West African history is reliant on oral traditions— something effectively wiped out by British missionaries in Nigeria. As such, my family line can only traced back two generations.The rest is fabulous tales of bird societies, sky kingdoms, and the ubiquitous (in West Africa), mama wata. What remained was for me was to take what old family photos in my possession, oral traditions, artefacts and myths— and remix them in an AI image generator.  

The dialogue with AI is made intriguing by the seconds, sometimes minutes of a nebulous latent space. It recalls the early lines of Genesis: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth became without form and void.”  The Hebrew Tohu va-bohu is sometimes translated as ‘became formless and empty’. The Spirit of God hovers over the waters, and next comes the prompt, let there be light…

Less satisfying is AI’s propensity for the generic, thus to subvert this and cultivate the negative space energy, I retreated to crunchier early tech, feeding  the images through ASCII encoding to preserve the minimalism of my goal, and reflect that urgent field of potentiality: hence a cloud of Glittering Witnesses…