Are We Using AI or is AI Using us?

In January I was thinking a lot about my phone and social media addiction. I wondered how I could curtail these things without giving them up entirely.

Then somehow these videos about the attention economy appeared in my timeline. I’ve watched all of them, and I’ve been thinking about the content of them continuously. To some extent I am skeptical. Who is this person called Cyprian that lives in a faraway land making these videos, and why should I believe him? The videos are simple, minimalistic. You hear occasional sounds of nature in the background. (Could the videos have been created by AI?) At this point in time, we have to ask when someone is creating content, what do they have to gain? What is the end game? Scanning Cyprian’s tweets and his twitter profile I decided that his end game was either selling his followers something related to Bitcoin, or converting them to Jesus Christ. I decided that if the next tweet I saw was about Christ, I would consider him a reliable source and I would take his videos seriously, but if it was about Bitcoin I would assume that his end game was something scammy. Read more

Dries Van Noten AI Collage

I was fooling around with Dries Van Noten prompts in various AI apps, and I ended up making a collage. I started with a met museum costume institute image that I scribbled on with the Procreate app. I love looking at Dries Van Noten clothes for artistic inspiration. Putting his name in the AI was fascinating and amusing. I wonder if he would be appalled. I don’t think he would approve of this palette. His use of color is masterful – he effortlessly switches from the subdued to the over the top. Read more

Ideas for a weekly art review

AI for the Holidays!

This week I’m trying to come up with some ideas for a weekly art review. I’m hoping to start a new process for the new year. I would like to use this blog space to track my progress a little better, and with that in mind, I came up with the idea of using a weekly template. The template will be a what/why/when/where/how series of questions of what I am working on. Even if it’s not an extremely productive week, I can still use the template to describe what I have been looking at and thinking about from an art perspective. And If I didn’t work on anything? Then a few sentences to describe why I didn’t work on anything. With this in mind, I’ll try to describe last week’s work. Read more

Notes from an Art Class in 1998

The following are some short notes I took at a painting class on September 30, 1998. The place was the Maryland College of Art (MICA), and this was a night class that was part of the continuing education program. We would bring our paintings in and group critique them, and the rest of the time we looked at slides of other artists and discussed what we liked/didn’t like about them. I took the class for one semester, made one interesting painting, and then went on a cross country road trip, and stopped making art (or at least “painting,”) for a long time. Read more

Dall-e Outpainting: Making a short film about art

I finally got access to Dall-E 2 and the thing I like most about it is the outpainting feature. You basically take a photo and ask the AI to add to it using prompts. For this little film I used outpainting to create some very long horizontal images. I then added them to the iMovie app, where you can do something really cool with horizontal images. When you drop them in and use the “Ken Burns” effect, it automatically creates a situation where the camera seems to be panning across a scene.

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