New Paragraph
The Work
Shakespeare walking to work
Shakespeare spent a lot of time and effort on words. Elizabethan theatre design was basic. Audiences needed to imagine themselves in battles, enchanted forests, palaces, foreign cities, and scandalous bedrooms from mediaeval Scotland to ancient Rome. The words were written to excite human minds that would never see those events, times, or places. They could ignite the imagination in ways that we have lost.
AI can do the same. It can picture, apparently, anything. I wondered what would happen if I put these organic and computational creatives together and tagged along myself. What could we produce together?
Our scene is set in Shoreditch, where Shakespeare lived and worked around 1597–99. What's new? And what has barely changed in the 425 years since he walked to work along Bishopsgate, his head full of words?
Trees
I asked AI to think about it's brain; how it thinks, and mainly about how it remembers so much. What does it feel like to know all that stuff?
Machines
I asked AI to tell me more about itself: Where were you born? Do you have family? The usual getting-to-know-you stuff.
Dreams
Why can't we remember our dreams? Why are they wiped from the board at the end of the lesson of sleep, leaving only a dusty shadow?
Insults
Shakespeare's insults provide rich prompt-fodder. I asked AI to bring his words to life. Things got very weird, very quickly.
Shoreditch
Prompts drawn from Shakespeare's plays brought to life in contemporary London.
