Human Intelligence prompts
THE WORK
A performance practice in which participants receive a daily prompt from the artist, with some granular amount of specificity, to be interpreted and executed through their own intelligence or action, documented/archived by the contributor, and returned to the artist. These prompts may take many shapes and forms, i.e. a simple title, a link to an article, prose, etc.
Documentation might consist of an image or video, prose or musing, a sound or song, AI generated media, meme, or any other file type <100mb in size, or <8mb if actuated via discord server.
The practice invites participants to consider a prompt with or without subtext, as a meditation or inspiration in their own creative practice throughout the duration of the program.
For Mars College 2023 I decided to take any opportunity to keep pushing forward my live coding practice. As soon as Vincent announced the intention to make daily prompts, I knew this was going to be a good motivator to keep at it.
The dynamic transformed into me actively waiting for the prompts many days. This led to noticing if a day was skipped, which got me into a loop of "prompting the prompter to be prompted". That emergent behaviour is quite telling of the future I think we will live; interacting with personal, private and communal conversational agents. That is, if the current trend of neural network chatbots does not collapse. Certainly, it would not be the first AI winter on this planet due to over-"hype" and over-"investment".
In any case, here I am presenting some results: 68 prompts in, roughly 4 hours of video content and some lessons learned. It is my will to let this accessible as a learning/inspiration resource for the live coding community. I made videos to show the performances I made with the patches shared everyday, as documentation of a way to use them. The patches are yours to remix, the same way many are remixes of different kinds of inputs.
I was also certainly worried about configuration and software drift, as my live coding interests are linked with my current exploration of declarative software dependency management. Originally, I wanted to use the prompts to push me to learn different live coding systems, but both learning how to hermetically declare dependencies (that is, to avoid implicit dependencies) and adapting to disparate software stacks was untenable for daily prompts.
Strudel saved the season. I could focus on other systems, taking my time to research and do trial and error, while keeping contributions going due to Strudel being executable on the browser. A follow-up action to this website is having the ability to serve it completely from a frozen browser and Strudel version, as an exercise of future-proofing these programs. For Strudel, the first attempt can be accessed in the curation of HIP patches I made for a Downtown LA show. For other live coding systems, some disorganised efforts are accessible through the KReKo project.
In summary, the previous points merge two tendencies that seem first at odds: archiving efforts and immediate interaction. I celebrate immediacy, I engage with it more and more for many aspects of my life. I also feel a responsibility to make these tools discoverable for future generations. Having the option to move between the two allows me to be deliberate about making a "unique" experience, whichever form that takes.