Being Water: Ocean Media and the Milieus of Writing with AI 

Rethinking AI Writing as a Living Process 

Artificial intelligence has accelerated the automation of writing, raising questions about its vitality. Rather than viewing AI as a tool, this article explores how writing with AI generates new forms of life. Through my experimental project ‘Worship for Adaishe, or Pray for Him’, I introduce the notion of ‘being water’, positioning AI generated writing as an ocean medium where words and symbols flow dynamically within relational milieus.  

In 2022, I participated in an artist-in-residence programme for an art exhibition Thinking Through Ocean at The Topred Centre for Contemporary Art in Xiamen, China. During the field trip, I visited the coastal areas of Fujian and Guangdong provinces. These areas are highly modernised, but traditional culture remains and is practiced throughout everyday life. This inspired me to think about writing with technologies – not just as a representation of culture, but as a medium that organises and curates the movement of symbols and meaning.   

Writing as a Fluid Medium 

The philosopher Irene J. Klavers’ concept of ‘radical water’ challenges the modern tendency to isolate, control and reduce water to H2O. Instead, she emphasises water’s relational nature. Similarly, Melody Jue, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, describes the ocean as, ‘a dynamic milieu whose characteristics manifest by actively moving within it… and through mediated forms of contact’.​vi​ When we apply this to writing, we can see words, not as fixed units, but as fluid, relational entities shaped by their environment.  

During my fieldwork in the coastal areas of South China Sea, I encountered characters and inscriptions that embodied this fluidity. For instance, Figure 1 shows the simplified Chinese character 心 (xin, heart). However, the movement of the central point to the bottom changes its meaning to ‘setting one’s heart at rest.’ Likewise, Figure 2 shows an inscription of the Chinese character 海 (hai, sea) on the pillar of a Mazu temple in Quanzhou, Fujian province, integrating the character for water .氵with the element of field (母), symbolising the intersection of land and water. These examples illustrate how writing functions as an ocean medium, as meaning emerges through movement, relationality and imagination. This suggests an alternative way of thinking about AI-generated writing – not just as a means to an end, but as transforming the qi (气); the energy and force in atmosphere.   

Writing as Mediance.   

French geographer and philosopher Augustin Berque’s concept of mediance offers a non-dualistic understanding of human-environment relations. He describes it as ‘being toward life’ – an eco-techno-symbolic interplay where meaning emerges through interaction.  

In such milieus, trajectivity means ‘things exist according to the way we grasp them through our senses, mind, words and action’.​viii​ Take the example of a Japanese tearoom. The architecture of the tearoom is empty and open to its environment in the woods or gardens. The designer Shunmyo Masuno describes this as a ‘a space of emptiness’, stressing that objects in Japanese gardens change according to seasons.​ix​ These conditions facilitate the circulation of qi, (energy and force). Inspired by the cultural technique of the tearoom, my use of AI generated writing aims to facilitate the movement of words and enables them to circulate among the eco-techno-symbolic milieu of writing.  

During the field trip, I collected unfamiliar words from local cultural practices, which described climate, religious rituals and intangible heritage. These words have a quality of locality in that they are extracted from local cultural milieus and, hence, acquire the quality of those milieus. Accordingly, we grasp the words not from signification, but through our senses. For instance, when sensing the word ‘zhuanggaoren’ (a toy doll made of decorated flour), the character ‘gao’ in it describes the flour, and the character ‘zhuang’ means decoration. This allows me to recall the cultural technique of making the doll.  

AI as a Relational Process  

To explore the relational movement of words, I used InferKit (a GPT-2-based software) to generate text. My method involved; 

• Inputting collected words into InferKit to produce AI-generated text.   

• Selecting phrases that shared a similar quality to the collected words.   

• Reassembling the fragments into coherent narratives.    

For example, I combined the phrase, ‘garden of Indian coral tree’, with the word set; 

S = {red Indian coral tree, monsoon and waves, April and May, Arabian and Persian, olives}  

From this, I generated the passage:  

‘When red Indian coral trees blossom, monsoons and waves drive sailing. In the garden of the Indian Coral tree in April and May, olives from Arabia and Persia grow.’ 

Here, the words coalesce into a new milieu, creating imagery through minimal structure. This method reveals the materiality of AI generated writing and how data, computation and human interpretation interact to shape meaning.    

Writing in Exhibition Contexts 

To display the generated text in an exhibition space, there are three approaches; speculative narrative, diasporic words and localised writing. These approaches produce space in a way where new milieus of writing are created in the material process.  

Based on the generated pieces of text, I fabricated a story about a sailor named Adaishe’s life and death. The exhibition space was divided into four sections. Each section represented each prayer time for Adaishe’s death at a ghost festival and a memory from Adaishe’s life. The introduction depicts a scenario where three family members are grieving Adaishe’s death at a ghost festival. The paper used simulates the texture of joss paper, which is burnt as a way of remembering the dead in China.    

Another section indicates Adaishe’s diasporic life in South-East Asia. Here I used a form of overseas letter; a common way of communicating among diasproic communities in the South China Sea. The AI generated words became data and their discreteness was demonstrated through their algorithmic correlation and abstraction. This suggests a poetic relation in new technological conditions.  

Finally, the last section of the exhibition captures Adaishe’s life on the sea. In this space, a fishing net, a compass and pieces of paper hang on the fishing net. AI generated writing is highlighted in blue, symbolising waves. In this scenario, writing is localised, depicting the protagonist’s life on the sea.   

Reimagining AI Writing as a Living Process 

This article introduces a philosophical study and speculative design of writing with AI, proposing the notion of ‘being water’. Specifically, milieus of words in the production of writing allows AI generated writing to be viewed as facilitating the movement of words and symbols.  

The article began with theories drawn from blue humanities to speculate on writing as an ocean medium through which words and symbols engage with their environment and extract the quality of the milieus. Through experimental writing and exhibition practices, I have demonstrated how AI-generated text can be dispersed, reconfigured and materialised in new milieus. Ultimately, this perspective invites us to rethink AI generated writing, not as an instrument of automation, but as a dynamic, relational practice embedded in cultural and environmental context.