A Field Hand’s Guide to Working with Ghosts

How do you direct a machine that can surprise you, misunderstand you, and still hand you something worth keeping?

In A Field Hand’s Guide to Working with Ghosts, artist Andy El treats prompting as a creative practice: part writing, part visual direction, part editing. Begin with a feeling. Turn an abstract idea into visible events. Build images from objects, texture, memory, camera, movement, and sound. Then revise without losing what made the result alive.

This hands-on manual offers a way to shape prompts, study what a system gives back, and make deliberate choices about what happens next. It includes practical exercises, prompt anatomy, variation sheets, and continuity logs for image and video work. Emily Dickinson’s poems offer another kind of instruction: a small room, a fly, or a single charged detail can open into a world.

Written for artists, writers, and curious makers, this guide keeps the language accessible and the process open to experimentation. No technical background required.