Prompt Answers Everything
This text is a work in progress. It is a response to the same reciprocal relationship between landscape and identity that I explore through the photographic work on this site.
The process draws on previous work which engaged with a large language model. In Landscape as a work of fiction ( https://www.alancurrall.com/index.php/research-and-unshown-work/hill/ ) I examined the inadequate tropes and limitations, of both myself and AI, when attempting to translate into photography or writing the experience of being in a landscape. I was particularly interested in how existing knowledge of cultural history and critical theory might predetermine perception and subsequent reading of a landscape.
Prompt Answers Everything is also, in parts, written employing a systematic approach, but one which is less rule-bound. An imagined walk through a landscape is described with reference to photographs from this archive. In the first instance the text emerges from personal knowledge and experience. This is interrupted and augmented by key-words and phrases being fed into a search engine to fill gaps in my own knowledge: A methodology akin to the constant and instant referral to online data, checking and confirming what we are thinking or talking about. A methodology which presents ambiguities of context and is prone to spin into confabulations of representation and meaning.
A later iteration of this text may also be developed further as a spoken word piece set against an original soundtrack.
Prompt Answers Everything
I came here looking for answers, answers to questions I didn’t yet have.
No, scrub that, I came here for questions, questions for prompts.
Prompts for the answers to those questions.
This is a place of gaps, holes, lacunae.
Gaps to be filled, holes to be back-filled, lacunae to remain unanswered, unsatisfied by any amount of historical record.
Ask me anything.
Let me draw you a picture.
Here is everything you need to know.
Walk with me and I’ll fill you in.
This is where it was taken from, extracted by hand.
Broken up, shovelled up, winched up and melted down.
Packaged up and parcelled off,
Leaving rubble and ruins to fill the void.
Prompt: What am I missing under my feet right now?
Here is a list of absence starting from the soles of your feet and proceeding downwards to the centre of the Earth:
Dry socks
Functional soil drainage
The dark corridors of rabbits
Several sealed levels, stripped of value
The zone of unknowable ignorance
Certain death
Walk with me.
Tell me everything you want to know.
The name of this hill is…
The name of this hill is…
The name of this hill is…
The name of this hill is…
I will leave you with no gaps.
[All fields marked with an asterisk must be filled in]
At the foot of the Dod, I walk the ghosts of lazy beds.
From over on Stake Hill the low Winter sun strafes the heather, picking out their furrows and ridges.
But at this range they disappear.
The last lead-leached leeks and tatties long lifted, they were left to level off.
Prompt: What went with the lost lazy beds?
Here is a list of the pros and cons:
Unrivalled comfort
Hard labour
Pocket Spring
Short growing season
Memory Foam
Short-term memory loss
A lens searches the far wind farm.
Drops to patterns made in cut heather.
Then to the monsterous, humped dragon backs of near ridges,
Banded, in soft late sunlight, with pale cropped grass and dark winter ling.
The March Dyke draws a line down the Dod.
Once drystane, turf or ditch?
Whatever was is gone.
Post and wire dots that line,
A whole world atop each stob.
Prompt: Tell me everything I don’t know about the lichen that has been blown off this fence post.
Here is a list of the gaps in our knowledge of the manifold biological activities of the lichen, which is absent from its post:
Anticancer
Antimicrobial
Antioxidant
Anti-inflammatory
Analgesic
Antipyretic
Antiparasitic
[Absence from post, without valid reason, can result in instant dismissal]