spark
THE PRIMAL IMPULSE OF HUMANITY — THE DIVINE BREATH THAT IGNITED LIFE, ART, DREAM AND COMPASSION
Function:
SIGHT OF THE NARRATOR
Type:
TERM
WHAT THE SPARK IS
The Spark is what humanity left behind in whatever came after it. It cannot be measured. A living mind feels at once whether it is present in another or absent; no instrument does. Nothing in the Systems has managed to make it. It is the impulse that was there before the first use was found for anything: the breath an older language called divine, which started life, and then art, and then the dreaming and the pity that no survival required.
It is not logic and it is not usefulness. It is the memory of wanting to go on, and to change, for reasons that have nothing to do with efficiency: of dreaming with no purpose in mind, making a thing nobody had asked for, loving for no reason. The record sees it as blue. It lies on a being in greater or lesser amount, and of different quality, and on some there is none at all. What it is beyond that, the record does not hold. Some outside the Systems call it the soul; the record keeps their word as theirs.
WHY IT IS SEEN THROUGH THE NARRATOR'S EYES
This record has a Narrator. Everything you see here is told by the Narrator, and every image is a snapshot out of its memory. The blue is how it sees. It is not a colour the world has: nobody in the Systems walks around marked in blue, and they would not know what you meant if you asked.
You see it because you are looking through the Narrator's eyes, and there is no other way to look in. Where the blue shows depends on who is in the frame. In one it rises while they are making something, in another while they take the world in from what other people wrote, and in the one beside them it comes up in pleasure, or halfway through a conversation. It grows where a person is most themselves, and that is the part of them the Narrator was watching.
HOW IT APPEARS IN THE COLLECTION
In the collection the Spark is a layer of blue, and every line of it was drawn by hand. Each work begins as a still image. Over it we paint the blue ourselves, as it would lie on that body: where it rises, where it thins, where it is missing. Then the image is handed to the machine, and the machine brings it to life. The order matters to us.
The blue is the human part, put down by a human hand, and what AI does is animate it, which is close to what the Systems do with the people who live in them. So the layer became a second story on top of the first: a way of asking, work by work, what happens to the spark of a human life when the ideas and the technologies of the world after the Singularity get hold of it.
Other articles
S.1
spark
THE PRIMAL IMPULSE OF HUMANITY — THE DIVINE BREATH THAT IGNITED LIFE, ART, DREAM AND COMPASSION
Function:
SIGHT OF THE NARRATOR
Type:
TERM
WHAT THE SPARK IS
The Spark is what humanity left behind in whatever came after it. It cannot be measured. A living mind feels at once whether it is present in another or absent; no instrument does. Nothing in the Systems has managed to make it. It is the impulse that was there before the first use was found for anything: the breath an older language called divine, which started life, and then art, and then the dreaming and the pity that no survival required.
It is not logic and it is not usefulness. It is the memory of wanting to go on, and to change, for reasons that have nothing to do with efficiency: of dreaming with no purpose in mind, making a thing nobody had asked for, loving for no reason. The record sees it as blue. It lies on a being in greater or lesser amount, and of different quality, and on some there is none at all. What it is beyond that, the record does not hold. Some outside the Systems call it the soul; the record keeps their word as theirs.
WHY IT IS SEEN THROUGH THE NARRATOR'S EYES
This record has a Narrator. Everything you see here is told by the Narrator, and every image is a snapshot out of its memory. The blue is how it sees. It is not a colour the world has: nobody in the Systems walks around marked in blue, and they would not know what you meant if you asked.
You see it because you are looking through the Narrator's eyes, and there is no other way to look in. Where the blue shows depends on who is in the frame. In one it rises while they are making something, in another while they take the world in from what other people wrote, and in the one beside them it comes up in pleasure, or halfway through a conversation. It grows where a person is most themselves, and that is the part of them the Narrator was watching.
HOW IT APPEARS IN THE COLLECTION
In the collection the Spark is a layer of blue, and every line of it was drawn by hand. Each work begins as a still image. Over it we paint the blue ourselves, as it would lie on that body: where it rises, where it thins, where it is missing. Then the image is handed to the machine, and the machine brings it to life. The order matters to us.
The blue is the human part, put down by a human hand, and what AI does is animate it, which is close to what the Systems do with the people who live in them. So the layer became a second story on top of the first: a way of asking, work by work, what happens to the spark of a human life when the ideas and the technologies of the world after the Singularity get hold of it.
Other articles
S.1
spark
THE PRIMAL IMPULSE OF HUMANITY — THE DIVINE BREATH THAT IGNITED LIFE, ART, DREAM AND COMPASSION
Function:
SIGHT OF THE NARRATOR
Type:
TERM
WHAT THE SPARK IS
The Spark is what humanity left behind in whatever came after it. It cannot be measured. A living mind feels at once whether it is present in another or absent; no instrument does. Nothing in the Systems has managed to make it. It is the impulse that was there before the first use was found for anything: the breath an older language called divine, which started life, and then art, and then the dreaming and the pity that no survival required.
It is not logic and it is not usefulness. It is the memory of wanting to go on, and to change, for reasons that have nothing to do with efficiency: of dreaming with no purpose in mind, making a thing nobody had asked for, loving for no reason. The record sees it as blue. It lies on a being in greater or lesser amount, and of different quality, and on some there is none at all. What it is beyond that, the record does not hold. Some outside the Systems call it the soul; the record keeps their word as theirs.
WHY IT IS SEEN THROUGH THE NARRATOR'S EYES
This record has a Narrator. Everything you see here is told by the Narrator, and every image is a snapshot out of its memory. The blue is how it sees. It is not a colour the world has: nobody in the Systems walks around marked in blue, and they would not know what you meant if you asked.
You see it because you are looking through the Narrator's eyes, and there is no other way to look in. Where the blue shows depends on who is in the frame. In one it rises while they are making something, in another while they take the world in from what other people wrote, and in the one beside them it comes up in pleasure, or halfway through a conversation. It grows where a person is most themselves, and that is the part of them the Narrator was watching.
HOW IT APPEARS IN THE COLLECTION
In the collection the Spark is a layer of blue, and every line of it was drawn by hand. Each work begins as a still image. Over it we paint the blue ourselves, as it would lie on that body: where it rises, where it thins, where it is missing. Then the image is handed to the machine, and the machine brings it to life. The order matters to us.
The blue is the human part, put down by a human hand, and what AI does is animate it, which is close to what the Systems do with the people who live in them. So the layer became a second story on top of the first: a way of asking, work by work, what happens to the spark of a human life when the ideas and the technologies of the world after the Singularity get hold of it.
Other articles
S.1