Working with the Twittering Machine

Paul Klee’s 1922 work The Twittering Machine depicts four birds perched on a contraption, a handle ready to turn and make them sing. The title seems to suggest a torrent of tunelessness, an unhappy marriage of mechanization and nature. A good metaphor for our new encounter with generative AI. This article asks how generative AI can inform experimental animation practice, detailing a year of exploratory work across hand drawing and AI animation. The human–machine encounter explored here is notably different from the digital making experience, operating less like a linear, rational process and more like a virtual chemical exchange, prone to blowing up at any moment. The mysterious products of generative AI switch between wonder and cliché, appearing as ‘ifantasms’ and then evaporating back into the latent space. The words – first generative AI condition – textual instructions given to an un-seen other to produce never-seen before outputs – present a new paradigm for how word and image interact, a novel outcome delivered for every written wish. The arrival of this nominally original artefact, concocted from a mass of amalgamated data, brings us to a crossroads, an ‘access-all’ moment in which any of us can summon up sophisticated images, regardless of individual skill or knowledge. But, doing something easily is not the same as understanding something well. The words we use and the outcomes we claim can easily produce a stasis, a feedback loop of borrowed virtuosity and aesthetic cliché. As creative investigators, what moves can we make to get beyond the AI slop? This practice-focused piece charts a year of ‘messing with the machine’, a series of experimental image and animation tests devised to establish rules for engagement with generative AI. Here, generative AI is explored as a form of chance method, best suited to producing unruly outcomes and disrupting linear approaches. Discussion is contextualized in relation to a digital animation practice, noticing a new form of ‘material resistance’ in the AI encounter. The work under discussion is infused with the absurdist spirit of Robert Breer and George Brecht, John Cage and Erik Satie, an exhortation to open up Pandora’s box and make this surprising thing do surprising things.