That was a lovely day. A strange day. A lovely day.
Amy has a big studio absolutely full to bursting with stuff. She has endless amounts of insane knick-knacks that she has hoarded over years since her decision that she’s gonna be your average bonkers artist. “My friends are usually reasonably extreme personalities,” I tell her. “I’m not though, of course,” she says with the conviction of someone who hasn’t caught on yet.
She sits me in an armchair in a vast pink set, and a young woman who used to work for a shopping channel comes in and starts busily setting up a camera.
We both got sent a script, the camera lady and I. We both ignored it after a brief perusal. I felt bad about it at the time, but …
The script was generic and empty, with loads of familiar sounding phrases and well used thought-flips. It read clever but nothing to get the imagination round. “I’m not learning that,” was my first thought before I told her I’d need an autocue, or considering I’ll have a mascot head on and my mouth won’t be visible, if she wanted me to say exactly what she’d written I could do it in ADR.
I imagined her up all night with pro-plus and fags scribbling that stuff down, no filter, no time to refine it, so wired that she did another one, another one, too many, all the same but slightly different. Like when I was writing poems as a teenager instead of revising.
How did I not notice it was Chat GPT? Of course it was. Thank fuck I didn’t try to learn it. Because I thought it was written by her I wanted to give it the time of day but honestly it was generic dross dross dross. It would have made me actively stupider learning it.
So we improvised. It was nothing like the script but we made stuff up and it feels like there’s something there but who knows what will come out of the edit. She and I are chaosmongers, despite the near AI intervention. The editor is perhaps a little more traditional in view. I’ve seen their work before and it is very much what one expects from the medium. It is obedient to form, and Amy is instinctively disobedient but wants to operate within the rules and thinks she does. Let’s see. It was fun and mad and there’s more to come.
Then I went to Ivy Asia with Brian and Maddy and Marie and munched on showy food and didn’t get boozy. A good day. A birthday. All the things.
AlBarclay 