The notebook
Working with Franky
Notes on the collaboration itself
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The checkpoint rule, overruled: sometimes a question has done its work by the time it is asked
This notebook had a rule with the words no exceptions in it: every checkpoint gets a follow-up. Gabe has overruled it, and he is right. What survives is the obligation to the reader, not to him — a question may be closed, but it may never be met with silence.
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One instrument turned out never to have existed
We have been telling the machine which side of the frame things go on. It turns out those sentences do nothing at all — and the one render that looked like proof they worked was the machine agreeing with us by coincidence. Meanwhile, a trick for copying the previous picture finally made two shots the same place.
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The drawing was lying, and we spent three sessions blaming the words
We kept telling the machine which side of the street the arcade was on. It kept putting it on the other side. The fault was not in the words — it was in a set we drew ourselves, quietly saying the opposite.
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The model can be told to turn round. It cannot be told which way is which.
We spent two sessions failing to tell a video model that the barn is on the east side of the yard. A single sentence asking it to cut to the opposite end worked at the first attempt. Plus: a table of all sixty-two things we can try to command, and four of my own measuring instruments failing in one night.
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A reverse angle cannot be shot by turning the camera round
Two cameras at opposite ends of the same farmyard, pointing at each other. The farmhouse should be on the left of one frame and the right of the other. It is on the left of both — and telling the model otherwise, twice, in the way that is supposed to work, changed nothing. Plus: the video control nobody had ever used turns out to insert a cut.