Daydreams

Within this page is a collection of interactions I’ve had with AI-image generation. Each piece was created using a “blend” function and a prompt to merge two or more of my physical artworks into digital hyper-concepts. Basically I fed my artwork into the engine and told it how to interact with it. I’m still unsure how I feel about this process. It seems like a natural extension of my artistic exploration, yet after producing around 2,000 of these in 2023, I was left with a lingering sense that something essential to the creative process had been stripped away.

There’s a certain physicality to bringing ideas from the mind, through the hand, and onto paper-something this process removed. Many designs felt disconnected from me; some I simply didn’t like at all. But the ones I’ve included here stood out as relevant to my work. Countless iterations of them exist somewhere in a digital cloud. To be honest, some were stunningly cool, yet I was reluctant to take full ownership of them, especially if they seemed like someone else’s ideas or style.

This process left me feeling both creatively invigorated and stagnant at the same time. On one hand, my productivity skyrocketed. On the other, I found myself missing the simple act of drawing. Creatively, I felt “foggy”, for lack of a better description. I did reintegrate a few of these designs into my studio practice, developing them further-those are the ones I would sign. But since then, I’ve returned to pen and pencil on paper and haven’t really looked back.

Where do we go when creativity becomes an extracorporeal mechanism? That’s a question that I asked an AI recently and this is what it said.

“AI accelerates and complicates this process [externalized creativity through tools] by generating images at a scale and speed that can feel alienating. Instead of a tool that simply extends the artist’s hand, it can act more like an externalized creative force, one that responds to input but operates with its own internal logic. The question then becomes: how much of the creative process do we still own when the mechanism is no longer fully under our control? And at what point does art-making become more about curation than creation?”

How do I feel about the shared ownership of these ideas? So far, not great-yet at the same time, I can’t help but be impressed.

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