FORCE QUIT
2025
Published in More Postrational Visuality (Ted Hiebert & Duncan MacKenzie, eds.) Free Download | Amazon
Overview
Force Quit is a hybrid text and image work presented as corrupted corporate correspondence generated in recursive collaboration with GPT-4 and custom language models trained on the artist’s own writings. Structured as system alerts, executive templates, and procedural notifications, the piece adopts the bureaucratic aesthetics of contemporary platforms while strategically destabilizing them.
The work appears in More Postrational Visuality (2025), a volume examining plural, non-universal approaches to meaning-making in visual culture. Within this context, Force Quit operates as an infrastructural gesture: it inhabits the language of compliance, administration, and machine-generated authority in order to reveal its fragility.
Rather than critiquing algorithmic systems from a distance, the work folds them inward. It treats corporate formatting, automated tone, and protocol language as material, mirroring and multiplying them until coherence fractures.
Description
The text is presented as a live document issued by a fictional “OpenAI-Registered Correspondence Unit.” It declares itself both authentic and untrustworthy, functioning as what it describes as an “executable condition” rather than literature or theory.
Portions of the work were developed through recursive dialogue between the artist, GPT-4, and custom-trained language models derived from the artist’s prior essays, manifestos, and studio writing. This layered authorship produces a distributed voice—simultaneously institutional and intimate—blurring distinctions between personal rhetoric and machine mediation.
Through glitched formatting, recursive voice shifts, and institutional mimicry, Force Quit stages a negotiation between human authorship and computational output. The AI is neither tool nor antagonist; it operates as a collaborator within a distributed field of agency shaped by training data, memory, and iteration.
The work examines:
Platform aesthetics and bureaucratic design language
Extractive systems and administrative identity
Distributed authorship in generative AI environments
Model training, self-simulation, and recursive voice
Survival strategies within algorithmic capitalism
If postrationality suggests a refusal of singular rational authority, Force Quit situates that refusal within contemporary computational infrastructures. It proposes not escape, but tactical inhabitation.
Context
More Postrational Visuality frames postrationality as a condition in which meaning proliferates rather than resolves. Each contribution visualizes alternative reasoning as material form.
In contrast to chapters that engage dream logic, ritual, or speculative metaphysics, Force Quit addresses the present administrative condition: APIs, copyright language, compliance templates, and automated notifications. It locates postrational practice within everyday technological systems.
By incorporating custom-trained language models derived from the artist’s own archive, the work also interrogates authorship as dataset—raising questions about originality, ownership, and the feedback loop between human memory and machine prediction.
