February 12, 2024

Romancing the AI – Using Neural Networks as part of the creative process

I’m not just an artistic genius you know. I have a day job (well, not at the moment, but let’s pretend) that involves me using clever coding algorithms to tease information out of voluminous and/or complex data sets. It’s both challenging and satisfying and I’m very good at it. It’s also not so different from painting as you might think. Now, before I get into the greasy nuts-and-bolts of this, let me briefly address the DALL-Ephant in the room. Some of my art is created with the help of my pet AI. I don’t want to get into the supposed existential threat that generative AI poses to the artistic community, but I recognise that merely the mention of that TLA (two-letter acronym, and yes I went there, sue me) makes some folks a bit queasy. So let me make something clear – the AIs that I create, either as part of my day job, or to aid my creative process, are neither a threat to anyone’s livelihood, artistic or otherwise, nor the ongoing existence of humanity. I recognise the rather distressing threat that the new breed breed of AI poses to our societal cohesion, and I intend to be part of the solution rather than the problem, but neither my pet Neural Network, nor ChatGPT are sentient, or ever will be, and in my case the use of AI in no way cheapens, short-cuts, or replaces any part of my creative process, as I will discuss here at length. Nor does it steal anyone else’s creative output outside of the referencing of photos and such that is already plainly apparent in much of the rest of my artwork.

Still not convinced? Allow me to walk you through the process, so you can see for yourself. I might get a little bit technical here and there, and feel free to skim any bits that look a bit scary, none of these are essential to the understanding of the overall process. For those that can grok the nuts-and-bolts, please be nice, this was all done in my free time and doesn’t quite pass the quality control I apply to my usual day-job output!

So why do I use an AI in my creative process? Well, I vaguely remember a fit of unconstrained, impulsive ADHD enthusiasm on a long train journey a couple of years ago. I think my thought process was along the lines of “I’ve got all these images that I’ve collected from the web that I use as painting references, I wonder what would happen if applied my python skills to mess with them in interesting ways” and I set about coding my first “image mangler” using my phone right there (I was likely using Pythonista on my iPhone at that point, but were I doing this right now with my Android phone I’d use Pydroid). At that point I my idea was to algorithmically mess with pixel values to mutate the images in interesting ways. This meant dreaming up interesting algorithmic approaches that weren’t those used by the myriad image filters available as standard in all the existing image manipulation tools (e.g. the Gaussian filter).

When you’re manipulating images in any tool, such as Photoshop or GIMP or whatever, what’s actually happening in the background is that your image is converted to a 3-dimensional numerical matrix (aka an array, or sometimes vector) which represents the pixel values of that image – specifically, 3 two-dimensional arrays, one for each of the primary colours of the colour model you’re using, usually RGB – Red, Green and Blue (I could get into a long diatribe about the various colour models and how there’s really no such thing as “primary” colours, but that’s for another day). Each value in the 3 two-dimensional arrays represents a pixel intensity of the pixels that make up that image (0 meaning no colour, 255 meaning full colour). When the images are rendered the three values for each pixel are combined to produce a specific hue (in the subtractive colour model, again, for another day). If you change any of the values of any pixel, you can subtly change the resulting image once the channels are recombined. Since the digital version of this image is a simple mathematical matrix, the manipulations are usually done mathematically. So by adding or subtracting numbers from the pixel values, you can change the colour or intensity of that pixel, and those around it. Clever, eh? Most of the common filters use some pretty hefty and complicated maths, a lot of which I don’t care to spend the time trying to understand. I’m a much baser beast than is capable of such mathematical refinery, and my method is almost always “brute f***ing force” aka, arbitrarily changing shit with pretty simple numerical functions (add, subtract, divide etc.) and seeing what happens. Believe it or not, this is less clever than it sounds. And to make it even less sophisticated I reduced each image to a single channel (in effect, making it black & white, or more accuratly, monotone, since they could be rendered in any single colour) and crop them to a specific size and shape.

Now, paradoxically, it was that last step where all the real magic and fun kicked off. Yes, I produced some interesting effects by manipulating pixel values based on the values of adjacent pixels, but that was rarely the most interesting aspect of the resulting image, it was their composition.

Firstly, let me address the question of why I cropped them at all. Simply, when working with multiple mathematical vectors (one for each image), life gets a lot easier if they’re the same size. I was basically being lazy, since if I had deal with a different size and aspect ratio with every new image, I would need to write some boring code to deal with that. Bollocks to that, thought I, I’ll just make them all square.

So far so dumb. But I still had decision which square to retain from each image (presuming the image was not already square), and since I intended to run algorithm against hundreds of images, there was no way that I was going to manually choose the ideal crop for each one. So, applying my ongoing, borderline pathological, policy of brevity, I googled some code (this was back in the hazy mists of time before ChatGPT saved the world) that simply cropped the largest possible square from the centre of the image. Behold:

def crop_center(self, img, crop_width, crop_height):  
    img_width, img_height = img.size  
    return img.crop((  
        (img_width - crop_width) // 2,  
        (img_height - crop_height) // 2,  
        (img_width + crop_width) // 2,  
        (img_height + crop_height) // 2)  
    )

Some serious shit going on there, right? If you don’t understand it, don’t worry, it’s not important. Just savour the glorious majesty of the resulting image:

Original Image - a woman with crossed arm
Original Image
Cropped Image - crossed arm woman with half her head missing
Cropped Image

I think you’ll agree with me, that that’s, at best, a pretty insensitive crop. Which is less than ideal if what you needed was for the integrity of the original image to be largely retained through the process. But I didn’t, and what I saw in this image, and many like it, was a thing of wondrous beauty. A composition so divergent it borders on blasphemy. Ejection from traditional art establishment in a 500 x 500 matrix. A compositions that I would never have thought to use, or have the balls to select, in a millions years. It was love at first sight!

So what was the actual revelation here?

  1. Bizarre compositions can be very pleasing
  2. Computers are really great at messing things up

(I’d like to point out that this latter revelation pre-dates ChatGPT and its much lauded capacity for beguiling nonsense.)

These revelations got me thinking: what other perverse ways can I coerce a computer to mess up images?

Ironically, given how easy it was to elicit this specific behaviour, figuring out new ingenious ways for serendipitous image corruption was oddly hard. Where to even start? My algorithmic approaches to date were interesting, but hardly mind-blowing. I started hunting around in the wider field of digital generative art, and found some fantastic stuff, but also some scary maths that I didn’t much feel like grappling with (although I will no doubt revisit this area at some point) and lots of largely tedious AI based approaches. However, my skulking in these dark crevices of digital creativity did resurface some arcane knowledge derived from my day job as a data scientist and analyst from a good 6 or 7 years previous when I was messing around with language models. Specifically, the working of a Neural Network type algorithm crafted at Google that was all the rage at that point called Word2Vec. Word2Vec is a direct ancestor to the modern Large Language Models such as ChatGPT. It’s what’s generically known as an autoencoder. I won’t get into the nuts and bolts of autoencoders as language models here, suffice to say that their job is to take text in at one end, and then reproduce it at some later time, as best it can. In their most basic form, then are overly complex and poorly performing compression algorithms, but in their more refined form are, well, extremely useful complex and poorly performing compression algorithms. But you’ve seen the conjuring tricks they perform via your surreptitious use of ChatGPT and no doubt use them already to churn out the sort of boring prose that you secretly used to enjoy churning out yourself. (This post was produced entirely by me and Neovim by the way, so pipe down already!).

Anyway, it took a single google search to discover that same principle can be, and has been, applied to images, and it got me pondering: I wonder what sort of weirdness an autoencoder would produce if I gave it lots and lots of images to memorise and not enough “memory” to remember them. Surely it would start to mix all the images up in fun and delightful ways?

So I immediately set about cutting and pasting bits of python code from a tutorial I found with the documentation of foundational Neural Network library Keras and a few hours later I had my results, and whoa where they results! The rest, as they say, is history. I set up a Instagram account and started to share all my delightfully warped and frequently spooky images.

For those desiring a little more specificity for what I actually did, I will elaborate a little here, but feel free to skip this bit if technical tomfoolery doesn’t float your boat.

Before I get into the tasty neural network action, a quick note on the wider technological landscape. All of the fun and wonder was created with the combination of one or more of the following elements:

  • Python
  • Numpy
  • Keras with a Tensorflow backend fot the neural network
  • The PIL image processing library

Like any Deep Learning style neural network, an autoencoder uses one or more layers of interlinked hidden layers. For my proposes, how these interlink is not particularly important, every node in each layer links to every node of the next. Where a more standard deep learning network, for example some sort of classifier, would terminate in a very narrow output layer (e.g. 1 neuron for a binary classifier), the autoencoder output layer has the same number of neurons as there is pixels in the input, namely the number of pixels in your input images. The output of that layer is scaled back up and reconstituted into an image, which is what I share. All my images are of uniform size, 500px2 initially, but higher resolution now, which, for the sake of brevity, I flatten to a 1-dimensional 250,000 wide vector, scaled from the standard 0-255 range to a unit vector for the usual reasons. The autoencoder is tasked with “minimising” the error (loss) function (I tried various, but MSE gives me the most satisfying results) of the output when compared to the original input vector. You’ll note that in the prior parentheses that I used the word “satisfying”. This was not an accident. The task here is not to produce the best, or most accurate, result, it is to produce the most artistically satisfying result, which means I specifically do not want to absolutely minimise the error function or even close, since that would result in the original images being reproduced near perfectly, which is no use at all (at least for my use-case). So instead I want to reduce the error function to the degree to which I get something that isn’t just random noise, but also isn’t a faithful representation of the image. How do I do this? I use some or all of various approaches, the point being to “constrain” the network to prevent it from doing its job properly, for example I can:

  • Stop the training process prematurely when it has reduced the error function to some specific value or percentage
  • Train it on far too many images for the size of the network to remember, which is almost the same as…
  • Giving the network too few layers or neurons or connections to encode all the image information
  • Making the central layers ridiculously small
  • Use wildly divergent images (e.g. a mix up landscapes with portraits)
  • Dropout layers and similar

All this while trying different hyperparameters, layer configurations and error and activation functions (ReLU tends to work the best) and combinations thereof. There is some method and theory behind my experimentations but, since there is no specific, desired output, just noodling around with stuff is just as effective.

The worst of the technical detail ends here, but I can’t promise that some won’t leak out during the rest of this overly long post, soz.

By definition, the model created by any combination of configuration is also a product of the images that are input. I deliberately don’t input all images, since I have thousands and it would take too long to train on my Mac, but it’s also not desirable to do so. The crazy randomness is in part a function of the images that are chosen and the selection of images is part of the parametrisation and vital to the creative process. By controlling how many images input, even when chosen at random, I can effect the final result – just as I control my palette and brush strokes when I paint. I have also given myself the ability to include specific images to tailor the effect of the final output. Via this method I can create collections of similar or thematically linked images.

There is a separate module whose responsibility is to grab some images and prepare them for the training, and which offers further opportunities to affect the outcome of the model by, for example, tweaking the contrast of the input images. It also allows me to experiment with different resolutions (I’ve managed to train effective models of up to 1500px2). In theory, the higher resolution the better, but the exponential growth of the input vector places some practical limits given my hardware, and varying the resolutions produces different effects, so constraining this is sometimes desirable. There’s also the issue that many of the input images are of lower resolution, which is not a problem for the model and almost certainly is responsible for some of the interesting effects created.

And as for those interesting effects? See below, they’re fascinating, aren’t they? The model mixes up and mutates the source images blending and bleeding them into one another in bizarre and unpredictable ways. Some of the source images contain text which leaks through in enticing and haunting ways. Faces peep out from the trees from which they are growing, or blend into and merge with other faces. Planets mingle with beasts and butterflies appear to emit human language. There’s a haunted unity that creates cohesion among the hideous divergence. When staring at grids of these images I feel like the demoniac substrata of the universe is malignantly whispering to me like space-warped tarot cards. This is the esoteric language of Lovecraft’s Old Gods writ in digital form (more on this later).

A grid of bizarre, square, monochrome images

Because there is no right answer, and because I want unique images, I don’t keep the individual models created. They’re also pretty big and I don’t want to waste the disk space on them. So in effect, every image is unique, although certain input images seem to resonate more highly with the training algorithm, and so tend to turn up more prominently every time they are included in the input. I do, however, record the input parameters of the models that produced the most interesting and impressive images and reuse these. There is a fairly narrow range of parameters and inputs that yield good results, within which I still have a inexhaustible range of combinations to play with (as well as an ever growing repository of digital imagery). Many combinations and ranges of parameters merely yield white-noise or conversely overly accurate recreations, and can be discarded.

So the model gets trained from scratch every time it runs, like starting with blank canvas (metaphor both intended and unintended). Every time is a surprise and a wonder. The number of output images is exactly the same as that input, since the job of the machine is to reproduce the input images, or at least attempt to. The best models need at least 100 input images, so there are that many outputs to sort through and select the best from. Even the most effective models produce a large number of duds, by which I mean images that are completely unusable, usually because they are white-noise, or close to it, or too faithful a recreation. These can be discarded. Among the rest, many are not particularly interesting, but at an estimate, one in ten is a gem! This ratio varies greatly across the batches. Even with some home-grown tools to aid the filtering and selection process, it’s pretty laborious, but strangely dopamine filled, so it pleases and soothes my ADHD brain. I rarely adjust or doctor the images output – they are presented as is.

I could ramble on about this for a lot longer – it’s a fascinating and weirdly compulsive process, but I’ve already gone on too long. Maybe I’ll elaborate on a few of the areas that that I’ve glossed over at some point.

So what do I do with all these images, and how does that relate to my main body of work? Well, for the latter, initially at least, nothing at all. I set up a dedicated Instagram account, an obvious choice given how, when viewed via your profile page, the images are neatly arranged in grids of squares. Over time, the whole thing evolved to a convoluted, H.P. Lovecraft inspired hauntological framework called The University of Wilmarth Faculty of Eschatology. This is an ongoing labour of love, and houses thousands of the raw outputs of the models. Where it’s going, I’m not sure, but it’ll be fun finding out!

Along the way I used the images for a more abstract inspiration to my painted works. Mostly this was by way of more adventurous compositions, and via the introduction of more random and organic elements to the physical process. The images themselves were too intricate and disordered to scale up as direct references, and my original intention was to keep the two realms of my work separate. But I loved the images so much I had a nagging desire to see them on hanging next to my other art. Also, and inspired by the obsessively square digital art of my good friend and one of my favourite contemporary artists Mark Burden, I had an urge to see my works in uniform grids in the physical world.

So I set about figuring out how to do this. I could have just had them printed on nice paper and had them framed, but that felt a little lazy, especially since the creative process is already a little bit “factory”. It’s still possible that I’ll do this, but the more natural approach, given my tendency to incorporate elements of collage into my work, was to transfer the images to canvas where I could embellish and accentuate them. My smaller pieces are simply printouts from my fairly pedestrian home inkjet printer which are affixed to canvases using acrylic medium. I then go at these with acrylic inks, spray paints and the like. For the bigger one I scale up the images across multiple sheets and after which I follow a similar process. Others are simply scaled up by hand, and result in more “traditional” paintings. Regardless of which approach I use, I find the process highly enjoyable and creatively stimulating. It’s all win.

There’s a fair amount of extra bits that happen along the way, but that’s the gist of it. Having written this up, it feels like a ridiculously long, complex and convoluted process. I was worried that others might have thought me lazy for using computers and AI as part of my creative process! And I do consider this a deeply creative endeavour. At every step of the process I must make choices that affect the outcome, and the images that I choose to collect (as inputs) and share (as outputs) is based on decisions I make that are deeply peculiar to me. Were I to hand over all the code to anyone else (and I’m not averse to tidying it all up and open sourcing it at some point), I feel absolutely certain that the outputs they create would be dramatically different from mine, just as if someone else co-opted my studio and used all my materials and used the same reference images, they would yield dramatically different results. So concerned was I for a while that this process would be considered “cheating” or somehow creatively moribund, I considered not disclosing it at all. But I’m genuinely proud to have devised a such an innovative and unique approach. Maybe the works aren’t to everyone’s taste, but the same goes for the rest of my work, and anyone else’s for that matter.

For the most part I have paused my use of this approach, purely because other creative shiny things distracted me. I fully intend to resume this creative avenue and perhaps evolve it further in the future. One potential method for expanding it is to reintroduce the colour. I suspect that the warping of the hues could yield some really interesting results, or maybe just a brown mess! On the other hand, I’m really quite attached to the sea of monochrome. We’ll see I guess. There are also a plethora of other approaches to image vectorisation and model creation (e.g. convolutions) to play around with. Not to mention the essentially infinite choices of how to use the output images. In the meantime, my pet AI rests placidly in it’s cage, I’ll give it some attention when it starts gnawing at the bars.

ADHD Artworks Brain Vomit Data Science
May 3, 2018

Manga Mannequin Considering Jumping Into the Abyss

Here is a picture of my Manga Mannequin stood staring into the abyss.

He seems fearful, hesitant, afraid even. He also has no face to tell us this with. No voice and no story. These Manga Mannequins do suggest a story, or perhaps a character, or element of culture, or something like that. There is strength of pose. It’s hard to get any other type of pose. It’s almost impossible to coerce a pose that suggests deference, or fear or diminution. They’re made to model superheros. The powerful stances and limber contortions of Marvel and Andrew Loomis. There’s vulnerability here, which is satisfying.

 

Here’s another picture.


Here he’s looking a bit more confident. Looking over the edge, trying to decide what to do. You don’t need many cues to derive this sort of information. The mammalian brain is a remarkable machine, capable of extrapolation from very oblique abstractions. You kinda know what this dude is thinking. Your opinion of that (and it is opinion since, we presume, he’s actually thinking nothing at all) will likely differ from mine, but not greatly.

The fact that he’s visibly at the edge of a big drop (in reality, the edge of my desk. I think I was on a conference call at this point. It’s likely that I was paying attention to that more than taking the photo. This type of semi-conscious activity is precisely the sort of thing I need to keep me focused on conference call. Scrolling through Twitter or just daydreaming less so) suggest something of his predicament, or mind set. Were he on an uninterrupted surface, we’d maybe assume he was looking at some object on the floor, surprised or in alarm. Maybe a small dog is barking at him, or he’s noticed a clown in a nearby drain.

The next photo removes some ambiguity.

It’s on odd pose in the dog/clown scenario. He’s not stepping on or towards something, he’s stepping off. Although it’s hard to tell, we’d need to remove the context to know for sure. I’m not going to do that. I’d rather you focused on the what he’s going through at the precipice. That’s where the drama is, and that’s what creates tension and narrative.

Of course I’ve provided little narrative or characterisation, and few visual and textual hints. I needn’t even have done that much, but it’s nice to talk about it, don’t you think? What happens next? Does he jump? If so, why? Will he survive the jump? Will he plummet endlessly? Does he have a parachute? Is this really an abyss, or just a shallow hop? Maybe he’s going to jump from a bridge into water, not knowing how deep the water below is.

I have no further photos. We’ll never know the answer to these, and other questions you might have. You can provide these by creating the rest of the story in your head.

 

Brain Vomit
Finished by Alex Loveless (2018) - Acrylic on Canvas - 60x80cm
May 2, 2018

Finished

Finished by Alex Loveless (2018) - Acrylic on Canvas - 60x80cm
Finished by Alex Loveless (2018) – Acrylic on Canvas – 60x80cm

It won’t find it hard to believe that I find it difficult to focus when on conference calls. A random floating piece of dust catching a mote of sunlight is enough to draw me a away from the matter in hand. The ceaseless distraction that is the social web is like a black hole sucking focus to be forever lost among images of kittens and inane chatterings. In reality, I can be distracted by my own thoughts. You can lock me in a featureless, windowless room with load speakers blasting the call at me and I’d still daydream. It’s what I do, how I’m configured. It’s also fair to say that I can easily wonder during in-person meetings, but this is much less of a problem since a) people tend to notice quicker so I’m forced to make more effort, b) what’s going on in the room tends to occupy me – I like to try and read the room, understand the interpersonal dynamics, dissect what’s really happening and c) half the time, everyone else has their nose stuck in their laptop or phone anyway, in which case the etiquette is loosened due to shared defiance of the general order.

Nevertheless, on most occasions, if you’ve been invited to attend, and more so, if I have arranged a conference call, it’s customary to pay attention. To not do so is at best rude and unprofessional, and at worst results in potentially disastrous consequences due to misunderstandings and offense taken should there be someone important on the other end that you are ignoring. That moment when you catch your name being mentioned on the other end of a question, and you’ve been tuned out for 5 minutes, is never a comfortable one. I have strategies to dig myself out of such holes, but I’d rather not need to deploy them. I recognise the need to pay attention, I’m just not very good at it.

So over the years I’ve developed a technique for focusing when on conference calls, that I also use in face-to-face meetings that are especially important to pay attention in: I do something else. It sounds counter intuitive, since “something else” is precisely what gets me into trouble in the first place, but certain types of activity allow me to occupy my fidgeting mind and wondering fingers, while maintaining sufficient focus on the matter in hand. For example, sometimes I put myself on mute and run scales and exercises on my unamplified electric guitar. Fidget spinners really do help for shorter periods. Just pacing is also a short relief. But mainly I doodle. Not in a directed, specific way, I just pick up a pencil and let my hand and subconscious wonder. I have an A3 pad under my keyboard for this very purpose. Sometimes these doodles appear quasi-realistic and/or geometric, sometimes they are haphazard scribbles. Rarely do they resemble anything of this world. Somewhere from deep in my subconscious, odd creatures and bizarre, Escherian landscapes emerge. I don’t try and interpret these, they just are.

I decided to see what would emerge if I unleashed that same odd corner of my cognitive nether-regions upon canvas, which is what you see below. As it emerged over days, my environment and thoughts began to bestow some meaning and it became less “random”, but the marks that appeared continued to be driven by urge rather than conscious intent. The extent to which this is a manifestation of some facet of my subconscious or some Freudian complex I’ll leave to the those psychoanalytical witch-doctors who enjoy such speculation. I know not what it “means” outside a vague sense that there is some statement on evolution, ecosystems, the environment and Man’s influence on this, among the slops and dribbles that adorn the canvas.

I did not know at which point this painting would be finished since I had no sense of what shape the final piece would take. I stopped when I felt that further marks or textures on the canvas would be to the detriment of the painting to that point, and also because of the more practical justification that I had other stuff that I needed/wanted to be getting on with. It is partly for this reason that I named the piece “Finished” as an invitation for the observer to precis this assertion and decide whether it really is. But there is also a metaphor to be eked from that title, the sculpting of which I’ll leave to the Freudians.

Artworks Brain Vomit
April 28, 2018

Violent Random Equilibrium

Mornings are good. Spring is good. Spring mornings are all about change, and I like change. The anti-entropic thrust that brings colour and bustle to outside spaces is merely a part of a conspicuous cycle, but always feels fresh after the dormancy of winter. I walk my dog most mornings in a local park. The very act of being outside – the natural movement of things, the ever changing surroundings, the cacophony of animal and human noise – is tonic any time of the year, but the rapid unfolding of the fresh terrain, as plants and animals awaken, is a daily drama that brings every bit as much excitement and entertainment as the new season of Westworld has, coincidentally occurring at the same time this year. Every morning I see movement and progress, the building of things, and the obscuring of others as ferns spread their low canopy and leaves begin to obscure the heavens. I particularly love the vibrancy of colour, the barrage fluorescent greens, the vibrant antidote to the maudlin ocres of Autumn. Autumn brings resolution, Sprint is all about hope and optimism. You must go out and experience it, as I think many people miss it as it blurs past their car or train.

It’s a form of violence in some ways; an act of carnage. The status quo of the winter months is trampled, stretched and ruptured. Like a grey concrete wall freshly adorned with graffiti, a vibrancy of colour and creation destroys the monotony, a surreptitious act of creation brought forth via an act of destruction. And all creation is destruction. One set of states of affairs is eclipsed by another – creation and destruction go hand in hand. Nature is a consummate non-linear system, fractal at its core, and unpredictable in its essence. Without this reality no life could exist, and change would be wrought by simple (seemingly) linear entropy. It’s as magical as it is mundane.

Shallow talk of creationism is always at the fringes of admiration of nature, which is such a terrible travesty. Not only is such conjecture not required to explain this majesty, but the reduction of the act of creation via the brushstrokes of an anthropomorphic deity seeks to minimise the true artistry of chaos, make it seem so small and mundane. “God did it” is such a dull explanation, so prosaic as to belittle such complexity to the whim of creationist ego. To put man and its Gods above creation and the ecosystem that sustains them is hubris of the highest degree. Such attitudes are the type of process-group-think that is the enemy of all forms of creation. It reminds me of some remarks made by a lady I caught briefly on Radio4 recently who was feverishly asserting her belief that no person could restrain themselves from conducting ill deeds were they not to believe, deep down, in an interventionist deity. This point of view is as puerile and self-serving as it is insulting. Good things happen because of God, end of. Leaving the “what is good?” question aside, the question of the creation of good things needs no further explanation than the appreciation of one’s place within the interconnectedness of all things. Things are good because we appreciate the goodness of the states of affairs that envelopes us. Conjuring (subjective) bad states of affairs from a comfortable, homeostatic equilibrium is counterproductive. I’m not arguing that good things are only good because someone thinks they are, quite the opposite. Good states of affairs, in equilibrium, exist extant of life and sentience. Goodness is intrinsic within the system within which it maintains homeostasis (even if the things that inhabit, and benefit from, that system can’t always agree what constitutes “good”). In essence, goodness is the quality beholden to such things that maintain the current, if fleeting, equilibrium. This works on micro and macro level, individuals to collectives to whole systems. Subjectivity is only really of consequence of observing the forward and rear vanguard of the sliding window of perpetual change. Reality isn’t going anywhere in particular, but it is constantly mutating, and will never repeat itself. The urge to maintain a previously observed stable state, subjectively (and perhaps rightly for a fleeting moment) perceived to be good, is a form of conservatism doomed to failure. Obsession with with the forces of change will likely result in homeostasis being violated, and can have catastrophic results (think about the extinction of species and human cultures at the blunt end of the battering ram of colonialism).

Any stable system is only so because of its tendency to homeostasis, a regression to a sliding mean, so change is, by definition, gradual and continuous, though not always linear. This can be observed in societal systems, ecosystems, physical and biological processes, statistical analysis, and any sort of self perpetuating system. The goodness in that system is characterised by the things that allow that system to continue and flourish. On a micro level, such systems arise and are obliterated in the blink of an eye, or an epoch of history. Your body does this perpetually, trying to hold back the march of time is futile, external threats to homeostasis can be fatal, failure to maintain the homeostasis (by eating poorly or smoking for example) will eventually overcome your body’s ability to maintain homeostasis. At a macro level, systems are longer and more robust (our planet, our star). To observe and to invoke goodness, in the truest sense, is to comprehend the highest level of abstraction of your system to which you are able and consider what is most appropriate to maintain the most incidental level of homeostasis. Essentially, look after the macro system you are in – help it do what it does best, regress to the mean. That could mean, be nice to your planet, or create good conditions to your species. It probably doesn’t mean chop down trees and be an arsehole. It’s not really that complicated. Nevertheless, some groups find it hard to observe past the short horizon of their micro-system – class, tribe, country, genetic make-up, belief set – and seek only to maintain that. History has shown this to be the most disastrous of all outlooks and this, by the framework I have sketched, is the opposite of good  as demonstrated by, among others, the atrocities the reformation, World War II, Stalin’s twisted Marxism, and most recently, unrestrained capitalism.

The complexity of our homeostatic system, its ephemeral nature and infinity-reaching dynamics, transcend the ability of humanity to comprehend it, and thus we tend to reach for analogues. These may be comforting, and afford a level of imagined control, but these are not necessary. Your dogmatism really need extend to no further than “do shit that’s seems most appropriate to create good conditions to all in your systems at any point in time”. OK, that’s a bit of a mouthful. Just reach out and touch something, that’s all you need to do. See what’s around you and appreciate it. Then do what seems right based on that which you experience. You don’t need to think you understand it, or that some being has it all under control, or that you have control. It’s not really like that. Just know that, since you can experience it, so can everyone and everything else in that system. You can comprehend that right? As Master Dogen said “do not view mountains from the scale of human thought”.

Brain Vomit
April 19, 2018

Lower Your Fidelity

A recent musical binge on Car Seat Headrest has lead me to revisit the various lo-fi bands and albums I love from the 90’s. Both Will Toledo’s style and approach owe a lot to that movement, not least to Guided By Voices, but also Pavement, Sebadoh, Sonic Youth and various others to varying degree. Despite forays into more contemporary (if the current brand of revisionism can be called that) styles, and the odd nod to the music of his current home town, Seattle, his music belongs to the late 80’s and early 90’s. the whole lo-fi movement was really an extension of punk and hardcore as it mutated via bands like Husker Du and Sonic Youth into alt and indie. As such the DIY ethic and lack of any meaningful adherence to musical traditions and protocols percolated through and manifested in a mix of sweet, Beach Boys-esque melodies intermingled with chaotic noise, hissing feedback, frenetic string pummelling and frequent bum notes (deliberate or otherwise). By the time this manifested as a scene the belligerent lo-fi aesthetic had styled itself as a higher art form which concerned itself little (at least in the early days) with the commercial  arena with which they later flirted.  While song structures were frequently traditional, the composition and presentation was not. Guided by Voices and Sebadoh in particular concerned themselves with folk and rock, while grinding off the polish, atrophying, making them grubby yet spontaneous, very new, but somehow so old, like a bunch of forgotten photos from school days discovered in the attic.
The lo-fi aesthetic was an conscious inversion on the incumbent emphasis on polished production, staid song composition, production line pop and rock that had even started infecting punk. The reference to this as an aesthetic is not mere observation. Whereas punk’s lo-fi sheen, while worn as a badge of honour, came from lack of resources and ability, these future indie icons used minimal production values as an intrinsic part of their art. Song and presentation were one. Just like hearing Yes’s Close to the Edge via a Dictaphone would destroy the well honed presentation, thus GBV’s Echos Myron beefed up through a 48 track with some Pro-Tools action would sound ludicrous. Likewise, the spontaneity and throwaway nature of the recordings was a deliberate counterpoint to the prevailing obsession with perfection and homogeneity. Not only were songs presented as if recorded on said Dictaphone (I think in many cases they actually were) but little attention was paid to song selection or consistency. It would be reasonable to say that, in the early days at least, Robert Pollard recorded and released every vaguely musical idea that came into his head. Everything is filler, nothing is filler. No hits, no bullshit, just art and attitude. Pollard bragged about “sucking” as a band – from such a brilliant songwriter and able musician this is not self-deprecation, but a celebration and a victorious gangshout. Anyone who thinks that Stephen Malkmus can’t sing fundamentally misunderstood Pavement’s music.
Most musical genres experience their lo-fi epochs. Notable is the aggressive lo-fi ethic that casts its bleak pall over post-Darkthrone/Mayhem Black metal trve kvlt adherents. Find a dank cave, wait for the most gloomy, sleet-prone day, take your ancient Tascam 4-track, some fucked amps, some biscuit, adorn your nails and smear on some corpse paint, biscuit tins instead of drums, a couple of incantations  and a lot noise and screeching later, voila, Satan’s music. The sound of hell frozen over. Darkthrone and their progeny were hunting a sound that best describes the bleak perma-winter forests of the north. Sound and image alike aspired to the primal, elemental, frostbitten, misanthropic and hopeless – high technology have to part to play here, the sound of the forest could only be represented as physically imprinted on magnetic tape and etched into vinyl. Like the indie art brigade, music and presentation were one and the same, and as such Darkthrone never played live, in fitting with this approach.
Both camps were not eschewing technology, they were just railing against the way it was, and is wielded. But whereas an arch, knowing  and bone dry humour permeates GBV and Pavement’s music, Black Metal, in almost all its forms, is deadly serious, and utterly un-self-aware. Whereas Sebadoh and GBV can (usually) be played on an acoustics guitar, not one bit of A Blaze in the Northern Sky could be taken out of context – the thing as you hear it on tape or record is its entirety. Taylor Swift’s 12 month arena tour, public dramas, and fashion statements are every bit as part of the artistic package as each album track, which is wholly antithetical to both mentioned lo-fi movements.
I gravitate towards music and other types of art with this sort of approach (Peter Jackson’s early film making also springs to mind). Even though it often doesn’t move me emotionally, I feel heartened by the off-kilter stance and systematic belligerence. Polished and perfect is not something I’m really capable of, but still I spent many years striving for it, and berating myself for rarely achieving it. These days I welcome the dirt and pollution provided by a chaotic mind and environment, and beautiful entropy that springs only from poor mastery of my tools, pathological disorganisation, low impulse control and lack of ability to follow through. This bleeds through in every endevour I partake in, and now I’ve learned to appreciate this, I think it gives me a creative edge that other are incapable of, or are too fearful to try.
Most of the 90’s US alt mob found their way into professional recording studios eventually, somewhat negating their previous efforts. We can forgive them, since otherwise many talented musicians and songwriters would have been denied the limelight they deserved, and many listeners ignorant to the wonder of their music. Making something polished is also good if you find doing so essential, but don’t deny yourself the indulgence of spewing forth something unfinished, grubby and half-baked from time to time, or even all the time.
Brain Vomit
Pay to Win by Alex Loveless
April 17, 2018

Pay to Win

I find myself increasingly concerned for the plight of the younger generations. The older generations, who supposedly should be benefactors, mentors, and protectors of their kids’ and grandkids’ futures are repeatedly selling out their futures in favour of short term self interest, base prejudice and ego. While they frown on the kids as video games supposedly rot their brains, those same kids rebuild the foundations of the future underneath the old guard, to the extent that (as Zuckerberg’s recent appearance in front of congress, and the world, demonstrates) they cannot, even vaguely, comprehend what is happening, so their natural instinct is to brutalise, obstruct, litigate, smear and propaganda-ise it out of existence. Recent history has shown that this will not work yet, in the meantime, the younger generations bear the financial and social brunt of their elder’s continued, and increasingly feverish and seedy hubris and ignorance.

Pay to Win by Alex Loveless
Pay to Win by Alex Loveless
Artworks Brain Vomit
April 15, 2018

I do not like this

Here’s a painting I made that I do not like. It is, of course, of me, but I only ever meant to use myself as a model. I tried to make it not look like me, but I failed repeatedly and gave up. Perhaps there’s something to be read into that. Pretty much as soon as the figure took shape on the canvas I realised I hated it. I soldiered on with anyway, in the hopes that I could coerce something more interesting, which has worked in the past, but ultimately failed at that too. In the end, I had some paint to use up which I just started chucking on in an attempt to debase the painting, a bit like Johnny Greenwood di with the crunchy guitar bits at the beginning of the chorus of Radiohead’s Creep. They hate that song and similarly I hate this picture. The difference is, this picture is unlikely to make me rich, or result in it’s name being screamed repeatedly from amongst festival crowds. I place it here in the spirit of not trying too hard to make sure everything is perfect and also in the spirit of celebrating failure. I didn’t even bother to take a decent photo of it. I am already my own worst critic, but feel free also to join be in berating this awful painting (presented as an object, not a work of art).

I Do Not Like This by Alex Loveless (2018) - Acrylic on canvas - 18" x 24"
I Do Not Like This by Alex Loveless (2018) – Acrylic on canvas – 18″ x 24″

Artworks Brain Vomit
April 15, 2018

I don’t write good?

I don’t. To do so would require the summation of a degree of attention to detail and figurative sense that I lack. I’m as bad at grammar as I am at subtle, emotive symbolism. I’m not saying i don’t recognise the existence of these things, and attempt to diligently apply them, I just lack the neurological structure to do this well and consistently. This fact used to irk me. I always saw it as weakness, or perhaps the result of incipient laziness. The result of this is that I write less than I could/should like to. Actually, I write more than ever sees the light of day, because I lack the willpower to overcome my neurological shortcomings to actually finish most of what I write and polish it to the level that I perceive as appropriate. This is a terrible shame. Whatever or not that things that I write are interesting, useful or entertaining to anyone is not really the point. Writing and sharing is a valuable way for me to manage my condition and I should not eschew any therapeutic outlet. Since the 1-standard-deviation-from-the-mean British education system squashed any likelihood that I would consider myself a decent writer since I messed up punctuation and grammar a lot (since I was more interested in writing interesting stuff that making sure I capitalised in the right place), for a large part of my life I did not consider that I could write at all. I turned to making pictures and writing code instead. Via my children, I can see that the education system hasn’t much changed. Luckily I can coach my kids to help them navigate the regression to mediocrity attitudes of the system. Essentially “play their game to the extent to which you are able, and don’t let them get you down, for the future offers a multitude of opportunities to prove them wrong”. It’s like learning to drive, you don’t really start doing it until they stop trying to teach you.

Anyway, my point is, I’ve decided to stop caring so much about getting stuff right in favour of getting stuff out there.  I think this is an important therapeutic step for me and one that has been a long time coming. It should help unshackle me a little to grow and evolve in both the creative and stylistic sense. As such, from here on, I will do only the amount of copy editing that I can muster the energy and time for at any point in time, then publish and be damned. This will lead to errors and ugliness, but also the beauty that blooms through chaos, failures, random mutations, etc. – the very process that fuels both creation and creativity.

The fact that I also lumped in something regarding figurative sense at the beginning of this then largely forgot about it has not gone unnoticed. I’m not going to fix that. I’d rather write this line, something new, than do that. Does that make you uncomfortable?

Aardvark.

ef56%7 sthis is nmuerg

ADHD Brain Vomit
April 13, 2018

Self Portrait – Light and Dark

This self portrait was submitted to and rejected by Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year. I’m sort of glad it didn’t make the cut, as being subjected to an intense four hours of painting surrounded by onlookers and TV cameras would, I think, be a little much for my already hyperactive brain. I accompanied the image with a short (and not very erudite) commentary which I’ve included below.

I’d recently got back into making pictures on the advice from my therapist as a great way to help keep my hectic, wondering ADHD brain in check. The 2017 season is the first Portrait Artist of the Year I’ve watched, and forced my family to watch, and my wife ‘dared’ me to make a submission. Since my last self-portrait was painted 20 years ago I had to create one especially. I actually painted two, of which this I felt was the better and the most illustrative of my style and of me as a person. Anyone who knows me knows I come in two flavours 1) dark, brooding, moody, with a love of the macabre, angry music, and all things dark and sinister and 2) passionate, enthusiastic, animated, gregarious, outgoing and optimistic. Some times you get one or the other, some times you get both at once, which is a little scary. With this portrait, which is referenced from a selfie taken on my phone, I wanted to illustrate the dark and the light that characterises me. In addition to this I love painting contract in light and colour and I really enjoyed making this.
Artworks Brain Vomit
April 13, 2018

A rambling and indulgent treatise on the nature of art and the confusing and terrifying act of creation

I’ve always felt compelled to create things. The idea of creating and presenting a thing, physical or virtual, always felt like some sort of magic – the evocation of something from nothing, the act of transmogrifying and combining one or more things to instantiate something else. I’ve never been particularly picky about my materials, or the mode of delivery. For me, the creation of computer code, utilitarian as it may seem, is every bit an act of creation as conjuring a figure from a block of stone. Code can be elegant, beautiful, surprising, refined, chaotic, expressive, some would even say sensual – all the things that art can (and probably should to varying degrees) be. It is an act of creation and expression, and one person’s code has an individual style and signature as distinct and diverse as Van Gogh and Claude Lorraine. I don’t want to wax lyrical about writing code though. As someone who uses programming as a way to achieve goals – to solve problems, reduce labour, create insight – I sometimes take pride in the character and delivery of my Pythonic creations, but it is the end, not the means that define my work. As an analyst, the end product is something distinct and remote from the the lines of characters that represent the instructions to the computer that created it. The art is in the deft application of technique and conjuring of value (by way of insight, or maybe automation) that the entire process embodies. This is (somewhat) distinct from, say, someone who produces computer games or applications, where the delivery mechanism is much more intrinsically interwoven within embodiment of the final creation. Good code leads directly to good, and continued, experience. A well crafted game is a conversation between the developer and its customers and often embodies an intimate relationship. Like a painting, the art comes from the shared experience, the invisible (and sometimes very visible) link between producer and consumer. But more so, the act of analysis is more akin to that of archeology than the act of creation. The uncovering of form and meaning in the rubble, soil and silt of data. It is about finding something that is there, so that it may be inspected and appraised. In that sense, it does not in itself fulfill my desire to create, even if I do frequently find it very satisfying and rewarding and requiring of my creativity. For this reason, I have various other creative outlets. Writing is one of them. Another is making pictures. I want to talk about this for a bit.

Coming from a largely non-artistic family, art presented itself to me, rather than being something that I actively pursued. Once I discovered the possibility of using marks and media to make real the bingo tumbler of wacky and unsolicited ideas in my head, the balls just kept pinging out onto paper and later canvas and pretty much any other surface that made itself available to me (a large mural of Judge Dredd adorned my childhood bedroom door). The urge to create was less an ambition of expression, than the crude vomit of a confused and chaotic soul. My early influences spoke largely to my adolescent urges and fantastical daydreams and such the athletic, nearly-nude femmes which tangled with mythical beasts hungrily consumed from voluminous outputs of Boris Vallejo and his contemporaries smeared their salacious and heroic mark on my earlier works. The desire to make pictures of things that looked real was manifest. My desire was not to create high art, but make fantasy real. The contextual backdrop that would later be encroached upon by Mondrian or Picasso or the Tate Modern simply did not exist in my stylistic or visual lexicon. I was aware of them, much as dog lovers are aware of cats, but they held little or no contextual, cultural or emotional meaning to me. The Guernica may as well be a teapot in my kitchen (I don’t drink tea) for all the impact it had on me. Perhaps you’re expecting me to comment on how, once exposed to these deified works of artistic wonderment, I learned understand and appreciate their meaning, their beauty, their inherent glory, their genius. This, however, would be an affectation. Picasso does nothing for me. Or almost nothing. Mostly his works make me feel a little irritable, and occasionally I think they are funny. Picasso started out producing works in the more traditional sense, concerning themselves with realism and topography. There is a clear progression to abstraction through his lifetime. He deserves his standing as a pioneer and an innovator. I have no desire proclaim otherwise and little theoretical, professional or academical grounding to facilitate this. His work simply has nothing to do with me, or at least only in a remote, diluted sense. His influence (and that of countless other artist throughout the ages) is, mostly, and at best, tertiary. Their innovations said little to me emotionally or intellectually, but they did open up my consciousness to a world of possibilities outside of the confines of zombies, space ships and scantily clad maidens.

You see, art isn’t created and isn’t presented in a vacuum. More importantly, it isn’t consumed in a vacuum. Another form of high art that usually leaves me cold is classic music (jazz too). I can as a musician (I’m a mediocre guitarist) appreciate some of the the mastery. Having read something of the theory and technique of J.S Bach’s canons and symphonies and fugues, I can comprehend the intellectual and creative wizardry involved. I have even taken time to appreciate some of the more effusive biographical moments some the the historical backdrop – this context, I am lead to believe, will lead me to a greater appreciation of the beauty and magnificence of his work. It’s all totally amazing. What a proper dude the guy was! It is all ejaculatarily cool. What do I hear now, when I listen to Bach’s The Musical Offering, you know, the one with the brain-bending six-voice fugue (it is pretty impressive), the one that is reputedly “the most significant piano composition in history”, the one that he wrote for an actual king and total groupie (Frederick THE GREAT) which he left bits out as riddles so Freddy could fill them in a bit like the Sunday Times cryptic cross word, the one invoked by quasi-loony Douglas Hofstadter as one of the center pieces of his seminal treatise on ARTIFICAL BLOODY INTELLIGENCE, “Godel, Escher, Bach”, you know, that one? What do I feel? Bored. I get much more out of the knowledge I have about the remarkable piece than I do actually listening to it. I feel no shame in this matter. It is just a fact. Really, much like country and western music, Bach’s voluminous output all sounds the same to me. Not that I believe it to be so, but apparently lacking the emotional machinery to comprehend all of that complexity, it just comes out as the audible equivalent of the brown murk you get when you mix too many colours of paint together. So who is it that does like this stuff? Well, Bach may be musically omnipotent, but his most widely recognised works merely provide a backdrop for other stuff to most people (Air on a G String was used to sell consumer quality cigars back when it was still ok to advertise lung poison) and he’s hardly bothering Little Mix at the top of the Spotify rankings. No, most people, just like me, don’t appreciate Bach and Charles Mingus and Garth Brooks, they merely passively consume them when forced to do so. Why is this? Because they lack cultural and contextual backdrop to make this a likely reality. Art, of whatever form, is consumed not in exclusion, but in the midst of, and almost always because of the contextual, emotional, cultural and societal backdrop in which it is consumed. You simply cannot appreciate what it was like to hear The Goldberg Variations when they were first presented to world in 1741 (in fact given that, from a purely probabilistic point of view, you would not likely have been born of the aristocracy you would have lacked the means and opportunity to experience it). You also (presumably) cannot know what is is like to experience these same musical utterances as the daughter of a socially mobile Asian classically trained pianist who desires for his most cherished to not only appreciate their majesty, but also to be able to play these to perfection before your 18th birthday. You can, however, remember hearing the “duh duh duh duh” bit of Beethoven’s 5th for the first time on some shit ITV sketch show in the 80’s accompanied by the smell of your dad’s farts and the subsequent loss of TV signal when your cat knocked the arial from its perch. However, earlier that very same day you and your mates (well, me and my mates) were huddled round a well worn copy of Iron Maiden’s Powerslave operatically hollering the 3rd chorus of Aces High into the unfeeling ether. That was my social context. It’s one that a Bach enthusiast would find every bit as incomprehensible as I their beloved harpsichord noodling. There is no comprehensible framework for comparative value judgment that I have ever encountered – such a thing is but the bastion of science fiction. Yet my passion for Maiden’s 80’s output will certainly rival that of any classical beard stroker. Back to the decorators of canvas? Picasso can basically sod off. Mondrian? Pictorial equivalent of elevator music (I’m pretty sure I’ve heard Bach played in elevators too). I have the intellectual capacity to understand why I am supposed to value these works so highly, I just lack the emotional framework. Movie posters from the 1950’s and 60’s fill me with joy. The original poster for Forbidden Planet may be in my top 5 pictures of any sort, of all time. Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud can sometimes elicit a positive response, but I can get lost in Derek Rigg’s illustration on the (front and back) cover of Iron Maiden’s Somewhere in Time and Ed Repka’s tasteless and unsubtle works from 90’s death metal sleeves are a kind of magic to me, to this day. Can these joyous works be considered art? And regardless of this, do I want to produce items like these? The answer to these questions are very simple: you’d have to ask the creators and no.

Repetition is the death of art. This is the relief to my core philosophy of art and what it is and for. Art, for me at least, is the evocation of something new, from pre-existing states of affairs, which are presented for consumption and appraisal as ends in their own right. A teacup, no matter how beautiful a design, is not art. It is a nice object. A crude kind of art can be created by presenting that teacup, unchanged, as art. Art is an act of selection and contextualisation. In that sense, the single biggest defining attribute of the concept of ‘art’ is mediation. A painting is just an object until presented for appraisal. A painting can be presented as an object, and not be considered art. The whole Magritte “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” is a dry comment on this very fact. No doubt someone has presented a beuatifal painting to the world with a placard saying “this is not art” (I really can’t be bothered to find out). In such a scenario, it’s reasonable to say that the item itself in NOT ART, but the act is. Just like taking a photo. Anti-art is art, just go ask Marcelle Duchamp, but it is art that is utterly dependant on it’s cultural and physical environment. A disused urinal in a disused lot is not art. However, EVERYTHING presented as art is art – and everything presented as art must be considered within a subjective framework and classified as good or bad, worthy or unworthy. Upon which criteria its quality and worthiness are based is up to the consumer, and is frequently heavily influenced by their social and cultural context and that of their background and that of all their peers and contemporaries. The identity, biography, repute and ability of the creator and his/her subjects are window-dressing to the main act of cultural context. Art is a qualitative invocation of the cultural contexts from which it is brought forth. It is a nodule or blemish on the ever growing and changing skin of cultural history. Art is evanescent, capricious, condescending and crapulent. It is also psychic sugar, the phantasmagoria of the collective conscious and unconscious made visible through the utterances of deranged mediums known as artists. The dominance of context upon the very being of art means that it cannot stand still, since the march of societal and cultural progress, in whatever direction, means that standing still is the same as moving backwards. Continually banging out the same old shit, will go down well with a hard core of devotees (AC/DC made a very long career from doing this) but will age poorly in capricious, meandering reality. The cutting edge of contemporary art (by which I mean, cutting edge at the point of its creation) is so shocking precisely because its creator has brought forth something so new that it is in fact totally alien within the the current social context (cue Arthur C. Clarke quote). Every subsequent homage or blatant rip-off hastens the original towards mundanity and it’s creator towards banality. Thus the creator must muster the superhuman power to further push boundaries (and thus render his previous successes puerile and/or irrelevant) or languish in increasing a kind of static creative senility. Thus there must be restless movement at the vanguard of the arts. To fail to do so would colour all art an incipient, temporal beige, like Polaroid pictures that survived from the 70’s. So I repeat myself: Repetition is the death of art.

This brings me back to me, as it always does and should. I have recently rekindled my love for making pictures of stuff, after a break of over a decade. Why I did this you’ll have to ask my ADHD brain. The point is, since I have a desire to make pictures of stuff, I must choose what I want to make pictures of, and to do that, I must have some sense of why I’m doing it. If my intention is to make ‘art’ I must be cognizant of my social context and settle myself that it’s unlikely that I’ll incarnating colour-swatches-at-scale Rothko-style. But still I look to the wider art and illustration community for answers to the what and why questions. But actual the inverse is the case. You see, the core anxiety I have about making pictures is the infinite number of possibilities available for what to represent, how to represent it, what materials to use, the dimensions and other particulars, how and when to present it and to whom, and any number of other considerations which require attention as part of the act of creation. Whatever it has, it has to be new and other new, destinct things must follow, or else violate the whole ‘death of art’ mandate. If an artist only painted a single picture, reproduced from the same photographic image, his entire career, hundreds of times, the combinations and permutations still inherent in this sequence of acts – subtle differences caused by the environment, the effect of the passage of time and rolling window of context, the effects of age on the artist – are mind boggling in their interbreeding promiscuity. The very concept of attempting to bring something new into the world, however unoriginal or repetitive, given all the possibilities is daunting to the point where I am often completely frozen. There is also the question of a creation’s ‘artistic’ merits with regards to the aforementioned considerations, a thorny and contentious and ultimately confusing subject which only the thinnest of surface sheen I’ve managed to allude to. It’s a brain-mangler when I think about it, which suggests I shouldn’t.

The simple answer is to not create at all, an option that doesn’t feel very real to me for reasons that are probably too voluminous and diffuse to tackle at this point. We’re leave that for another rainy Tuesday. Another option is to, as suggested above, do the same thing, or very similar thing over and over. This act in itself is an artistic statement of sorts in itself, at least if presented as such, and one whose meaning and significance would change over time and whose lasting appeal (if any) would be deeply indebted to the that of the artist. What’s interesting about this point of view, is that it, in some senses, is exactly what typifies accepted and celebrated art. Any producer of art (be it writing novels, taking photos, sculpting, creating wonderful food) has to manifest a profound level of consistency to be taken seriously at all. Any artist whose output from one work to the next bore zero commonality with any previous works of the same artist could barely be comprehended by even the most patient of appraisers. Indeed, quite a degree of consistency, some would argue much too high a degree, is required to garner any attention at all, let alone be taken seriously. As someone with an ADHD brain, this very idea, a reality in all meaningful senses, is an infuriating straight jacket of the spirit and soul. The expectation appears to be that once I have overcome the Herculean act of choosing a subject, form and means for my expression, I pretty much have to stick to that framework, or subtle variations and adjacent progressions for ever. OK, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but major creative U-Turns are usually reserved for the more established progenitors in any artistic genre, and even then are often seen as folly or ‘sell out’. That is an odd kind of hell. It also runs contrary to my own interpretation of the act of artistic as detailed above. To a pathological degree, I derive little value from repeated experiences, and in many cases unavoidable or imposed repetition is psychologically painful and can lead to acute and extreme degradation of my mental and physical health. This is not a metaphor, this is my reality. It is not an affectation, it is, at its most serrated edge, a profound and chronic sickness. It is also an incredible gift, since it allows, or rather facilitates the broad range of my knowledge and experiences and my ability to ramblingly muse thusly. It’s a bit of a gourdian knot (or some such metaphor). The act of creating pictures of things is joyful and theraputic to me. One of the few truly mindful activities I partake in. But realm of the artistic consumer and, worse, the artistic appraiser, and even worse, the artistic community as a whole, terrifies me. When I make things, I’d like them to be seen so that transcend objecthood into some sort of art, however, the idea of actually doing this is daunting. The whole thing is big and confusing and frustrating. Yet still I make things. I’m going to post some here. I’m not sure that that context says about my works. I’m not clear on the what the context of this blog says about, in terms of how (if) people find it and what they think of me as a result. In that sense it’s a piece of interagive art in itself. Let’s make that official shall we?

The blog is art. It’s also an oak tree. And the image tattooed on the inside of your eyelids. Reading this final sentence will propel you into dimensional vortex where only penguins inhabit. Wish you were here?

ADHD Brain Vomit