BEMYSKY

I started this piece at the beginning of the year, and paused to finish it until just recently. It is of an independent model who quite frankly deserves to work with a professional photographer, but her intimate approach at personal photography has its own sublime appeal. You can find her work here: https://bemysky.tumblr.com/

During the delay of not working on this, the emergence of this new A.I. art movement popped up over the year. Much has probably already been said, but working through this piece to finish it led to some contemplation. I've posted elsewhere:

"The A.I. art thing is a perfect example of contemporary creative cultural malaise: an amalgamation of everything and anything into an semi-incoherent, stolen, distilled image for vague aesthetic purposes, without requiring specific skills or techniques. Purely digital, machine made, for the fun of seeing strange and interesting juxtapositions. A distorted chimera, full of derivatives without a source.

It runs parallel to the energy of a meme-image, since nearly all memes lose their owners in distribution, becoming the ideas expressed, also losing aesthetic value. But the meme still has value in an idea, it still carries information. The A.I. image carries aesthetic information, but doesn’t yet push into having relevant information.

The point, and maybe the purpose of art, is to capture specific emotions, specific tastes, specific ideas, from a specific individual and a specific time period. The A.I. trend does this in itself, but doesn’t represent anything beyond itself. It doesn’t indicate anything beyond itself, since once the image is revealed to be A.I. generated, the viewer should then ask, 'who or what is the source of this?'

Give credit where credit is due."

Ryan Kingslien has an interesting take on it:

"You, me, those around us may be graphic designers, motion designers, character artists, Unreal Engine generalists, texture artists, or animators but that is only today. We were something else before. We will be something else after. — Either way, we were here before and we will be here after. We will all survive because we are not what we do today. We are that which does it."

www.ryankingslien.com/all/worried-about-ai-a-simple-mental-framework

I partially agree with his stance, which is that the method of A.I. art generation will eventually be absorbed in some way for production and image creation. It's unavoidable as much as early photography was to painting. That being said, it's a question of Heart for me. If I know a machine autogenerated a piece of work, be it visual art, animation, music, text, etc., I'll interact with it for the fun of it. But there is no Heart in it.

From Tetsuo Hara:

"What AI can't do is be 'resolved to die,' — 'Suffer, suffer, suffer, and think it through. And then when you think 'I really might die,' there is 'this is what I wanted.' That's when the 'soul enters.' Those pictures with soul that make all the readers happy... To do that, to stake your life, abandon your desires, kill yourself. See it through no matter how painful. That's all I have.'"

www.imdb.com/news/ni64322305/

If there is an era we have entered, it is one in which we are to wrestle with the reality of this type of automation that exists at that edge of what was once imagined as a "futuristic idea." This idea has bled out into reality quicker than any of us probably anticipated. It's here now, not tomorrow. A page like https://twitter.com/blind_imagery is aesthetically compelling, having pieces that can probably meet any requirement for a concept or book cover.

But what is the purpose of developing individual skill, if all you need are a few starting examples for this thing to render anything you want? The internet dissolved the necessity for gallery space to display art. This A.I. thing may dissolve the need for an artist in order to display "art", skipping the human element. However, you will not get a Rockwell, Sorayama, Giger, Granov or Mœbius from this. Someone, some person, has to make the first step for aesthetic value, for a "this" versus "that" distinction.

There is wonder and awe in seeing a work of art that is a mark of performance by a skilled professional.