THE ARTIST

Almost a year has passed since I embarked on this strange, intense, surreal and ultimately deeply fulfilling journey. It began almost casually, with a simple observation about the way Leake Street seemed to function as a creative space and process. From there, it became a rabbit hole, then a rabbit warren, and at times something even more difficult to describe. I dread to think how much data has accumulated across my ChatGPT and Claude accounts alone, but somewhere within that enormous trail of conversations, experiments, failures, corrections and discoveries, a coherent direction kept emerging. It feels also important to mention I am presenting here the polished finished piece but I have also the unpolished version complete with insightful mistakes and epic wrong turns. There is a lot more to show and explain in more detail.

There was one simple dynamic that kept the ship on course despite the obvious pitfalls of working closely with AI platforms, including those old favourites, hallucination and sycophancy. AI has arrived in our lives with extraordinary speed and has raised profound questions about its effect on almost every part of human experience. I tend towards optimism. There are many things about this technology that are beyond my control, but over the past year I have developed equal measures of curiosity, caution and respect for tools that have themselves evolved at an astonishing pace while I have been using them. The most important thing, for me, has been to keep the human intention clear and to allow formal verification, evidence and repeated testing to challenge both my assumptions and the confident suggestions of the machines.

At heart, the experiment was very simple. I wanted to know whether an ordinary person, with a particular sensitivity to creativity and pattern, could take something observed in an extraordinary place like Leake Street and develop it into something genuinely new. I still do not know where any of this will lead, and I am comfortable with that. Perhaps it will open further mathematical or creative questions; perhaps it will simply remain what it is. Either way, I have had the privilege of making something that, as far as I understand it, is distinctive not because its individual ingredients are unprecedented, but because of the particular way those ingredients, art, observation, collaboration, AI, mathematics and formal proof, have been brought together.

I also owe an enormous thank you to everyone who has supported this peculiar journey, including those who had absolutely no idea what I was talking about but encouraged me anyway. Most especially, I want to thank the artists involved in MIND THE MAP, who were endlessly patient and extraordinarily generous in sharing their creativity. Their willingness to enter into a genuine exchange with me helped create the conditions from which so much of what followed became possible.

Dedicated to MICHAEL CRAIG