LEAKE STREET COLLABORATION 2015

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

— Henry V, Act IV, Scene III

I admit that, having gone down many dead ends, there could still be the smallest chink in the armour that I’ve not seen, or that has even escaped the acute eye of the AI, Claude. This feels very much part of the evaluation journey, and now Spectral Auditor V2.6 needs to be pulled apart and properly scrutinised. I mentioned the H Hierarchy to a friend who astutely observed that even if the whole thing were proved false in some way, it would still be a win, purely because of the intensity of the experience it produced and what it produced.

Leake Street has taught me one thing above all else: the work is never finished. Since I first stumbled into the space in October 2014, everything meaningful has come from the people I’ve met there and the conversations that followed. Ideas echo, overlap, and evolve through collaboration. Creativity, for me, has always come from connection. In that sense, the path that eventually led to Spectral Auditor V2.6 feels less like a plan and more like a natural continuation of that lineage.

There is a huge amount of process behind this work in its current form, compressed into a short four-week timeframe, that hasn’t been shown here yet. This was a conscious decision, made to avoid overwhelming people visiting the exhibition. It includes countless overlapping conversations with different AI systems (which will take some time to untangle), along with experimentation around how to approach them, provoke them, and push them into unfamiliar territory. Along the way, I developed techniques to generate more interesting results, and these will be shared in the near future.

Each AI platform has its own character and strengths, and together they have functioned almost like a team. At different moments they have acted as mirrors, stress-testers, and even antagonists. They have been invaluable, but they do not carry the human capacity to create meaning. That responsibility still sits with us. They can generate structure, but interpretation and consequence remain distinctly human.

What I’ve come to realise is that paradox plays an important role in this process. Paradoxes don’t resolve things neatly; instead, they create the space in which meaning can form. They hold tension long enough for something new to appear. That tension, rather than certainty, is where this work has lived.

The next phase depends on other people entering the conversation. Engineers, mathematicians, artists, researchers, builders, thinkers, and sceptics are all invited—not to agree, but to test, question, misuse, and reshape what’s here. Alongside the technical work, the practice continues through painting and collaboration in projects such as Mind The Map. These works operate differently, but they come from the same impulse: to trace patterns together and allow meaning to emerge through process rather than prescription.

Nothing here is final. Some things will fall away. Others will adapt into something new. If any of this resonates with your own way of working, that resonance is the invitation.

I can be contacted via email at marccraigartist@icloud.com.