Why I won’t make it into the AI Art History, and Why it’s OK.
An honest assessment
Disclaimer: This article is neither fishing for compliments nor lamenting my unsatisfied vanity. It’s just an honest and realistic assessment.
The creativity of machines has always fascinated me. For me, it found its apogee in 2016, as I read brilliant essay series by Ross Goodwin: Adventures in Narrated Reality.
These essays changed my life. Machines were not just replicating what humans wanted to get from them. They stepped further into the unsupervised storytelling terrains.
And so, I began to experiment. Google Deep Dreams, StyleGAN, GPT-3, DALL-E, all these milestones blew my mind continuously. New ways for self-expression, new narrative approaches, new storytelling revolutions (and all this in literally meaning, not just like some buzzwords).
I come from Academic Domain, I studied Culture and Art sciences and am a non-coder. But during the last years, AI has democratized itself — and all existent complex models are accessible for non-techies and artists, who have tons of ideas, but no time to learn Python.
So I began to share my knowledge with the world like…
- How to create movies with AI
- How to use generative music
- How you can record AI-driven podcasts
- What do you need to train AI on your own memories
- How to inspire your kids to use AI for creative self-expression
- How to collaborate with AI in art
- Index of Creative Intelligence
Etc etc.
It’s always a pleasure for me to get occasional responses about how my writing helped people create art and find themselves in the new digital forms of self-expression.
The thing is: I’m not docked in any art institution. I am not part of an artist group. I’m a lone wolf. I earn my money with my daily work (which I love but has nothing to do with AI and Creativity). I am just a private guy with a family, who spends nights writing and creating.
I am also terrible at self-marketing. My writing is my marketing, so to say.
I see many aspiring stars, creators, and artists, whose stellar path is incredible, who share their experiences and art in big magazines, art fairs, etc. and I am delighted for them (even if I’d love to share my knowledge with the bigger audience as well — but nobody asks, and I don’t dare). I have my Merzazine with 279 readers, and I love all of them. For myself — probably I will once find a cozy place in a footnote of a worldwide Digital Art History. Probably not (since there are too many better voices, which is terrific for the development of our humankind culture).
Probably I will just disappear, like thousands of thinkers and makers from the past, whose names are lost but whose works are granularly saved into the DNA of cultural journey.
I’m not sad. It isn't about me. It’s about the global art world. I just hope to be another nudge for you into the Universe of Creativity. Like the incredible Ross Goodwin, who inspired me for my whole life.
