电路 • Circuit
Almost 20 years before LLMAI exploded into popularity, I thought I could automate art. I thought that the right sequence of filters, brightness and contrast tweaks, level adjustments, and GIMP plugins could make anything into a viable and even profitable series of pieces that I could generate in a thoughtless sequence, down to version numbers and iterative nomenclature. Before I even really started 'doing art' I was already trying to suck the soul out of it.
Art is hard. Sometimes you find a prodigy whose creation process looks effortless. Sometimes someone is possessed by a muse and churns out a masterpiece - or even a series of masterpieces - in a fit of inspiration, and seems bewildered by the fact that it happened at all when it's over. But those are the outliers. Real art, real creativity, is a difficult process from concept to execution, no matter the medium. Real art takes practice, time, and dedication. Real art is very frequently though not always realized through some degree of suffering. Before I reconstructed this very blog, which has gone through several iterations before I could commit to giving it any kind of content to hold without deleting it weeks later in a fit of dissatisfaction and vulnerability, I told myself I was going to teach myself how to write again. Sitting down at a blank screen with a blinking cursor in front of me and my own inner voice, suffocating the Hellbrain with a pillow, is the hardest thing I've done this year - and I've done plenty of hard things so far.
But the difficulty curve of just sitting down to start, let alone the messiness of the creative process itself, and the part where you have to share it with other people, is part of what drives any wonder in experiencing it at all, inspires engagement and experimentation and those fumbling grasps at trying, with increasing desperation, to find and secure a sufficient outlet for the raw creative potential backing up behind you, like water trying to unknot a garden hose.
There is still a hard drive somewhere that holds my first attempts at digital art, that the Wayback Machine was not able to scrape and keep forever archived out there on the internet. The formula I used is lost to time, defunct in my memory. They are no less art than they were when I created them, all those years ago - and they are arguably made more magical through time, artefacts of an older, simpler me, who thought - with such profound hubris! - that true art could be reduced to something reproducible on an assembly line.
Musing on this reminds me of an old family friend, whose artwork, after a time, fell into a similar pattern rather than being consumed by it out the gate and ultimately falling flat and failing to start. The process reduced to something procedural, generated rather than created, beholden to an algorithm rather than pulled from that uncomfortable, liminal, imaginal between-space where things are yet neither idea nor end result. Still no less art as the end product, but thinking about it on a deeper level makes me wonder if, maybe, never getting far enough to meaningfully engage with that warped process was the best outcome - even if it ultimately drove me further from the true process to which I now find myself struggling to return.