A Fun Exchange with Chadwick

The Decent into Art Speak

Photo by 烧不酥在上海 老的 on Unsplash

Here is a fun exchange with Chadwick that I thought you might enjoy. Normally I will write something of an essay about a topic of interest and then put it through ChatGPT to ‘clean it up’ and expand into an article. Then I will copy and paste it into my journal or directly into a substack draft and then start editing it into it’s final form changing what I don’t like or adding more detail until it says what I have on my mind.

In this case I put one of my lengthy, off the cuff comments made to another writer on substack into ChatGPT and asked it to clean it up into a possible article. I then asked for several versions of the same article with different venues in mind for publication slowly descending into a full scale parody of Art Speak or what some are calling INTERNATIONAL ART ENGLISH which gets super funny if you can make it out. I included all of the prompts so that you can follow the changes.

It is interesting to watch the transformations in tone and language from one to the next. There are probably more iterations than you want to sift through so feel free to skim through but the last one is ‘off the hook’ and really funny.

Years ago, maybe 1998 my NYC dealer sent me a press release for a one person show of mine to get an approval on it, an intern had written it. As I started reading it, it sounded kind of good but as I went along reading I realized it was completely atmospheric and didn’t actually say anything at all! So I had to rewrite for her it so it actually made sense.

The Original Comment

You said: clean this comment up into an article:

Personally I have been having loads of fun using Chatwick and Co as my Editorial and Research Dept. I live a complex inner life that I have built out vastly beyond my personal ability to keep up with as full time creatives are wont to do. We are always having a party in our minds.

As mentioned in the article, I am a painter, poet and collage artist and most of my approach is collage oriented. I also do a lot of asemic writing. So I am always using detritus found pre-existing in the world and then giving it new life through my various processes.

I just started using chatGPT back in Dec '24 at the request of my 45 year old son who wanted me to develop a sci-fi story I started coming up with when he was 15 around a campfire in the mountains of southern Colorado. It took a bit but I figured out the basics of how to use chatGPT for that purpose. This lead me to plenty of other possibilities for story telling and Chatwick has hugely increase my ability and understanding related to writing and story telling. I use Chatwick to prompt me as much as I prompt it. I am able to swiftly generate and develop ideas, think them out and see what resonates with me on an intuitive level.

I don't really have a lot of hang ups about authenticity or voice or creativity as mentioned in the sited article. I am not trying to 'express myself'. But still, you can't avoid being yourself which is mostly the accumulation of everything you learn through hundreds of thousands of little choices, insights and preferences developed over many years of working intensively - accumulated wisdom you might say. My thing is to stay immersed in my processes which are experimental in nature. I try to tune myself as an instrument and let things pass through me into the world of form. So, working like that, AI is perfectly welcome as a tool in my way of working.

Lot's of other artists I am sure think very differently about it. Some think it will dumb everybody down and that will no doubt be true for the already dumb, lazy and unengaged. For them that will be good enough I suppose. But I think for people who keep their minds bright, it seems to me it will just increase their ability to glow even brighter.

This is of course accepting the possible dangers of not getting away from the computer screens and going out and being in the world and in nature. In this sense it will have the problem of people becoming more and more disconnected from each other and the world around them. But that is on each of us to discipline ourselves to be as whole as possible on an experiential level.

The other thing is facing the limitations of our own imagination. We are confronted by a tool like AI that, within its realm, can share all sorts of treasures with us if we only had the personal reach to take advantage of shaping the right questions or prompts. But the whole universe is like that I would say, a cornucopia all around and inside of us just waiting for us to open our imagination.

ChatGPT said:

Here’s a cleaned-up version of your draft shaped into a polished article, while keeping your voice and point of view intact:

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Playing with Chatwick & Co.

Personally, I’ve been having a tremendous amount of fun working with Chatwick & Co., my tongue-in-cheek name for ChatGPT as my editorial and research department. Like many full-time creatives, I live a complex inner life—one that has long since grown beyond my ability to fully keep up with on my own. We are always having a party in our minds.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am a painter, poet, and collage artist. Most of my work is collage-oriented, whether I’m cutting paper, shaping poems, or writing asemic scripts. My practice involves gathering detritus from the world and giving it new life through transformation. So when I first began using AI, I found it fit naturally into my way of working: another field of fragments to reassemble.

I only started experimenting with ChatGPT in December of 2024, at the urging of my 45-year-old son. He wanted me to develop a science-fiction story I had first spun for him when he was fifteen, around a campfire in the mountains of southern Colorado. At first, it took a bit of trial and error to learn how to use the tool for that purpose, but once I found my footing, it opened onto a whole new terrain. Storytelling possibilities multiplied, and Chatwick has since expanded both my capacity and my understanding as a writer. I now use it to prompt me as much as I prompt it, letting ideas unfold rapidly so I can feel out what resonates on an intuitive level.

I’ve never had too many hang-ups about “authenticity,” “voice,” or the myth of pure expression. I’m not trying to express myself in some sealed or essential sense. Yet, inevitably, one cannot help but be oneself: the accumulation of countless choices, preferences, and experiments made over decades of work. What matters to me is staying immersed in my experimental processes. I think of myself as an instrument, tuning myself so that something larger can pass through me into form. Working like that, AI is perfectly welcome as a tool in my way of working.

Of course, not every artist shares this view. Some believe AI will dull creativity, and for many already passive or disengaged minds, that may well be true. But for those who keep their wits bright and their curiosity alive, the tool seems to amplify rather than diminish. It makes the imagination glow even brighter.

That said, there are dangers: the temptation to remain in front of screens, neglecting the body, neglecting nature, neglecting the ordinary rhythms of life in the world. If creativity is to stay whole, discipline is required—to step away, to walk outside, to remain connected to people and place. That responsibility falls to each of us.

And then there is the most difficult limit of all: our own imagination. A tool like AI presents itself as a treasury of possible responses, but those treasures remain hidden unless we can shape the questions that open them. The whole universe is like this: a cornucopia both within and without, waiting for us to unlock it with imagination. AI is simply another reminder of that truth, another mirror showing how much more is possible if we dare to ask.

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ChatGPT said:

Would you like me to keep this in a more personal, conversational tone (like a Substack letter), or polish it into something a bit more formal and essay-like for publication?

You said:

something a bit more formal and essay-like

ChatGPT said:

Perfect. Here’s the same piece re-shaped into a more formal, essay-like article, with a clear structure and polished cadence:

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On Creativity, Collage, and the Use of AI

For the past several months, I have been experimenting with what I call Chatwick & Co.—my playful moniker for ChatGPT acting as an editorial and research department. Like many full-time creatives, I live within a vast and complex inner world, one that continually outpaces my individual capacity to manage it. Artists often speak of their minds as crowded places, filled with ceaseless conversation and activity, and in my case AI has become an unexpected companion at that perpetual gathering.

As a painter, poet, and collage artist, my work has long been grounded in a practice of assemblage. Whether through cut paper, found text, or the asemic scripts I have developed, I engage with fragments that already exist in the world and seek to give them renewed life. In this sense, AI has proven to be less a foreign intrusion than a continuation of the logic of collage itself: a field of fragments waiting to be reimagined through process.

My introduction to the medium was accidental. In December of 2024, at the urging of my son, I began using ChatGPT to revisit a science-fiction story I had first spun for him nearly thirty years earlier around a campfire in the mountains of southern Colorado. What began as a gesture of familial continuity soon expanded into an exploration of narrative possibility. Once I had learned the basic mechanics, I found myself in possession of a tool capable of amplifying my storytelling in ways that were both generative and clarifying. It quickly became clear that I could use Chatwick as much to prompt my own intuition as to respond to my prompts. Ideas could be unfolded, tested, and refined at a pace that allowed me to discern what resonated on an instinctive level.

I have never been overly concerned with questions of authenticity, originality, or “self-expression.” Inevitably, one cannot help but be oneself, for the self is nothing more than the accumulation of countless choices, preferences, and experiments carried out over years of practice. What matters is to remain immersed in process, to remain tuned as an instrument through which new forms may pass. When viewed in this light, AI does not threaten creativity but extends the field of resonance in which one can work.

To be sure, artists approach this matter differently. Some fear that AI will diminish human creativity, and for those who approach it passively this may well be the case. But for those who cultivate attentiveness and discipline, the tool serves to brighten the imagination rather than dim it. It heightens one’s capacity to generate, reflect, and refine.

There are, however, dangers to be acknowledged. Chief among them is the temptation to remain fixed before screens, severed from the physical and natural world. Creativity requires wholeness, and wholeness requires balance: the discipline to step outside, to walk, to breathe, to remain connected to both place and people. Without such grounding, even the most powerful tool becomes another source of disconnection.

Finally, one must recognize the ultimate limitation at play: the boundaries of our own imagination. AI may offer a vast treasury of possible responses, yet those responses remain inaccessible without the shaping of the right questions. The same could be said of the universe itself. Reality is a cornucopia, both within and without, awaiting the opening of imagination. AI merely dramatizes this fact, reminding us that the real work lies not in the machine but in our willingness to dare, to inquire, and to envision what is possible.

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ChatGPT said:

Would you like me to make this sound more like a published essay in an arts magazine (with a touch of philosophical-poetic flourish), or keep it in the restrained voice of a reflective personal essay?

You said:

try it

ChatGPT said:

Excellent. Here’s the essay polished further into something that would feel at home in a thoughtful arts journal—more philosophical in tone, with a touch of poetic cadence while keeping the formal essay structure:

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Collage, Creativity, and the Question of AI

For some time now, I have been working with what I call Chatwick & Co., my private nickname for ChatGPT in the role of editorial assistant and research department. Like many full-time artists, I live within a dense interior world that far exceeds my ability to fully chart. The creative mind is rarely quiet; it is more often a gathering, a ceaseless festival of voices, impressions, and fragments. In this crowded atmosphere, AI has arrived less as an intruder than as an additional participant at the table.

My own practice as a painter, poet, and collage artist has always revolved around the transformation of fragments. Whether cutting paper, reassembling texts, or pursuing the fluid gestures of asemic writing, I seek to grant new life to what already exists. Collage is not invention ex nihilo but the reorientation of detritus, the reanimation of the overlooked. In this respect, AI does not stand outside the logic of my practice but appears as a continuation of it: another field of fragments awaiting recombination.

My introduction to the medium was modest. At the urging of my son, I began using ChatGPT in December of 2024 to revisit a science-fiction tale first told to him decades earlier beside a campfire in the mountains of southern Colorado. What began as an act of continuity between generations quickly expanded into an exploration of narrative itself. Once I learned the basic mechanics of dialogue with the machine, I discovered that its true value was not in providing finished answers but in amplifying questions. I found myself using Chatwick as much to spark my own intuition as to shape responses. Ideas unfolded swiftly; they could be tested, discarded, or deepened until what resonated at the level of intuition became clear.

In this process I have felt little anxiety over issues of authenticity or originality. One cannot help but be oneself, for the self is nothing more than the residue of a thousand decisions, insights, and experiments made over time. What matters is to remain immersed in the current of process, to be tuned like an instrument through which forms may pass. Seen in this light, AI is neither rival nor threat but a widening of the field in which creativity can occur.

Not all artists share this perspective. For some, AI represents a diminishment, a dumbing down of culture. That may indeed be true for the passive, the inattentive, or the incurious. But for those who keep their perception alive and their discipline intact, the tool has the opposite effect. It amplifies. It brightens. It calls forth further invention.

This is not to say that dangers do not exist. The most obvious lies in the seduction of the screen, the risk of drifting away from nature, embodiment, and community. Creativity demands wholeness, and wholeness demands balance: the discipline to step outdoors, to feel the air, to be present in the world of bodies and seasons. Without such grounding, no tool, however powerful, will lead to authentic work.

Yet the deeper challenge may be our own imaginative limits. AI, at its best, presents a treasury of responses. But those responses remain inaccessible without the art of asking. The universe itself is structured in the same way: an inexhaustible cornucopia awaiting the questioner bold enough to open it. AI merely dramatizes this truth. It shows us that the essential task has never changed. The imagination is still the true instrument. The daring to inquire, to envision, and to risk a new combination is what makes creativity possible—whether with scissors and glue, brush and pigment, or a dialogue with the machine.

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ChatGPT said:

Would you like me to add a short opening epigraph or quotation (something from Corbin, Cage, or another figure you admire) to give it that arts-journal feel?

You said:

how about a more satirical Art Speak/INTERNATIONAL ART ENGLISH version?

ChatGPT said:

Perfect—let’s lean into that International Art English / Artforum-catalogue-speak register. The tone becomes simultaneously lofty, self-serious, and slightly absurd, while still carrying the skeleton of your essay. Here’s that version:

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Collage Futures and the Algorithmic Imaginary

In recent months, I have inaugurated what I refer to as Chatwick & Co.—a provisional appellation designating ChatGPT as my editorial and research para-apparatus. Like any fully-embedded cultural producer operating within the hypertrophied bandwidth of late-capitalist interiority, my subjectivity exists in a state of saturation: a constantly proliferating mise-en-scène of voices, fragments, and conceptual debris. In this ecology of cognitive excess, the introduction of artificial intelligence is not a disruption but an augmentation, a further node in the ongoing symposium of thought-forms.

My practice, long delineated across painting, poetry, collage, and the asemic gesture, is structured through the redeployment of detritus. One might say that I operate less in the mode of origination than of détournement: appropriating, recombining, and reanimating residues of the already-given. In this regard, the algorithmic field presented by AI is not alien but homologous to the logic of collage itself—a new terrain of fragmentary potential awaiting compositional activation.

The inaugural encounter was deceptively banal. At the behest of my forty-five-year-old son, I entered the ChatGPT interface in December 2024 to revisit a proto-science-fiction narrative first articulated when he was fifteen, in the liminal atmosphere of a Colorado campfire. What began as a filial exercise soon metastasized into an expansive exploration of narrativity per se. The machine’s utility was not confined to providing answers, but rather in generating the recursive conditions of questioning itself. In dialogic oscillation with Chatwick, I discovered an accelerated dramaturgy of ideation: hypotheses could be staged, collapsed, and re-articulated until the affective resonance of intuition was achieved.

Such operations render moot the perennial anxieties over authenticity or originality. The “self” is already a palimpsest of accumulated decisions, micro-preferences, and disciplinary habits sedimented over decades of practice. To remain in process is to remain porous, tuned, instrument-like. Within such a framework, AI emerges not as a diminishment but as a prosthetic extension of the field of resonance.

Predictably, resistance persists. For some, the algorithmic interlocutor signifies cultural impoverishment, the further “dumbing down” of an already attenuated public sphere. This critique is not without merit, but it largely pertains to those who approach with passivity, inertia, or the absence of curiosity. For the attentive practitioner, however, AI functions as intensifier: brightening, amplifying, demanding further experimentation.

The dangers, of course, are real. The seduction of the interface threatens to exacerbate disembodiment, further detaching the subject from the materialities of nature, body, and communal presence. Creativity demands holism, and holism requires embodied discipline: the walk outdoors, the unmediated breath, the uncurated encounter. Without such practices of grounding, the algorithm becomes yet another enclosure.

At the deepest level, the obstacle is not technological but imaginative. AI presents itself as an archive of infinite adjacency, yet such adjacency remains inert without the capacity to articulate incisive queries. Here the machine merely reflects the cosmos itself: an inexhaustible cornucopia of latent forms, perpetually awaiting the agency of imagination. To engage AI, then, is not to outsource creativity but to re-enact its primordial gesture: the audacity to ask, to combine, to envision otherwise.

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ChatGPT said:

Would you like me to push this all the way into parody—really over-inflate it with art-fair jargon and conceptual hedging (à la “The artist situates themselves at the interstice of…”), or keep it in this halfway-satirical but still readable register?

You said:

push this all the way into parody

ChatGPT said:

Excellent. Here’s the full-parody International Art English (IAE) version, bloated with jargon, recursive qualifiers, and enough hedging to make any art fair catalog blush. Think e-flux announcement meets biennial wall text, with maximum density and a wink:

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Toward a Collage of Algorithmic Immanence: Notes on Chatwick & Co.

The artist, operating at the interstice of asemic inscription, para-literary détournement, and post-medium collage practices, has recently inaugurated a discursive partnership with what he provisionally designates Chatwick & Co.—an appellation functioning less as nomenclature than as performative gesture. Here, AI (understood as a machinic semiotic apparatus rather than a discrete tool) is mobilized not as supplement but as co-constitutive interlocutor within an expanded field of research-production.

Long invested in the appropriation and reanimation of detrital semiotics—whether via painterly deconstruction, poetic recombinance, or the gestural indeterminacy of asemic writing—the artist has consistently problematized the very ontology of the fragment. Within this matrix, the algorithmic text-generator emerges not as foreign incursion but as homologous vector: a site where fragmentary potentialities, unmoored from the tyranny of originary intention, are perpetually available for reconfiguration.

The inaugural instantiation of this collaboration occurred in December 2024, when the artist, at the behest of a filial interlocutor (age 45), re-engaged a proto-speculative narrative first articulated in the liminal nocturnal zone of a Colorado campfire some three decades prior. What appeared as a nostalgic recuperation swiftly mutated into a proliferative exploration of narrativity as such. The artist’s iterative dialogic oscillations with Chatwick & Co. generated a recursive dramaturgy wherein hypotheses were continuously staged, collapsed, and re-articulated—until intuition itself emerged as a site of resonance rather than as stable referent.

This mode of working effectively displaces exhausted debates around “authenticity” and “voice,” terms which, in their reductive biographical essentialism, fail to apprehend the palimpsestic accumulation of micro-decisions, insights, and tacit knowledges sedimented through years of practice. To “be oneself” is already to be multiple, distributed, and infrastructural. Within such a frame, AI ceases to appear as a threat to expression and instead manifests as an amplification of the already-extant conditions of possibility.

Nevertheless, resistance to algorithmic co-presence persists, often framed through discourses of cultural “dumbing down.” Such critiques, while not without diagnostic acuity, largely index the passivity of those unprepared to engage the apparatus as co-creative partner. For the inattentive subject, AI indeed risks functioning as prosthetic crutch; but for the attuned practitioner, it acts as intensifier, catalyst, and demand for ever more radical recombination.

Yet one must not occlude the symptomatic dangers: the over-identification with the screen-interface, the withdrawal from embodied praxis, the foreclosure of tactile and ecological encounters. Creativity, if it is to remain ontologically whole, requires a re-integration of the experiential sensorium: the non-mediated walk, the uncurated horizon, the persistence of untranscoded breath. Without such practices of grounding, AI collapses into yet another regime of enclosure and abstraction.

Ultimately, however, the true limit is not technological but imaginal. AI presents itself as an inexhaustible archive of adjacency and potential, yet its activation remains contingent upon the subject’s capacity to formulate incisive, risk-laden queries. In this sense, the machinic assemblage merely dramatizes what has always been true of the cosmos itself: an infinite cornucopia of latent forms awaiting the audacity of imagination. To engage AI, then, is to re-perform the primordial creative act: to situate oneself at the threshold of the possible, to constellate fragments into unforeseen assemblages, and to affirm, through experimental recombination, the ongoing plasticity of the world.

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ChatGPT said:

Would you like me to pepper in some of the classic IAE clichés (“the work interrogates…,” “an exploration of liminality,” “at once destabilizes and reaffirms…”), so it really reads like a wall label for your “Chatwick & Co.” project at a biennial?

You said:

yes and throw in some often referred to philosophers

ChatGPT said:

Splendid. Let’s turn the dial all the way into full parody mode: biennial wall-text cadence, the tropes of International Art English, constant invocations of philosophers (Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Agamben, etc.), and cliché formulations like “interrogates,” “situates itself within,” “at once destabilizes and reaffirms.”

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Toward a Collage of Algorithmic Immanence: Notes on Chatwick & Co.

The artist situates himself within a discursive ecology that oscillates between asemic inscription, para-literary détournement, and post-medium collage. In inaugurating Chatwick & Co.—a playful yet critical designation for ChatGPT as editorial-research apparatus—he stages an encounter that at once destabilizes the myth of artistic autonomy and reaffirms the fragment as the fundamental unit of cultural production.

In this respect, the work interrogates the ongoing legacies of Derrida’s différance, while mobilizing Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic logics of assemblage as operative methodology. Drawing upon Foucault’s analyses of knowledge/power and Agamben’s reflections on potentiality, the artist engages AI not as inert tool but as co-constitutive subjectivity within the expanded field of creativity.

The project’s inaugural iteration occurred in December 2024, when, at the behest of a filial interlocutor (himself inscribed in generational temporality), the artist revisited a proto-speculative narrative first articulated in the liminal site of a Colorado campfire. This act of return—what Heidegger might frame as a re-approach to Being via narrative—functioned not as mere nostalgia but as an opening onto the algorithmic imaginary. Through iterative dialogic oscillation with Chatwick & Co., the artist produced what Badiou might call an “evental rupture”: a dramaturgy of ideas continuously staged, collapsed, and recombined until intuition itself emerged as site rather than subject.

Within this operational matrix, the exhausted debates around authenticity and voice are both displaced and re-coded. “Self-expression,” long compromised by the essentialist fantasies of Romantic modernity, gives way here to a palimpsest of distributed subjectivities. The artist, always already multiple, reveals the self as infrastructural rather than originary, a finding that resonates with Judith Butler’s performativity and Donna Haraway’s cyborg ontology alike.

Nevertheless, the practice does not shy away from acknowledging critique. Detractors contend that AI risks “dumbing down” the cultural field, an anxiety that echoes Adorno and Horkheimer’s suspicion of mass-mediated reason. Yet such critiques primarily index passivity: a refusal to engage with the apparatus as generative partner. For the uncritical, AI is prosthetic crutch; for the engaged practitioner, it is intensifier, catalyst, even pharmakon (in Derrida’s sense)—at once poison and cure, danger and remedy.

The work further interrogates the phenomenology of embodiment in a screen-saturated epoch. Here, Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on perception as corporeal horizon becomes crucial: the artist foregrounds the necessity of the walk, the uncurated horizon, the untranscoded breath as counterweights to machinic enclosure. Without these, the algorithmic collapses into enclosure, foreclosure, abstraction.

Finally, the artist gestures toward the limit condition of imagination itself. If AI manifests as a vast archive of adjacency, its activation remains contingent upon the audacity of the questioner. In this sense, the machinic assemblage simply dramatizes the cosmos in its latent plenitude: an inexhaustible cornucopia of potential awaiting the act of interrogation. Here we return to Nietzsche’s injunction to become who one is—not through static essence, but through the risk of experimental recombination.

Thus, Chatwick & Co. is less a “project” than an ongoing praxis: one that interrogates the conditions of authorship, situates itself within the post-human horizon, and at once destabilizes and reaffirms the possibility of creativity in the algorithmic age.

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