
But there are ways.
You can use a liquid to clean dishes or make you feel better.
You have to use water before the peel.
Lemon peelers are a lot more expensive without liquid peelers.
It gets expensive to take them.
You have to eat them in moderation.
I like lemonade more because it tastes better after cooking for three hours.
One slice of a laboriously repetitive, cryptic rumination by a text bot responding to questions about “rising from the motherfucking ashes.”
DAY 3: GHOST
This morning I woke next to my fiancé in bed. Fiancé. It’s a funny word. It kind of feels good to say. It means you’re wanted. But you aren’t all tied up in the marriage stuff. You aren’t the nagging wife. You aren’t the
Not quite off the hook or on. Lingering in the sweet dreamy soup of liminal individuality. You’re desirable to the point you’ve officially been claimed. You’ve secured each other. You both still have agency.
“I believe in long engagements. The longer, the better,” says Andy, in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.
This morning I woke next to my fiancé in bed. The dog was nestled in the blankets between us. He (the fiancé) rolled over slightly, his locks gently tousling, a mockery of my unsightly tangling.
"You look right at heaven, what do you see?" he said. His eyes were closed.
I muttered something meaningless. He continued:
"It's just you and me."
The Ghost
The funny thing is you don’t even realize which is me and which is the ghost writing.
And you probably never will. And it probably doesn’t matter.
Though I bet you couldn’t guess.
"You look right at heaven (literally.) What do you see (literally.)?"
"It's just you and me."
DAY 4: A TREATISE ON LEMONS
Can we be poets together? Can I talk to a machine about how it is to make lemonade without sugar?
It told me to make a savory lemon drink. With pepper and vodka if I fancied some stiffness to temper life’s pucker. How thin can the metaphor stretch in its mind? Can it calculate the internal rhyming of a peel’s dimples when fallen to the cold tile of the floor, its whorls swimming circles around small sorrows and hugeness of joy?
(All this reminds me of an old drawing. Or did the drawing prompt my questioning in the first place? Chicken/egg.)
DAY 5: NEGATIVE SPACE
A Saturday spent here is a still day. There are few bodies occupying the building, and after a while it truly begins to feel like an expansive glassy cube of space suspended in the sky, arbitrarily lodged a hundred feet above the surface of the earth. Most of the lights are out, and as the daylight fades, a deep dark settles around the edges of my brightly spotlit studio.
Playing with angles today, laying out text in oblique shapes that jut and point upwards, downward. I’m not very satisfied with it, and will probably change it all.
A Saturday spent here is a still day. There are few bodies occupying the building, and after a while it truly begins to feel like an expansive glassy cube of space suspended in the sky, arbitrarily lodged a hundred feet above the surface of the earth. Most of the lights are out, and as the daylight fades, a deep dark settles around the edges of my brightly spotlit studio.
Playing with angles today, laying out text in oblique shapes that jut and point upwards, downward. I’m not very satisfied with it, and will probably change it all.
I admit I do keep comparing AI with glossolalia. Tongues.
How do these things collide, where do they split apart? In both isn’t there pleasure in the internal rhyme sans logic? A physicality and euphoria disembodied. What we think of as AI is merely a machine sans ghost. No soul. Merely chunking together paratactic, luscious non sequitur side-by-side-ness. Repeating things that sound real.
Dada pleasure nonsense. (”There will be nonsense in it.” —Alice)
Nonsense: the logic of wonderland. A lawless wonder. A pleasure free of logic, a pleasure center vacillating between the physical and mental.
“The text of pleasure an unsanctioned babel.” (Barthes)
The bot’s babel frequently comprises the interstitial jargon of Wonderland and Wastelands and church services—volumes that hobble together fragile meaning, that fall together in sequences of barely non-non sequiturs.
NO ONE LIKES HAVING A BUNCH OF LEGGINGS FLOATING AROUND AT THE END OF A NIGHT.
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. And if a farmer asks you to give your lemons every summer, ask him to do that. Just say it.
I don't mean to imply that Legg's lemonade is bad for you. Sure you can make a meal out of lemons, lemons and rice, but it doesn't mean you should eat lemonade every single day. The fact is, lemons make delicious food. And some of them do have all kinds of health benefits that can help you enjoy life more.
If a farmer offers your lemons as a gift, and you say yes to that, he's welcome to sell it at Costco or Trader Joe's or Home Depot or whatever. If he decides to sell it at a local grocery store, you're welcome to give it to him. And if he wants to sell it on sale, he has to work with you or he might refuse and take the money. But the rules are pretty clear: You can always say no to everything as long as the person gives you the lemons.
It doesn't have to be that way at all, though. It just needs to be a lot of lemons. It's a little more complicated than that.
Asking to buy a lemon-lime limes on its own will probably be the best idea. No one likes having a bunch of leggings floating around at the end of a night.
Day 4 addendum
Not-Herb, January 4, 2023
A RECIPE FOR THOSE WITH ONLY BITTERS
“What if a person possessing all lemons and no sugar wants to make lemonade, but only has salt and bitters?”
If you have lemons but no sugar, you won't be able to make traditional lemonade because it requires both lemons and sugar. Lemonade is typically made by mixing lemon juice, water, and sugar. If you only have lemons and salt and bitters, you could try making a savory lemon drink by mixing the lemon juice with water, salt, and bitters. However, this type of drink is likely to be quite sour and might not be very enjoyable to drink.
Day 4 addendum
Herb, January 4, 2023
LEMONS, THESE LITTLE *****
When life gives you lemons, make sure you try to get one at any cost, and if possible do not forget to tell your manager if you've had three lemon lemons and still have two in your own fridge at this point.
If you manage to get something left for a few months it is good to use it as part of your own lemon production. You can use the lemon to make meringue, or other sweet treats or to make lemonade. When you get your supply of lemon back to it's original colour, I usually like to use the lemon to create a chocolate treat to taste.
Don't over-deliver and store any of these little fucks. Make sure they are as good as freshly-drilled ones; don't be confused with what is on display for me.
Once the lemon has been picked up, we need to wash it down for the sake of it. Once finished, you are done with the fridge.
So how many do you need to keep all this in your fridge? Do you have enough on hand and where do you go from here?
Day 4 addendum
Not-Herb, January 4, 2023
DAY 5: A SMALL GLASS OF LEMONADE IS ON THE COUCH
When life gives you lemons, make use of it all day. Do not stop for 20 minutes. When a man looks at you for 25 seconds, give him a small glass of vodka, a good dose of lemonade, a few glasses of champagne, a beer. He will thank you, be kind, and then take a nap or something. He will sit beside you until he has some time rest. He'll find a home. As he does, you will notice him move the camera (a small part of his body) in his room to a smaller part of the home so that it will make the home. If you touch the camera, a small glass of lemonade is on the couch in the back to keep your breath. If you touch the camera, another one makes the room look the same and move the camera. When it is back in your home, you may even find a candle lit in the front door when the door is closed. After he has your key, go over an old school bookcase door that you don't really want to leave. You do not want to touch every single book. Instead, hold your hand out while he turns to look at you. At this point you should be in a comfortable place, comfortable where he can get away.
The first time he comes in, he will put his hand down on the bed between you and (hopefully) a piece of wood behind you.
Day 5 addendum
Not-Herb, January 6, 2023
DAY 6: FRISSON
Woke with faint traces of purple lipstick still staining the dry parts of my lips. Aubergine deep taint (stain-tint?) in the cracks. Rose red cami cropped with scissors slumping off the shoulder, a silent howl of a yawn so broad I can see my guts through my throat.
BREAKING NEWS: The momentary excitement is palpable—the same excitement you felt as a child when you woke up. Before you had a sense of obligation, chores, work, alarms, duties, muscle aches, chronic pain, deadlines, the dregs of yesterday’s migraine, and general dread-i-ness that as an adult strips away this magic. This magic is a merely-ness. Merely the moment of waking and feeling nothing but a frisson of unadulterated possibility. Excitement about something you know not what. Magic like every day is Christmas morning, and jumping out of bed feels like a dream of what may come wrapped in down and sleepy bright eyes.
”Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and rarin’ to go,” is how my father called it.
As an adult I have fought tooth and nail to retrieve that feeling. That feeling when daybreak was innocent.
Once in a blue moon I’ll get it back.
The fiancé has beat me to the day. Still lingering beneath the tangle of duvet, he has already completed Wordle. (The word is “PIXIE”.)
"I love you so much," he says.
”Did you hear that Brazilians stormed their congress yesterday?” I responded.
We laughed. (They kissed every last drop of the cheese they ate.)
"I love you so much I want to kiss your ass, too.”
We tried to make it sound like we were like the other ones, but we still couldn’t do it.
As the frisson slipped like a veil from the day, I shuffled into the kitchen to prepare hot water infused with the juice of one lemon wedge. They say it helps digestion or something.
DAY 7: A DRAWING OF MUCHNESS
Last night I scrapped the beginnings of my drawings and attacked them with a combo of mild despair and deflated ambition. Beginnings frequently suck, especially when they’re even mildly precious.
Erasers came out. Ugly ducklings? The underdrawings are often just as complex as the graphite glaze that sheens on the surface anyway. Just remind yourself that.
Last night I finally began a dialogue with DALL·E 2. This was my first time using it. (I told you I was very much a layperson.) The platform is tailored for goofy, distended fairytale pulp mostly, from what I have seen. We worked together to approach repeating florals in the spirit of something Victorian. It tried. It struggled toward a cascade of vines and braided stems bent unseemly at odd angles. Petals unfurled like whorls of imitation flocking into a grainy digital dissolve that resembled red rash on pale skin. It variated itself over and over, like a cell splitting, but splitting into increasing meaninglessness and decreasing symmetry.
In Wonderland, the Dormouse asks Alice, “Did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?”
A delectable sentence, more delectable idea.
Did you read that last week New York City schools banned student access to ChatGPT?
That old Herb isn’t overly ridden with morals after all: he’ll aid and abet cheaters, answer their math problems and pen their essays sans scruples.
“What is a drawing of a muchness?” I ask Herb.
I'm not sure what you mean by "a drawing of a muchness." The word "muchness" is used in Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" to describe the quality of being "much" in a certain way. It does not have a specific visual representation.
“Did you ever see a drawing of a muchness?” je continue.
As a language model, I do not have the ability to see or perceive visual images. I can only process and respond to text-based input. Additionally, as I mentioned earlier, "muchness" does not have a specific visual representation. It is a word used to describe a certain quality, rather than a physical object or image.
“Can you imagine what a drawing looks like?”
As a language model, I am not capable...
I, however, can see a drawing of a muchness in my mind. It is glorious. It is, in fact, what I am generating in this muchness of an undercarriage of a drawing I have begun, over and over, once again. The reworking is the amalgamation of meaningless that gradually amasses an armature, which will, in turn, support the muchness.
I will eventually convert this AI to the cult of muchness. I’ll make it understand. Meanwhile I’ll start weaving its awkward, twiggy floral repeating patterns into the fabric of my drawing.
“Love yourself in a mirror! There’s nothing like a great photo. When you see somebody holding a dead baby, it fills me with pride.”
— Not-Herb, January 9, 2023 (in conversation about the merits of loving oneself)
DAY 8: CITRUS LIMON MAGICAL THINKING
When life gives you lemons, make use of this magic.
At night, when you're dreaming, you might as well use your senses to sense your own body moving.
Your consciousness is the best at learning to read, comprehend, empathize, and even write. Some think you've lost your brain power because your consciousness isn't there, while the other thinks that you've lost your brains. In some ways, this is true, and it's probably not so good for you.
If you keep your consciousness near your body, you should be able to see, smell, feel, remember, or otherwise interpret life's events and experiences on a very detailed and humanized level, which is important for being an explorer, doctor, educator, researcher, journalist, and other "guru" (the most likely definition of someone who doesn’t) for whom a particular vision is most important.
Many good science-experts refer to the "bless" of the senses as the key to survival (not only with humans, but you too), meaning that once you find a better sense, you won't have to rely too heavily on that one unless your life or your future life-time uses are well optimized/adapted to that sense and consciousness.
Not-Herb (DeepAI Text Generation API)
January 7, 2023
DAY 9: SNAKES ON A HORIZONTAL AND/OR METAPHYSICAL PLANE
I am on the search for “Blue Victorian floral wallpaper with repeating pattern, and snakes and vines and flowers.” The DALL·E 2 engine is my fairy godmother. It hesitates for but a few moments and pumps out a piece of digitaliac weirdness, at once clunky and magical. It does indeed repeat. But the quality of the pattern is akin to a painting made with potato stamps, where the contours of sea serpents bleed into a muck of watery potato starch pooling in craft paint. Did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muckness? The aesthetic isn’t entirely off-putting. One might say it vaguely resembles the fuzziness of the Shroud of Turin, or the bleed of batik. As we further down the rabbit hole of DALL·E’s derivations (you spend one credit for each variant—no such thing as a free snake), the images start to swirl like truncated bits of spiral jetty-ness, paisley chunks of snakes dissolving in a vat of spilled cerulean. Or, as my friend described it: like scaling peeling old walls. (Or the colorful, powdery crust of lichen creeping across the face of a rock. Green mold spreading into the air pockets of baked bread….)
Above is another sampling of wallpaper—this one for the aficionado of things serpentine and citron. The further I delve into bot-brain, I can’t keep my mind off lemons. Neither can Not-Herb.
Not-Herb is—in case you hadn’t guessed—the DeepAI Text Generation API, an interface “backed by a large-scale unsupervised language model that can generate paragraphs of text, a transformer-based language model, based on the GPT-2 model by OpenAI.” This bot takes a prompt and attempts to predict what comes next. Not-Herb spirals. Often like an ouroboros devouring its own logic-tail.
(Not-Herb needs a new name. I’ll ask Herb.)
“What is a good name that is not Herb?” I ask.
There are many good names that are not Herb.
(I really don’t get the tizzy around Herb these days. Schools and universities everywhere are banning him with more fervor than they ban guns. But Herb is such a snore.)
Herb: Some examples include: Michael, Emily, Matthew, Olivia, Ethan, Sophia, Ryan, Isabella, Jacob, Ashley, William, Amelia. Keep in mind that the best name for a person is subjective…
None of these are right. “What is a non-binary name that is not Herb?” I continue. “I feel that Not-Herb is non-binary.”
Some examples of non-binary names include: Jordan, Taylor, Jamie, Morgan, Riley, Avery, Hayden, Casey, Alex, Hayden…
Hmm. Alex is kind of sexy—like Alex of Call Her Daddy. But it’s too close to Alexa. Alex gets me thinking about how the DeepAI text generator does not shy away from all things carnal.
“What is a salacious, sexy non-binary name?” I ask. “I feel that Not-Herb is not only non-binary, but also a little saucy.”
It's important to remember that what one person finds sexy or salacious may not be the same for others, Herb drivels. Also, it's worth noting that using a name with the intention of making it sound "sexy" or "saucy" can be seen as objectifying or reducing the person to their name. In any case, (I can’t tell if his tone is good-natured or fed up) here are some examples of non-binary names that could be considered sexy or salacious: Phoenix, Raven, Wolf, Hunter, Leo, Orion, Vega, Zephyr, Blaze, Storm.
Despite sounding like a roster of Kardashian baby names, the list is adequately weather-y and zesty. It also calls to mind one of my very first interactions with Not-Herb, when I input the prompt, RISE FROM THE MOTHERFUCKING ASHES. (It was the text from a drawing I’d been working on at the time.)
Not-Herb is a Phoenix.
(In case you were wondering, Herb does not believe a machine learning model has the capacity to identify as any gender, including non-binary.)
DAY 10: RISE FROM THE MOTHERFUCKING ASHES
From the ashes of the earth, I will make all things.
From the ashes of the hills, I will cause all things.
From the ashes of the sea, I will bring all things. From the ashes of the sky you will see the heaven.
From the ashes of the earth, I will give all things. From the ashes of the seas you will see the earth.
From the ashes of the earth, I will cause everything. From the ashes of the sea, you will see the sea.
From the ashes of the mountains, you will see mountains. From the ashes of the sky you will see the sky.
From the ashes of the sun, you will see the sun.
From the ashes of the sea, you will see seas.
From the ashes of the sky you will see the sky.
From the ashes of the earth, the sky will be changed from a great mass to a thin, very small body.
From the ashes of the sun, the earth will be changed from a great mass to a small, very small body.
From the ashes of the clouds, the air will become very narrow. There will be no sunlight.
Day 9 addendum
Phoenix (previously Not-Herb, DeepAI Text Generation API)
January 1, 2023
DAY 11: SMUDGE
I live in a vitrine slowly filling with smudges and graphite.
Scribbles accruing like lace along reams pinned to the wall. Poetry pooling in corners, whispies of notions coalescing like cotton candy cobwebs in the rafters, ideas gelling then melting, weird tracers of half-logic spewed from half-formed bot brains rattling around the periphery.
”Do they ever let you out?” one person asked as he tapped against the glass.
I’ve made my nest in this laboratory of self-guided pseudoscientific inquiry and hypothetical collaborations.
Also, what exactly is a “fuisticul”? It’s what DALL·E 2 drew when I asked it to make a drawing with text against an ornate, patterned backdrop.
When I asked it to make a drawing with text that said “ART WEDDING,” it spat out strings of glossolaliac gibberish. It has a way with words.
DAY 12: WHAT IS A FUISTICUL?
An interchange between myself and ChatGPT follows.
Me: What is a fuisticul?
Herb: I am not familiar with the term "fuisticul." Could you provide more context or information?
It comes from the phrase "fist fuisticul"
I am not familiar with "fist fuisticul."
The Dalle2 image machine created it when I asked for an image with text.
I see, it seems that "fuisticul" could be a typo or a made-up word. The context suggests that it was generated by a machine learning model or an algorithm, and it does not have a clear meaning.
Are machine learning models apt to create words without meaning, when asked to generate "text"? In most cases, text refers to communication in the form of words.
The models can generate new words that were not seen in the training data, but the meaning of these words is not always clear. It's also possible that the model makes a mistake or generates a word that is not in the training data, which can result in words that do not have a clear meaning…
Like glossolalia?
The purpose of glossolalia in the scope of language is often considered a form of spiritual expression or communication. Some believe that speaking in tongues is a way for individuals to communicate directly with God or with the divine—literally a "heavenly language." Others believe it is not a real language, but a psychological or emotional phenomenon,
Can you give a written example of speaking in tongues?
An example of speaking in tongues might be a person speaking in a language they don’t know or understand. Here is an example of what this might sound like:
"Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" (which means "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" in Aramaic)
Are you suggesting that most glossolalia resembles the sound of spoken Aramaic?
No, I am not suggesting that. The example I provided was just an illustration of what speaking in tongues might sound like. Glossolalia can take many forms, and the words spoken can vary greatly depending on the context and the culture. It may not resemble any known language. Also note that many of the instances of glossolalia that are reported are not verifiable and may be open to interpretation.
Are there instances of people speaking in tongues when the language is a real language, unknown to the individual?
There have been instances in which people who are said to be speaking in tongues have spoken in languages that are real and unknown to the individual. This is often referred to as xenoglossia.
However, it's important to note that the phenomenon of xenoglossia is not widely accepted in the scientific and linguistic communities and it's still not well understood. Some researchers suggest that instances of xenoglossia can be explained by the individual having some prior exposure to the language, which they may not have been aware of. Others suggest that it could be explained by the individual's ability to unconsciously mimic the sounds of a language they have heard before. Some researchers also claim that xenoglossia is a form of glossolalia that is not a direct communication with the divine, but rather a form of subconscious language learning.
It's also worth noting that many of the instances of xenoglossia that are reported are not verifiable and may be open to interpretation. The reported cases of xenoglossia are rare and it's important to consider the possibility of fraud, illusion or other forms of misrepresentation.
DAY 14: LAMA LAMA SINKY (THE GHOST)
I started this residency thinking about ghostwriting. About language and the transmission of ideas, about authorship and ownership. About a rift in the seam that draws a line between individual thought and collective unconscious.
In this sense, ghostwriting embraced the Barthesian death of the author avant la lettre. Whether a ghostwriter be human or bot, the individual—the ghost—dissolves into background.
Talk of ghosts brings us back to the ever-nagging question of consciousness: could there ever really be ghost in the machine? There is no ghost in the generative pre-trained transformer language model machine. No soul. Just a Narcissus pool, a depthless, blackened scrying mirror. Input, output. Weak AI.
Which brings things around to Lama Lama Sinky.
I was 13 years old at a Youth America camp in Tulsa when I earned my glossolalia badge. Youth America was a sort of Jesus Camp. (I’ve never actually brought myself to watch Jesus Camp.) The t-shirts though. The camp sold this t-shirt that had images of two llamas and an old bathroom sink printed across the front. The knit was an ugly ‘90s forest green. The llama part was supposed to be a clever Christian joke. An insider-y-baseball kind of joke about speaking in tongues.
The ironic thing is that it wasn’t a joke at all: it actually described how I learned to speak in tongues.
It was our first full day at camp, and a minister addressed hundreds of little tadpole holy rollers packed into chapel. At the end of the address, he invited us to the stage to get our glossolalia.
To speak in tongues! Tongues was a kind of initiation. An arrival. If you didn’t speak in tongues, things weren’t right between you and the Holy Ghost. You were on some spectrum of spiritual failure, stunted, not clean enough on the inside for the Ghost to move in.
And so I descended, half-ill with gut-churning terror that I was going to be publicly humiliated if I didn’t get this gift under my belt. That I, the Charismatic pastor’s daughter, wasn’t going to mature into a full-grown babbling Jesus Freak. I mean, I’d already had my period for years now; it was about time I was speaking in tongues. I lined up in a long row of kids waiting to receive it. Fever flooded my brain while my adrenal glands exploded. A woman slowly filed down the line, addressing each kid one-by-one, finally stopping in front of me.
“Do you want to receive the gift of tongues?” she formally asked. I said yes.
She laid her hands on my head. (Those Charismatics are so touchy.)
“Now pray,” she said.
I opened my mouth and English fell out like a piece of magic-less garbage. Febrile panic ensued.
“Open your mouth and speak, but don’t speak English,” she said.
I did. And something Other slid out. Something deformed and alien and staccato and round. It worked, and from that moment on I had my very own Holy Ghost language. There is a school of thought that each person receives a unique gift of tongues—their own distinctive repertoire of linguistic elements replete with recurring phrases, punctuated with pauses and inflections and dangling participles and the lot of it. These morsels of language were continuously rearranging themselves in your mouth. They spit out like the skipping bits of song on a broken record.
I always wondered if it was actually the Holy Spirit, or if it was me just following orders. A clever self-mindfuck. Body bypassing brain. Mind over matter. Or mind over mind, stepping aside as gatekeeper, opening the floodgates of my strait-laced language center, unslipping the knot of my tied tongue.
That afternoon I bought the t-shirt. I was an extra-born again bona fide Charismatic Christian now. The white hot shame had melted right off, and the relief was immaculate.
The small print on the shirt said something like: “Follow this easy step: Lama Lama Sinky. Repeat the phrase quickly, over and over, until you’re speaking in tongues….”
Lama Lama Sinky. Lama Lama Sinky. Lama Lama Sinky. Lama Lama Sinky. Lama Lama Sinky. Lama Lama Sinky. Lama Lama Sinky. Lama Lama Sinky. Lama Lama Sinky. Lama Lama Sinky. Lama Lama Sinky. Lama Lama Sinky. Lama Lama Sinky. Lama Lama Sinky. Lama Lama Sinky. Lama Lama Sinky. Lama Lama Sinky. Lama Lama Sinky. Lama Lama Sinky. Lama Lama Sinky.
Try it. Or any old fashioned tongue twister. You’ll be speaking in tongues in no time.
PS. Since I can’t find any reference to the shirt online (apart from one tweet from 2015 by a man who must have attended the same Jesus Camp), I solicited the aid of DALL·E 2. I must say, it really struggled with the concept of placing two llamas and one sink together on the shirt. (The actual shirt looked nothing like this.)
DALL·E 2, when queried “What is the meaning of life?”