The Rings of Hallucinations
W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn is a seminal piece of writing. Ground breaking in it’s style and approach. To do it a complete injustice, it’s a narrative of a walk around the county of Suffolk. At various jump points the narrator takes the reader on a whirlwind trip through history and across the globe with multiple threads entwined throughout.
As a “thought” experiment I connected the similarity of the words of Sebald, my knowledge and my imagination to that of prompts, “AI” context and “AI” generative image creation. I was interested to see what “AI” would make of Sebald’s writing.
The original was written in Sebald’s native German and translated into English which make the poetic and descriptive writing even more remarkable.
Whilst The Rings of Saturn contains photographs and illustrations, indeed whole areas of research have emerged around Sebald’s use of these, the readers imagination is triggered at every page and narrators turn.
It struck me that a reasonable amount of reading, knowledge and context was needed to bring these imaginings to life. This is by no means a criticism of Sebald’s writing! The magic of Sebald’s writing is his ability to draw separate threads from history and place together to make considerably more than the sum of their parts.
As a “thought” experiment I connected the similarity of the words of Sebald, my knowledge and my imagination to that of prompts, “AI” context and “AI” generative image creation. I was interested to see what “AI” would make of Sebald’s writing.
Using extracts from the more descriptive parts of The Rings of Saturn I asked an “AI” to create an image. You can nudge and direct these “AI”s somewhat but I left it to it’s own devices. Some passages had to be adjusted to remove parts that the “AI”‘s content restrictions deemed unsuitable.
The initial results were quite startling. Not wanting to abuse Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and just create some “AI” slop I decided to create some physical postcards. I also made them appear as if the narrator sent them from within events of the narrative to the narrator. For the text on the postcards, I fed each image back into the “AI” and prompted it to create some postcard style writing from it.
I went on to create 18 physical postcards in total. The “AI” generated image on one side, and “AI” generated postcard oriented text on the other. I addressed the postcards to the unnamed narrator, addressing them to the Norfolk and Norwich hospital that the narrator was convalesing in after his breakdown. To continue the theme of automation and computerisation to the postcards I used a pen plotting machine to physically write the text on the back.
To be able to address the postcards I made up the name Earl Framlingham, a reversal of the village of Framlingham Earl where Sebald is buried.
The use of “AI” is highly contentious and the use of text from The Rings of Saturn questionable. I made these purely as an investigation of how “AI” might or might not be used in a creative practice. I beg forgiveness from Sebald and any devotees that I will probably have deeply offended. It was not my intention to deminish Sebald and his work.