Maybe even a new art form

Over the past year I’ve been making the majority of my artwork using generative AI tools. Let me explain.

It took me a while to warm up to the idea of them—quite a while, in fact.

For the first six or seven months after the Girl with a Pearl Earring remix came out, I sat watching what other people were doing in this new medium. I saved many posts, many images, occasionally resharing them but… I felt left behind.

During the back half of the pandemic lockdown, after a year or so of domestic photography to the point where the subject had exhausted itself, I had started on a series of everydays in the form of digital paintings that took 10-30 minutes to create. These were handmade digital objects crafted in reaction to the souless insta-reproducibility of NFTs. But suddenly NFTs were gone and AI images were everywhere—spectacular and ornate compositions available at the push of a button to seduce you. Anything anybody all at once. Like an art lottery or slot machine: pull the lever, and see if you like the result. If yes, save to camera roll. If no, let it dissolve into the infinite scroll. Rinse and repeat.

Seeing all this, I couldn’t help but think: maybe I’m retired now. Maybe there’s no point for me to make art anymore. Or, at least, I’ll be forever unfashionable as this keeps on going. Because now that we exist within an infinite, LLM-infused hall of mirrors, no image can ever be personal again—and especially no digital image. Isn’t it all just data to be ground up like hamburger forever and ever from now on? I had made an artistic practice from taking intimate images of my life… and this just no longer seemed relevant. I was closer to dinosaurs like Brakhage or Noren than whatever artists this century will become. So I figured I might just be done—and, to be honest, I was actually OK with that. (I said what I wanted to about digital images in memento mori anyway.)

But I also recognized the potential of these systems. I’ve worked as a collage artist longer than I’ve been a filmmaker. And, the reality of my life right now means that these systems are actually perfect for me: the tired father who works full-time to support a family and whose window of opportunity for artmaking has narrowed to 30-60 minutes, exhausted on the couch after 9:30 PM, with muscles sore after a day’s work, having also cooked dinner, washed dishes, facilitated homework and baths and piano classes and art projects and stuffy play pretend and folded laundry and so on and so forth. And in those rare minutes where I wasn’t working for someone else, I was simply to tired to drag myself to my desk and organize video files from an unfinished project on my hard drives, which themselves are buried under boxes from the latest studio migration or partial re-organization, or pull out the many barely-curated boxes of collage materials sitting under the basement staircase waiting for my attention.

And so there, pooped on the couch, my brain ringing with cellphone addiction and bite-sized dopamine hits to numb the body, these AI platforms were actually perfect, because everything in the whole world had already been cut and labelled for me, and even various techniques involving strenuous labour (or at least the simulacrum of them) were bottled up inside these systems… but it took me quite a while to see it… as I said, about six months of watching and waiting.

Anyway, when those gates opened, content came flooding in like a tidal wave. As a result, in the past year I’ve made many more images than I normally do. And many of these images I cherish and savour. And I am well-aware of the issues that are present with these systems—questions about authorship, questions about property, questions about ethics, questions about training and the effects our tools have on our selves—but, at the same time, it’s an actual new art form. I used to remark to people how incredible it is that we get to live through the early days of the new art form of the cinema, which is barely a century old when music, dance, poetry, painting, and architecture have all been around for millennia. But here’s another new kid on the scene, and once again—just as happened before with cinema and photography—folks are trying to take it out to the woodshed and bury it, tell folks they shouldn’t touch it, rather than explore the potentials.

But it’s been such an interesting tool to explore. And I will continue to do so, because making is my way of thinking about the world, of understanding media, of understanding myself and where I am going. And I continue onwards.