Disquiets: A Pebble in ChatGPT

Author: Emir Imamović Pirke

Disquiet in life is often regarded as uneasiness or uncertainty, but for the artist it has a special purpose. Creative disquiet is not an obstacle, but a catalyst. It us an internal feeling which conveys that what the artist sees of feels must receive a physical shape – through image, word, sound or movement.

Without disquiet there would be no progress nor originality. The artist rarely creates from a state of peace; they create out of questions, doubt and the need to express that which cannot be contained in him. Van Gogh painted from a state of deep inner frustration, Kafka turned his anxieties into literature, while modern artist such as Marina Abramović use disquiet as the foundation of their ideas and performances.

Creative disquiet is not always dramatic. Sometimes it hides in the quiet of the workshop, in the erasure of sentences and constant self-questioning: “Can it be done better?” The artist often feels that their work is not completed, and it is that uncertainty that drives him toward another effort, another expression, another form.

In a world which strives toward superficial tranquility, the artist disquiet becomes an act of resistance and a symbol of freedom. Art is born on the cusp between inner tension and the need for giving shape.

That is why creative disquiet isn’t a weakness, but a strength. It is a quiet force which drives change, exploration and truth. Without it, art would be reduced to mere repetition – with it, it stays alive and indispensable.

The previous 249 words were written, by order and without compensation, by Chat GPT. It, they, he, she – whatever – also wrote a longer version, but there was no space for it, because of, as the Serbian writer Svetislav Basara would say, “characterology”: a machine needed 3796 characters to explain how “creative disquiet is not always dramatic”. Basara would say: it’s not qwz. Of course, the word qwz is not a consequence of “random letter insertion”, although ChatGPT claims the exact opposite. 

Describing the communication between the crew of Apollo 8 and Flight Control, in the introductory chapter of the book “The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization”, Harvard professor Martin Puchner writes: “As the Earth was becoming ever smaller, and the Moon ever bigger, it was not easy for the astronauts the record everything with their camera.  Flight control understood that the astronauts had to rely on a simpler form of technology: speech. 'We’d like for you, if you can, to describe to us, as poetically and detailed as you can, what you see.' Their astronaut training didn’t prepare them for poetry lyrical assignments, so they didn’t posses the necessary skills for it. They passed the gruelling and ruthless selection process, because they were the best fighter pilots and because they knew a thing or two about astronautics”.

Fran Frederick Borman, a graduate of West Point military academy – “As if he came straight from the Latin quarter of Paris, where he read Jean-Paul Sartre” – exclaimed: “It is a vast, solitary, desolate existence, or an expanse of nothingness.”

German writer and Nobel laureate Günter Grass (1927 – 2015) said in an interview for the Neue Westfälische paper, several months before his death, that he thinks that World War III has already begun, but “in a completely different way from what we came to know from World War I and II”.

The designers of atomic shelters, along with the builders themselves, painted them for nothing. As the first ten years of World War III have shown, in the end there won’t remain an expanse of nothingness”, which doesn’t mean we’re not hard at work on achieving “a desolate existence”. 

So, even if World War III, in its unexpected form – and why did we even think it would be atomic, and that, as such, it would allow the victor enough time to celebrate its victory, as it would need for the enemy’s rocket to fly to it target? – hadn’t begun, a “desolate existence” would seem inevitably in a world in which machines write about how “the artist’s disquiet becomes and act of resistance and a symbol of freedom”.

Paraphrasing poet and scriptwriter Abdulah Sidran (1944 – 202) – humanity is not up to the task: it’s easier for it to let go of the need for thought, than its addiction to cigarettes. In the end, machines wouldn’t grow smarter, while humans stupider if the latter weren’t ready to transform every form of technological progress into profit for moguls of the digital age. The shift from classic telephones to cell phones which functioned as mobile call-boxes, and in turn, from cell phones to smartphones which can even make a call and which exert the same effort to set the alarm clock as to install ChatGPT, was not imposed, but chosen.

In the introduction of his book “Programirani zaborav: Podijeljeni gradovi i neželjena sjećanja”, historian Dragan Markovina writes: “This book, and most probably my professional and public work in historiography, international relations in this region, exiles, symbols, border identities and long-term processes, would not exist if I hadn’t been born in Mostar, and experienced war in my hometown as a prepubescent child. Then I was led into exile, after which I lost my home and my town for a long time, changed three communities, Korčula, Zagreb and Split, and found myself trying to understand the history of all these town, searching for minorities and continuities, and generally contemplating how some people were lucky to live some form of a normal life in their hometowns, without major breaks and discontinuities,, and how because of that we find each other at odds in many things.(…) Everything that came after it led to thing manuscript, which I carried within myself ever since college.”

Humanity will – which, from a misanthropic perspective is tragic news – survive World War III, as it survived it two previous iterations. The world order which Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis calls “technological feudalism” requires living peasants connected to 5G.
However, art could also survive – which is great news for misanthropes – as the last line of defence from desolate existence in a digital expanse. Machines know that there is some kind of “creative disquiet” as “an inner feeling which conveys that which the artist sees of feels must receive a physical shape”. However, it is far more important what ChatGPT can’t do – and will never be able – and that is understand or explain that every author feels disquiet within themselves, but until they understand its cause and find a way to express it, it is like a pebble in their shoe – a bearable discomfort which, sooner or later, they have to get rid of, thus freeing up space for some new disquiet, because the need for creation never stops – “Without it, art would be reduced to mere repetition – with it, it stays alive and indispensable” – or more often, to disquiets for which there is no cure, not from a pharmacy nor form on the internet.

Technological progress which, as ChatGPT said, wouldn’t exist without disquiets – has brought mankind to the Moon, a probe to Mars, while it also brought pornography two clicks away from a virtual walk through the Louvre. However, it hasn’t enabled machine to come close to “the border between inner tension and the need for giving shape.” The other doesn’t exist without a great mind voltage, which is precisely also the cause for motherboards malfunction, which reduces the most advanced software to a socket in a cave in which humanity has popped in on its way from wood to space and the poetry in it, discovering, not always rapidly and never in a massive scale, that in some instances it has to rely “on simpler technology: speech”, without which it can’t get rid of something it carries withing itself “ever since college”, or something like that.