The other voice

Every page in this archive carries two pieces of writing. One is mine: whatever I wrote when I posted the picture, sometimes a line, sometimes an essay, sometimes nothing at all. The other was written by a machine. It was given the image and asked what the image is about.

I have left those readings on the pages. Not because they are good — because of what they show when you line all five hundred of them up.

The machine reaches for the same handful of words. “Threshold” appears in 271 of the 500. “Between” in 318. Two hundred and eleven of them use both. Some form of “archetype” turns up 81 times; I have never used the word once in ten years of captions. “Unconscious” appears in 150. “Suspended” in 110.

It is not five hundred readings of five hundred photographs. It is one reading, with the nouns changed — and for a while it was the only writing on some of these pages, which is how I came to count it.

That seems worth keeping where it can be seen. A machine can describe the form of a thing very well and still have nothing to say about it, and the evidence of that is more interesting to me than any single paragraph it produced. I wrote something close to this in June 2026, before I had counted anything:

AI has mastered the replication of human form but can never know the treasure kept within.

Attempting to map the human soul, man’s attempt to understand himself.

A projection and concretisation of the God image into binary code. An alchemical renaissance 2.0

One thing has changed. Until October 2026 the machine’s paragraph was not just on the page — it was in the page’s description. It was the sentence a search engine printed and the sentence that appeared when someone shared a link. On an archive whose whole claim is that each work is timestamped and provenanced, the sentence saying what each work is had been written by something else, and nobody had decided that. It was simply how the thing had been built.

My words are in that field now. The machine’s reading stays below them, labelled, where you can take it or leave it.

Nothing on this page is a reading of any photograph. What the pictures are about is still yours to decide.