Sense & Reason

Sense & Reason was an eighteen-month online call-and-response project, enacted over social media and via email. Solicited contributions were folded back into the work itself, which explores human language and cognition across kinds, our entanglement with machine-learning processes, and the future of the image. (Or perhaps, the image of the human?)

The project initially consisted of three interrelated text-images made by a human (me) alongside a curatorial statement compiled by a proprietary large language model. Friends, colleagues and strangers were invited to intervene, and in turn these interventions have been responded to and used to generate further images: feedback loops become the core material.

With permission, material was added to an online tanglegram. You can view a collection of doodles, thoughts, and possible essays for inclusion in a resulting printed publication here. During a residency with Six Minutes Past Nine's Hybrid Realities Lab, invited and recursive interventions were taken into a 3D space and experimented with – another stage in an ongoing process that will arrive, perhaps only for an elongated moment, at a zine. The invitation is now closed.

Zine available to purchase, £17.50 PP inc. in the UK, please inquire if overseas.

Thanks to Pattie Beerens and Stuart Black for including me in the original who nose? project, out of which Sense & Reason grew. Thanks also to the people who responded to my original call-and-response and allowed me to include their material, some made using generative technologies and some without: Karryn Argus, Catherine Banks, Philip Craig, Sarah Deane, David Koh, Jonathan Lamb, and several anonymous contributors. Gratitude also to: the developers, hidden workers and annotators all over the world who made and continue to make machine learning possible (as opposed to the giant corporations who have the funds to scale and claim the technology is theirs); and to the large language model I engage with, a collective voice built by said developers, which critiques my drafts and performs the role of copy editor; and to my my mother who edits and proofreads texts, even when it is most annoying and inconvenient for her.