Chelsea Coon, program/sleep/stop/cry/shutdown (2021), Performance for video. Digital. Black and white. Sound. 9 minutes, 52 seconds. Courtesy of the artist.

The following prompts (in bold) were input into OpenAI’s GPT-3 Beta Playground using the Davinci model. The text in italics was the output for the prompts completed by GPT-3. The collected outputs were combined to produce the final text for the performance.

Instructions for a performance artwork:
In space, there is no up or down.
You are not allowed to program.
You are not allowed to sleep.
You are not allowed to stop.
You are not allowed to shut down.
You are not allowed to speak.
You are not allowed to cry.
You are not allowed to sleep.
You are not allowed to sleep.
You are not allowed to stop.
You are not allowed to stop.
You are not allowed to stop.
You are not allowed to stop.
You are not allowed to stop.
You are not allowed to stop.
You are not allowed to stop.

Performance:
Chelsea Coon, program/sleep/stop/cry/shutdown (2021), Performance for video. March 14, 2021. Digital. Black and white. Sound. 9 minutes, 52 seconds. Courtesy of the artist.

Statement:

“I attempted to keep my body in continuous motion while also contained within the square surface space of a tabletop without falling, breaking, or ending the piece. The gestures were meant to take on slight differentiations as the work unfolded—never truly repeating the same motions. In this way, I demonstrated numerous possibilities for my body to orient within the intimate confinement of the square space. Each gesture contained the accumulated duress of my previous gestures in the memory of my body.

I pre-recorded my voice reading out the GPT-3 instructions. I alternated between following and unfollowing the instructions as they played out to me during the performance. In the recording itself, I repetitiously read out the instruction set to a point where my voice shifted towards a heightened fluctuation over the word “STOP” which added a reactive, emotional detail of the temporal relation of my body felt to the structures at play both in and beyond the performance.”

-Chelsea Coon