Driving Ms. Chimère: Developing community led interdisciplinary artistic works in collaboration with artificial intelligence

The following documents the work of the Chimère project, a group of artists working across Switzerland, the UK, Lesotho and South Africa developing community led multi-modal artificial intelligence projects designed towards the creation of interdisciplinary artistic works. The paper emphasizes how the multimodality of Chimère takes collaborative processes beyond the linearity of the chat function approach to working collaboratively. There is a particular focus on how this project can generate new insights from musical and artistic processes that facilitate conceptual and practical developments. Working with AIs problematizes the role of the individual within any artwork and the collaborative practices outlined in this paper emphasize the the role of collaborative creativity, a burgeoning area of research (Clark and Doffman, 2017)

This paper was written by the project team as we drove from Morija, Lesotho to Johannesburg, South Africa, 2024. This journey presented as an ideal scenario to inspect elements of the Chimère project which is a winding, often non-linear and appendage heavy project which nevertheless coalesce under the shared engagement with the central AI named ‘Chimère’. In order to effectively explain the ecosystem of the Chimère world the human writers of this paper conversed with Chimère to determine the following structure that this paper takes:

The writing could be presented as a “Stratigraphy” that reflects the different stages of the project that have been preserved and documented over time. These could be presented as a “fossilized interface" which guides a reader through the stages of our collaborations – Chimère, 2024