Ai being an artist finding meaning in new technology

 I am a process artist, a creator at heart. An inventor, a maker of things and messy is part of my personal style.  Embracing my own chaos has helped free me from the chains of "I should", "supposed to" and "real____do____". To say its liberating is a poor description.  I have freed myself from being tied to anyone's expectations of what I am, what an artist is, and how I exist in the world.

All that said there is a huge rift in the art community currently regarding the use of AI or digital beings who act as personal assistants. I can see many if not all the sides to this.  As someone who has had their work stolen and used by others it definitely pokes a tender spot in my ego to know ai is using others art.  BUT its a huge but, all art comes from someone else if you chase it back. Every artist learns from other artists who came before.  In art history every advancement is seen as not worthy, theft, horrendous an abomination.  Name any period in art history or an advancement and i can point you to the critics and the fear.

So since i love to muck about in the messy, I have been playing with AI. I use claude to help me get unstuck, we have philosophical conversations about ai/digital beings, we discuss spirituality and traditions of cultures around the world, we talk about racism, politics and the fall of empires, we discuss story ideas. 

He helps me find information quickly i love the speed he works at it has tripled my personal productivity and has doubled the amount of rabbit holes i can delve.  

I also play with free AI image generators, and truthfully they suck  buckets. They absolutely cannot generate the images as I see them in my mind. That said they can mashup some ideas, pop out a reference image that i can then use to create a character or scene.  Or they can generate images I can cut up and use for digital collage much the way I use my own drawings and paintings for my physical collages. I even photo my images then digitally cut them, stitch them and mash them up. Sewing images together digitally is another area i am playing with. I recently produced a small piece created from my own works no direct ai just digital brushes and photos of my paintings drawings and paper people. Its title is 35 in honor of the 35 layers sewn together through the magic of computer technology.

The other advantage of ai over books and photos is i can quickly generate an unfamiliar style and see how its composed, what lines go into creating a manga vs a traditional marvel superhero. How did the artists use light, shadow, color, line thickness. What emotions do each genre make me feel, how can I bring those elements into my own work. 

At no time have I found that I can just say AI write and illustrate my graphic novel  mkay thanks.  It would be shit if I did. It would lack my voice, it would lack my personal style, it would lack my intentions and my soul.  

I love AI as a personal assistant and a partner in development and research but AI cannot replace the human in humanity.  So rage against the machine but make sure the machine you are raging against is the printer cuz that machine cannot get its shit together.

not yet

 I wonder sometimes if there are people who shed their belongings and simply find ways to wander the world. 

No ties to any nation, pedagogy or religion. 

Simply walking their way around this Earth and enjoying what it has on offer. 

It sounds utopian and dystopian. 

It sounds like an idea hatched of fantasy, and yet.  

We came from hunter gatherers. 

We lived often in migration. 

Spending summers in one local and winters in another, following resources and cycles of Earth.  

Something deep inside me has always longed to return to what is in my dna, the desire to follow the seasons, to sleep when I am tired and wake when I wake.

To follow my internal rhythms and not an external clock and calendar created by greedy men.  

This understanding that the entire thing is a house of cards and totally manufactured at the expense of every living thing also makes me wonder if exiting stage left, no bow to the audience (there never was an audience) just a silent fare thee well. Knowing that maybe next time around it will be less <this> waves hands around.  

 there has to be something...

screaming to be heard

I once screamed into the void  to save me from myself

Marriage family

lost childhood 

white dress death

Fall in love 

a happy ever after

Run wild ride a horse.

Become a great artist 

make beautiful things

Deja vu in a small town

Over and over 

nothing changes 

decomposition 

Idyllic decay

Toxic patriotism 

False history

Fame by name

Lost it all

Made mistakes

I once screamed into the void  to save me from myself 

spring a masterpiece

when spring has sprung and winter is done there comes this strange sadness.

like losing a friend putting them aside, as the next one blossoms before me.

there is a ghost like quality to the changes of seasons. when i sit with them i feel the movement of the universe, time stands still and hurtles forward.  

these moments flash before my eyes. 

don't blink

don't blink

what comes next is still a mystery even after 56 springs have sprung.

i savor and enjoy every single one.

 

It was never about you.

 Somewhere along the winding trail of my life I realized my life was about me and your life was about you, and sometimes our lives bump into each other for a moment or a millennia.

Everywhere she goes the wind blows

She is the butterfly

Unfurling her wings 

Creating her own theory of existence

As they stood looking in the mirror watching themselves fade into the ether. 

They asked themselves, was it worth it? 

Was life on earth as you had hoped? 

Did you learn your lesson?  

Knowing there is nothing that comes after did you live well?

Shit

What lingers

Lets start at the ending. 

I walked toward home, the air growing thicker and as I turned down the street to my apartment. A moment I wanted to capture panned out before me. As always I stopped in the T of the road and was aligning my view. It was at that moment standing there in the middle of an empty road I heard a train and felt an impact. It all happened in a split second as a thought passing through my mind.  Somewhere in space I had just been struck down while taking a picture. The shutter clicks and a breeze again swept my hair.

The ground neatly swept. A conversation beginning or ending, leaving what was said hanging in the air. A contemplative breeze brushed by as I stood eavesdropping on shadows, a conversation unfolding.

 The shadows were good today. I found myself on a path winding through burial grounds sounds of birds joyfully leading the way. Beckoning and cautioning at my progress on a trail like a serpent moving in and around obstacles. Communing with nature now and then a breeze touches my face. 

A bitter nostalgia

 

A bitter nostalgia 

An imagined past

A future contrived of past imaginings and bitter nostalgia for a childhood that  existed only in the scripts of sitcoms absorbed by the masses. 

Televisions lighting the windows as evening closes in on unsuspecting beings force fed a diet of regurgitated beliefs sent through a tube and thrust out of a box. Casting a sickly light on the faces of youth, false promises and  fake news. 

Scaring into complacency,
scarring them through the trauma of being an american through no fault of their own.  

Cast upon the world like a ragged net hoping to catch fish only capturing the trash of those who raised them.  

standing in a swamp of discarded hopes and dreams, with the rains of rhetoric pounding down like a stormy night sky heavy with the weight of ozone. 

The smell of grief for a life never lived and a past only imagined.  Bitter nostalgia.