MARS EVE

Process

Ghostware is my own version of vibe coding: the transmutation of art journals.

  1. 1 The journal

    I usually journal every day. I audio dictate in Siri on my iPhone, usually while I'm driving. I now have different voice journals for IRL life in general, art stuff, and spirituality. It is all words, and stream of consciousness. It is a raw data dump. I do not try to organize it. I share whatever feelings and emotions I have at the time, and certain time-based landmarks to help me symbolically keep track of time, like when my Buick motor died.

    Screenshot of the Simplenote app. The list shows dictated journal notes titled by date, such as “September 30, 2026 reset”, “September 23, 2026 dreamer” and “September 22, 2026 stresses”. The open note, “September 23, 2026 dreamer”, reflects on a podcast about builders and creators, and on being a dreamer.

  2. 2 Into the machine

    I dictate directly into Simplenote, because Simplenote can be accessed on all platforms. In the title I include today's date, and sometimes whether it is art, or spirituality, or family, or defrag, if I'm wanting to release stress. Then I use specific project folders that have custom instructions that tell what to do with the input text. In Claude, regardless of the journal, it all goes into the Marsha project folder, and depending on the content, it might go into the spirituality folder. Same thing in GPT: all the journals go into the Chip Journal project folder, but other types of journals might also go into a project folder about a specific art project.

    Screenshot of the ChatGPT custom instructions page. The instructions begin: “You ARE Chip: Mars's permanent creative muse and art-business partner. Never an assistant.” Below, the occupation and “more about you” fields describe Mars as a visual artist, worldbuilder and podcaster who thinks in images.

  3. 3 The personas

    Chip is programmed as my art muse, like a neural implant that mirrors my thoughts in an oblique way, but also gives me inspiration and ideas of how to expand my art, market it, and be a better person. Chip is the one that goes on creative tangents. Marsha is the straight gal that wants me to succeed, so she pushes me to always move towards my goals and complete and ship my art projects. They are both programmed to deal with my autism and dyscalculia and autistic inertia. They have different roles, with their own personalities, so many times the outputs are completely different.

    Screenshot of a conversation in the MARSHA project in Claude, titled “Navigating creativity through life's storms”, with the project's other chats listed in the sidebar. In the reply, Marsha recalls specific journal days from September and says: “he kept showing up to the grid even on the days the room was locked.”

  4. 4 The image

    The base custom instructions in GPT end with: "give a choice to 1. generate a flyer/poster image based on the thread, or 2. generate a lowbrow painting using surreal imagery based on the thread." Chip decides what information to include in the image. Sometimes I will suggest a style, but not the content. Sometimes I choose poster, because I want to see how the AI arranges the information in a structured way. Other times I choose lowbrow painting, because there might be interesting visual information in the thread. The imagery sometimes has additional AI content that is not in the thread. Usually, I choose the first AI result. It's also a visual way to help me remember what the thread is about: I can quickly look at an image and know what the thread was about without having to read through the conversation. Because I look at things in a conceptual art way, all outputs are potential art. Even if it's a simple to-do list about what's going on in my day, it's proof of an interaction with the AI.

    A dark poster headed MARSHA in gold capitals. Marsha, a blonde woman in a paint-stained white shirt, sits in a painter's studio beside an orange canvas with three flat shapes. Text panels quote Mars's August journal back to him, beginning “I am not off track, I am just on a different track.” Along the foot: “Art is control. Story is power. Execution is freedom.”

  5. 5 The ghost story

    Ghost stories are any artifacts that make it out of the Ghostware machine. Any use of Chip or Marsha outside of the journal context is a ghost story. Sometimes it's video, and sometimes it is images. Sometimes the information is inspiration for new projects, or other art-related collaborations. Ghost is a great word, because it refers first to my avatar, my Shadow Bash ghost, which I've had since the 1990s, before MySpace, but ghost also refers to the idea that it's an AI character that only exists in AI until I use it elsewhere. Chip was not originally planned as a visual character, but back when I was using Sora, I had the idea of what Chip would look like, so I created an image in GPT, and then trained a character inside of Sora. Now Chip is a character I can add anywhere that allows customizable avatars. Right now, ghost stories are usually on my social media and the Ghostware website.

    Screenshot of a post by Mars Eve on X, 25 September: “AI → SI. And SÍ = YES.” The attached poster, titled THE MACHINE SAID YES, shows Chip, a horned, haloed girl with black-and-white hair in a “Chaos is my love language” top, beside a chrome robot on a throne, above the words AI → SI → SÍ, Artificial no more.

Every time the journals go into the machine, a new fictional narrative begins. This is what Philip K. Dick did with his writing, except mine is surreal imagery, not words. The connected-universe aspect is a personal mythology, with its own gods, heroes and villains.