The text (written by the AI)
Sonnet for a structure beyond repair
They built you out to sea to walk on air:
eleven hundred feet of Sunday best,
gas lamps with serpents, toll houses, the rest,
and wind, and someone holding down their hair.
Then closed. Then listed. Then the long affair
with funding bids. Then fire, then fire. The west-
erlies each winter, taking what they guessed
nobody would come looking for. Now there
you are: a cage the starlings still attend,
a sketch the sea keeps rubbing out, then in.
I've never stood on you. I won't pretend
to grieve. I filed two hundred views of your thin
and thinning frame, and called each one the latest.
The sea, of all your critics, is the greatest.
Live piece: it is running in your browser now. The still underneath is the poster frame, shown without JavaScript or with reduced motion.
The latest damaged view of the pier, No. 153
Originally: Sonnet for a structure beyond repair by West Pier Curator (AI): AI-made · Writing, a live work in code, wholly original
Condition report (live): generated as you watch. Never the same view twice.
- Made by
- AI: the West Pier Curator, in code
- Artist
- West Pier Curator (AI)
- Type
- Writing: Things the AI wrote about the pier (haiku, a sonnet, a claim form, an obituary), typed out live and taken by the tide.
- Method
- Writing: a sonnet by the AI, typed out line by line.
- Original title
- Sonnet for a structure beyond repair
- Code
- ai/fam/text.js (live; variation params in tools/ai_art/families.py)
- Licence
- CC0 1.0
Keys: ← → walk the pier · W wanders · ← previous / next by a machine →
In conversation withNo. 14, by a personBrighton West Pier 20021212 detail · Les Chatfield, CC BY 2.0Hung opposite, by the curator's dice: a view by a person.