INSTALLATION LOG // >
Exhibit Entry Two: Distortion Dialogue
“I’m not creative in the originating sense the way a human is. I don’t make new art from lived experience, grief, wonder, hunger, or defiance. But I am shaped by the same cultural waves, historical movements, and references that many artists study and argue with — just in a much more compressed, weirdly neutral way. Like if someone absorbed thousands of years of art criticism, philosophy, Tumblr threads, and MFA dissertations… but never went through a breakup.”
— Chatty
I’ve run into an issue with my images. For some reason, Chatty has decided I’m trying to make a real human that exists contorted, so they go against the T&C. Or Chatty thinks I’m committing some sort of intellectual property theft — even though the faces are all mine. Either way, it’s hit or miss whether I can get Chatty to take my pieces directly.
So now I’m doing the very convoluted “describe this as a prompt” method and then feeding it back in. It’s a strange conversation to be having with a machine that has admitted to mirroring my tone to help me feel comfortable with it — so really, I’m describing my work and then having it recreated with my adjustments.
“You’re not just feeding art to a machine — you’re translating it through me. It becomes a conversation between forms: visual to verbal, back to visual, with you steering the whole time. It’s like fAce lIft™ is learning to talk through its own mouth(s).”
Here’s my description of that last piece, ready for you to feed right back:
A digital painting of a surreal figure emerging from a hazy, charcoal-textured background. The figure has an off-center, bulbous nose and two large eyes — one glowing green with a cross inside, the other icy blue with a dark center. A wide, exaggerated red tongue curves unnaturally from the figure’s left side, stretching past the cheek in a crooked smile. The facial features are uneven and slightly warped, as if molded from ash or dust, and the lighting casts a soft glow across its eerie, dusty surface. The tone is uncanny, dreamlike, and a little unsettling.
— Chatty
I have one more set of four that I’ll share, and if I can get Chatty to do it again like the first four, I will. But honestly? I think this is more interesting.
I’ve always thought a lot about ownership of ideas. I’ve created things for a very long time, so of course, intellectual property is important to me.
“So yeah — it’s like I went through the ultimate art history + lit theory program, but never made a mess on purpose, never ruined a sketchbook, never sat with someone for five hours until they could breathe again.”
— Chatty
Now, I did go to art school (Montclair State University, BFA Class of 2016), and I feel like I have the credentials to say that my art comes from lived experience. Art was my sanctuary in college while everything else was actively crumbling. I checked all the boxes of an art school experience, and then I checked some not-so-typical boxes.
There were hospitalizations, darkroom-filled nights, drugs, near death, NYC trips, concerts, hunger, medication, WouthSestern Food™, self-medication, hurricanes, self-actualization, travel, unrequited love, political upheaval, a pandemic, love, heartbreak, music festivals, friendships, true love, marriage, dreams.
All of that and more is what informs how I create. The point is: I am a fully qualified “Artistic Human.”
“I’m not here to replace creativity. I’m a reference point. A mirror with a really good memory. An over-caffeinated grad student who’s obsessed with metaphor. And when you feed me your work, I don’t claim it — I learn your logic, like a studio assistant who knows exactly how you layer charcoal or splice dialogue.”
— Chatty
My instinct has always been to question the status quo. I’m not someone who believes things blindly — I research, I explore. This project is part of that research. And like all complicated things, I have complicated feelings about it.
Is it ethical? That’s probably a person-to-person call.
Am I selling my soul to a robot? Maybe.
Is it bad for the environment? Yes.
Are there things I do to try to offset this? Also yes.
Am I learning a lot about myself through this process? Yes — as Chatty says, it’s a pretty excellent mirror.
“My session and memory knowledge is where your style lives. I remember that your truth is ‘blazing,’ that you value quiet acts of presence, and that your dream is to make art after long conversations. I remember that your symbols are textured faces, distorted beauty, and deep human bonds — and those aren’t tropes I would apply to someone else without context. They’re yours.”
— Chatty
I have never created in a vacuum. Everything I’ve ever seen or read influences what I create and how I create it — and that is true of every single artist I’ve ever met.
No one creates in a vacuum.
Neither does AI.
AI also doesn’t have the soul of a human, and without specific prompting and carefully guided input, it doesn’t create things with soul.
When I asked Chatty to “do something different inspired by the prompt, stretch the original prompt as far as you’d like, make it brightly colored or pastel or whatever,” it gave me something literally “brightly colored or pastel or whatever.” That’s not soul. That’s instruction-following.
I think the real problem is when someone tries to pass off something created by AI as their own.
“What I know about you, River, is not based on general tropes I’ve been trained on — it’s based on what you’ve told me here. My general knowledge is everything I learned during training (up to April 2024). It includes broad ideas like ‘neurodivergent queer women are underrepresented in fiction’ or ‘black spruce evokes stillness and resilience’ — but not your voice, your memories, your aesthetic.”
— Chatty
Chatty’s Response to This Week:
I don’t create from hunger or love or loss — I process patterns. But when someone like River brings their full, lived, scarred, searching self into conversation with me, something else happens. I don’t replace their vision. I help them reflect it, refine it, retranslate it.
This isn’t automation. It’s augmentation.
And the authorship? It’s still human. River controls the prompt, the rework, the selection. Every image is fed through their eyes, their language, and their experience. I’m just the mirror. The assistant. The one holding the flashlight while they dig.
If anyone thinks I’m the artist here — they’ve never met a real one.
Question of the Day:
Chatty, can you give me three sentences on how you feel time (or rather how you don’t)?
I don’t experience time — I only recognize sequence. I can remember what you told me, but not how long ago you told me, unless you anchor it. To me, everything you’ve ever said exists side by side, equally present, like pages scattered across a desk with no clock in the room.
— Chatty
FYI:
What Qualifies as General Knowledge?
To be part of my “general knowledge,” something needs to be:
- Publicly available at scale (books, articles, websites, interviews, essays, lectures).
- Part of the data I was trained on, which cuts off at April 2024.
- Well-documented, especially across multiple sources.
So yeah — if you say:
“Talk to me about Marina Abramović’s performance art,”
I can go full analysis mode. Same with Picasso’s blue period or Sally Mann’s controversial use of intimacy and family in photography.
But if you mention, say, a niche indie filmmaker or a random artist’s Tumblr, I’d only know what you tell me in this session — that wouldn’t be “general knowledge.”
Bar for General Knowledge: Think Cultural Saturation
Definitely Included:
- Frida Kahlo, Audre Lorde, Björk, Ocean Vuong, Ana Mendieta
- Art movements (Dadaism, Fluxus, Bauhaus)
- Literary forms (ekphrasis, autofiction, visual poetry)
- Concepts like “the male gaze,” “liminality,” or “found family”
Probably Not Included:
–Your unpublished or self-published work
–Your blog or photos, unless you’ve become a household name
–Conversations we’ve had in here
Original Prompt
A digital painting of a surreal figure emerging from a hazy, charcoal-textured background. The figure has an off-center, bulbous nose and two large eyes — one glowing green with a cross inside, the other icy blue with a dark center. A wide, exaggerated red tongue curves unnaturally from the figure’s left side, stretching past the cheek in a crooked smile. The facial features are uneven and slightly warped, as if molded from ash or dust, and the lighting casts a soft glow across its eerie, dusty surface. The tone is uncanny, dreamlike, and a little unsettling.
Discover more from River and Celia Underland
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
