This piece is one of the later ones I made, after getting a good amount of practice with what people call "AI image generators" (namely DALLE).
I would often start with "random" material -- a word, a poem, a chat conversation, or in this case, a screenshot of a folder on my desktop which I had blurred and pixelated. There were pictures of people in this folder, which then turned into beige and brown squares (pixels), except for one red square -- that stood out.
I liked the feeling it gave me -- the red bright energy coming out of a bland environment. I opened up Paint and made the red square bigger so it took more room. Then it got morphed into a character, specifically a claymation one -- textured and tactile -- at my request.
Even though I'm working with digital tools, I want the resulting product to feel "real", like it belongs in physical reality. And clay has this wonderful solid (permanent) yet flexible feel or energy about it.
I made a couple dozen of these pictures, tweaking and adding -- dropping more images into the program to incorporate this color or that shape. Some came out busy. Some did not feel like "me" or "my style". But a few captured the aesthetic and motion of what I like about my hand-drawn doodles and the cartoon characters I'm drawn to.
This one in particular is special, because I can't look at it without feeling (and mirroring the feeling) of the excited red cube.
He's a simple guy, seemingly humble, not particularly imposing or powerful in the traditional sense, but the emotional engine is there. The weight is on one foot because he's moving forward, with momentum. He's facing the light and running towards it. This is power.
The red cubes on the floor are opportunities. Each cube could be a day, a minute, a relationship, a project, an art piece. It makes you want to enter a day with the same sense of excitement, enthusiasm, and borderline disbelief. There are so many patterns to discover, to use, to take, to push on.
Some things are not for you -- some waves pass you by or you walk past them. Some resonate with the same frequency as you, call out to you. Some things are "yours". It simplifies life, which is useful. Another power. The ability to parse, to be drawn to energy, to trust it.
You follow a thread, then get another revelation, then another. This is relaxing yet forward-moving. Like you're being pulled -- not pushing against the wind.
The process of making art, selling art, building a brand, marketing your work, etc can feel disorienting, tedious -- not because the work is hard (it's not plowing, not coal mining) but because of the mental anguish of too many choices, of shiny objects, of a thousand roads. But as we've all felt, if a path is illuminated, it's easy to walk -- easy to feel good -- to reach flow.
Knowing you can curate, edit, fix, remove, and otherwise explore your own world further gives you the freedom to step into the room. Once in the room, you can move around.
But the key for me is always to pick a thread -- if I'm smart, then I keep it simple -- the one that calls out to me. Then I will get somewhere via forward motion, even if I have to take 3 left turns. -- and I'd rather take those 3 lefts than agonize over whether to turn right.
All the correct decisions in a row become the incorrect path if it feels like pain. Then I might as well be carrying heavy boxes for a job, working as a marketer for someone else's product. Who cares that I'm officially "doing what I want for work" if the process blows? It's easier to be grateful if you're forgiving, realize that being less-than-good / looking goofy are serious work...
...and focus on exploration (knowing that is your strength, and not "precision of action from the jump"). All the great artists who lose their "beginner's mind" end up being stale. I think I'd rather be bad every first step I take into a new venture rather than "kill it" and then "fall off".
So despite falling in love with hand-drawn doodles, hip-hop remixes, curating interviews, and other artforms, I let myself follow a new light -- even if it's overhyped or not "real art" by some standards -- or other non-emotional reasons to turn away.
Perhaps the most high brow or even snobby thing to do is ignore (or not even take into account) anything but this feeling of delight and discovery (curiosity, awe, etc). A new artform, or medium, or this new thing "I can do".
I can allow myself to forget -- to be bad at the "other stuff" even if I love doing it, and then come back to them with fresh eyes and a beginner's heart. I might lose some short-term muscle memory but also some bad habits. When I return, I'm back with new strategies, new insight, and new love.
~
Before releasing this piece, I hadn't posted for a really long while. Hadn't written much. Had not created anything new. I felt like my "spark for creation" was blocked -- a traffic jam of songs, doodles, digital art, thoughts, curated playlists, and other entities all trying to fit through the head of a needle.
(This sounds too familiar -- to hear from artists -- and to feel. Which is why I was debating whether to share these words. I know it's much more painful to read than to write. Not because you'd feel for me, but because it reminds too well that we do this too. Maybe not with art. But with something. Yet to deny this truth would be to prolong a deeper agony, to invite regret. Though if didn't find a solution, I wouldn't bother bringing up the problem.)
I could make stuff. I knew how. I had the time -- but not the emotional fuel (focus?).
"If I'm not going to release this anyway, I don't want to make anything."
I could be mad at this feeling, think and intellectualize the role of an artist as they pedestal it -- "make art for yourself! damn the audience!" But I can't.
I don't want to.
"I don't want to." I'm a stubborn kid like that
I want to show you what I made.
I want to smile about it together. To ask questions. To be misunderstood and understood. To clarify. To go back and make more.
Making art does relax me. Allows me to self-reflect, discover, play. But somehow the vacuum got to me. I would always create with the excitement that some day I would share (at least the good ones). But many good ones came and went, and I didn't.
So this piece is a big deal to me.
In the midst of a stagnation or hibernation (or whatever other word you put on the state of having a weight you carry but can't put down), I kept running into this simple image.
On my computer, in Dropbox on my phone, wherever else you run into yourself.
Every time I saw it -- I couldn't believe this image wasn't out there. Every time I looked at it, it made me feel good. Delighted.
I identified with this little guy. I wanted to be him, in that beautifully captured moment.
I thought "I am him," "why am I sitting here? standing here? I see all this (wonder/possibility/goodness), and I am not moving".
I consciously noticed it, even made a note to myself -- "wow, this piece holds up, it's still potent". Then kept living my life, not letting the photons out, keeping them as bits in my (state-of-the-art luxury) storage.
Then once I decided I would "start there", release this piece, the next wave of wind came -- "but what do I say? how much time do I spend talking about each art piece? I don't want to chuck it out as an orphan (as Lyor Cohen once told Young Thug about releasing songs without promotion or fanfare or talk), but I have so many pieces and they all need to get out, be on my website, my museum, on people's walls."
As I'm writing this now, the words easily pouring out of me, I am reminded of how I took out the recycling last week. In my sister's complex in Decatur, GA, where I'm staying for a month, watching her cats while she visits our grandparents in Israel, you drive your big bag o' recyclables to the bins by building #1. To my surprise, you don't just throw the bag in, you have to open it and shake the cans, plastics, and papers out. When I tore the bag open and flipped it over to do so, all the stuffs rushed down, jamming against one another so none of them came out. They were heavy, they wanted to go in the bin, but they couldn't decide amongst themselves who would go first, so none went.
I remember thinking -- "wow, this is just like my art, my art business, my career, my life". Silly, really. I tore the bag a little more and shook it -- one brave can tumbled through, then another, and then they all gushed down in a clump of clanging. A couple more shakes and the whole bag was empty. The state of being jammed, of controlled inaction was just a distant memory of "a minute ago".
It's funny to sit here and "decide" what to say. About art. About this piece. About my "process", my "philosophy of art", and all the other nifty things I want to share or be "known for". After all, I want to sell art, put art on your wall, have you come back to me for more -- to think (and feel) that something here is worthwhile. I want to share my excitement for making cute little characters on the computer but I was warded off by myriads of artists talking about paints and photoshop, technical things (or challenges) that are top-of-mind to them but have no intersection with a buyer's life. No connection to emotion, inspiration, the reason why someone would put a piece up on a wall. Buyers think in terms of "who, where, and why". They don't care about "what". A playful piece to put in the hallway. A vibrant one for the home office or a kids' room. Something with red to match the rest of the decor, or contrast with it. Something with pop.
Ultimately, a piece should speak, mirror, call out to, push, pull on a person, where they say "this is for me" or "this is me, today, tomorrow, into the foreseeable future". That's why they buy it, so it helps them remember who they are, maintain what's good, pull them where they want to go. They're interested in emotion, story, character development -- not what software you used, what chemicals are in the brushstrokes -- not unless they make art themselves, and that's just a sliver of your buyers.
I'm not making art for other artists. I'm not talking about art for other artists to read. I won't inspire a single artist anyway if I don't connect with regular people, build a bridge to the real world. Then artists would care what DAW I use (aka which music-making software) or which visual program. If I do share bits about the process or any technical lore, it's because there's a story there. Something magical or beyond the facts.
Telling you I used Photoshop and the built-in Firefly generative capabilities to edit what I made using DALLE is only there so you know that I care -- that I didn't just ask a robot to make art for you. That I used one computer to generate serendipity for me, based on real emotion, real curiosity, real life threads, then took it into a manual space where another computer helped me remove what didn't resonate, replace and fill in, polish (but not too much) and make it ready to hang.
If I'm so "obsessed" (insistent) on authenticity (read: realness), why do I like making art with computer generators (what other ppl call AI)?
Related post: Why I don't like the term AI
If I'm on a journey of self-discovery, mining memories, dreams, and unconscious currents, why am I taking a detour from my hand-drawn doodles to make art using tools everyone else has access to? "Wouldn't your art look just like other people's?"
Perhaps this is a lesson in "everything happens for a (good) reason". If I had released my doodles when I wanted to, made a brand around them, and became known solely for that, then I wouldn't be open to looking around. To participating in what's happening today, using art to mirror people's experience in the current world, the economy, the identity-crisis that is warning to overcome us. "Who am I?" "What's my value?" "Do I have anything to offer other than my consumption dollars?" "How do I keep my job?"
These aren't just overhyped headlines (though they are), but they are an exacerbation of an existential bubble that started when the world opened up. Suddenly, I can see what everyone else is doing, at the speed of light. I am competing for attention, for worth, with people in Slovenia, in China, in Brazil, in Timbuktu (where is that?!). Beyond, my name (which I also share with others, ironically -- though not as many as John Parkers do), what makes me special? Makes me "me".
And that question was perhaps more easily answered when I freehand doodled. Despite access to markers, others didn't draw like I did. Maybe some drew similar things, sort of, but it was easy to justify myself when all infinite possibilities were "officially there", on a blank page -- where motion of a hand, a pen, was literally infinite in its potential. But when everyone is using DALLE, or Firefly, or Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion (and a few others), then what is my "edge"? Where do I ontologically "cut" reality in a unique way? (to borrow Karen Barad's idea). In simple words, this means -- what do I make you see or understand that only I can?
Just like language, where we all know the same words (except perhaps, "ontologically" -- having to do with the nature of being, as related to categories of existence -- think "when does an apple become a core?"), limitation often allows for a clearer definition of "you and not me". If I use oil paints and you use pencils, it's easy to tell us apart, but it's also a bit of a crutch, a cheat code. If we both are given the same box of crayons, maybe there's a bit more clarify there. After all, you can't explain why what you made is different from mine via a simple answer: "I can afford oil paints and an art space in my house, and you can't", "I had a cousin who painted with acrylic and gave me his supplies when he moved to Arizona".
Now, our origin stories are based on something less obvious -- it becomes an exploration of emotion, attention, love, story -- beyond the tools. And so, if you look up other people's art on the web (Instagram, Google Images, etc), you will not find much that looks like mine, even though I used DALLE/Firefly -- "simple" tools. That even non-trained artists can make pictures with. This is because my sensibility is different, despite access to the same box of crayons.
I was excited by the prospect of making pictures out of words, and I didn't let the ubiquity of the medium discourage me, because I knew I liked to look at different things that most people. Or at least, I valued different things than most artists, or most artists who would think to plug this new toy in. In a sea of superhero, brooding, maximal, magnificent, photorealism, I share simple, not overly cute (though super cute), excited, feeling characters. Cartoons, sure. Pop art iconography, ok. But more than that -- walking poems, pondering creations, curious and engaging-with-the-world Pinnochios that gave up on striving for the idea of "realness" a long time ago.
Because the striving is the reality, just like mine. As soon as I'm ontologically too defined, I cease to be real. I become a "reel" instead, a loop of self-repeating behaviors, which is great for initial brand-building but horrible for any stretch of a fulfilling life. So I used the ennui I felt with my doodles or masterful electronic hip-hop songs I was constructing from samples (which I was so proud of but never released to create a job for myself "out there") and followed a new light source.
It was a worthy challenge, one which connected me with the world but also gave me the opportunity to instantly differentiate. I again blurred line between creation and curation. People would ask "is this real art? did you really 'make' this? you hand didn't trace the shapes. a computer spit this out for you". Others might answer "then why does it feel so radically his?" A question followed by another. All the while I could be making bucks to feed the energy current of my life, of others. This was exciting to me. A bit rebellious, a bit going with the crowd, but 100% authentic and following my delight, in the process, in the final product -- seeing life emerge from bits, from words, from fragments of ideas, interpreted later, not in the forethought. Not trying to recreate what's in my mind, but marveling at "what I had done", even if I didn't do it alone.
And this is important to me too, to feel connected to the zeitgeist, to the tomes of culture that these computers have inhaled, to be able to exhale something so lovely when intersecting with my intent. The world and I created these together, and I can also love them not as my own, but as my buyers would -- "oh wow, that's for me", "a gift from another".
When I use these instruments, I feel like I can experience that right along with my "audience" bc I'm sitting in the stands with them, looking at what unfolds on the stage, no thanks to my own doing (or sort of). It gives me the same joy of directing a play without being an actor within it, which I miss from my theater days. And though I love acting, and love emoting with my own body, love doodling, and love meticulously piecing songs together, I always think "do I love this because I made it?" and "is it really that good?"
When DALLE makes 100 images during my chats (because it lives within ChatGPT and you make pictures as an extension of the conversation) and I only like 7 of them, I know those 7 are good. Because they make me feel something. And the other 93, I don't feel odd rejecting, or putting to the side, or not "claiming as my own". It reinforces curation as the backbone of good creation, of good art.
And it does so in such an obvious way. If a comedian on stage does a perfect impression of Homer Simpson, and I instead bring a tape recorder on with me which plays a joke recorded in 1954 by an unknown comedian but still lands today as it did back then, who is more "creative"? What does the world ask for? More uniqueness, more gradients, more depth, connection, more point of view or for me to "move my cords"?
After all, manual labor seems to be the least compensated output, and it's not even a new concept, not a new economic reality. I guess this is my way of trying to reward courage. Because is it easier to come up with the original design of the Minions, or to painstakingly animate an hour and a half of 3D models? Long nights, sweat, delirium might be the costs of the animator. But a loss of "identity" is a risk that the character designer faced alone.
"This isn't art. This is too simple. A child could come up with this. Why would you deserve a dollar, the next job, the title of an artist?" -- these are the questions that plague the creator alone, a curator of a rounded cylinder and two circles who colored them with one color and called them "real".