I've always made things with my hands, I find it physically soothing and mentally intriguing. I've also never been able to imagine things I hadn't already seen. The combination of these two facets of myself, even before I realized them as an adult, is that my creative efforts have focused intensely on various kinds of mimicry. As a kid, I made geometric patterns and followed templates from the iron-on-bead kits (it uses a pattern on a special board with pins and then the back is heated with an iron to fuse the beads into a pixelated image). I've done sand images, layered sand in tiny bottles, and color-by-number. In my oven-bake-clay phase in elementary school, I made copies of objects from my bedroom, such as a laptop computer and a tiny hermit crab which fit into a real shell. I still have a clay sculpture I made twenty years ago of my grandmother's cat, now a decade in the grave. I looked at the world around me and made tiny models that captured ephemeral moments.
In high school I started making duct tape reproductions of whatever someone wanted me to affix in brightly-colored adhesive. I made three-dimensional sculptures, reproductions of paintings, and custom art based on reference images. I figured out a scale from taking a printout of the image and scaling it up, measuring precisely using rulers and T-squares. I made several items for my youngest sibling, such as a duct tape companion to his beloved Blue Dog (the duct tape rendition was dubbed Purple Dog).
Throughout my duct tape era, which remains the longest of my creative eras (though book reviewing and hand-sewing are slowly vying for the title), various people (usually older, male relatives of mine) questioned why I did what I did in my chosen manner, when there were other ways to get the end result. One questioned why I used duct tape? Surely, since duct tape is just adhesive, with a cloth layer and a plastic layer on top, it would be easy to make my painting reproductions by slathering a canvas with adhesive and then putting some sort of plastic over it. Another said I would sell more of my creations if I duplicated my skill, teaching other people what I did, taking commissions, outsourcing the work to my lackeys, and then raking in the cash. Other than telling them I preferred to use duct tape and I wanted to do it myself, I didn't have a great answer. I knew they were wrong, but I didn't know how to express it.
Something I didn't know how to say back then, but my then in-process engineering degree would teach me later, is that the disconnect is I viewed what I did as path-dependent processes, almost to the degree where I didn't care about the end result, precisely, but I cared how I went about it. I enjoyed making all the little copies of my corner of the world, but once they were made I didn't always know what to do with them. Selling them, or making them on commission in the first place, wasn't because I wanted to make money from my creations, it was because if I just kept them I had to figure out what to do with them, but if I sold them they got out of my way and I could use the money to buy more materials.
I wasn't doing all this just to churn out art and make the pieces exist, I was making them to have had the experience of their creation. Because I enjoyed the calm and structure of measuring precisely, unrolling tape and listening to the rcccccchhhhpppp as I flung my arms wide and didn't let the roll twist in my hands. I could ripe tape precisely, for hours. I was proud of the way I spend hundreds of hours working with tape and never used scissors, instead subtly layering each piece so that they were big enough to adhere but exactly the right layer was visible on top in the end.
It wasn't just adhesive and plastic, it was a visceral feeling of precision made manifest. It also was, in many ways, a forgiving medium, something I desperately needed as my then-unknown dysgraphia messed with me in subtle ways. I could place a piece of tape, see it, know it was in the wrong place, and then reposition it, or peel it off and replace it with a different piece. Few mistakes were irreversible, and I would spend hours (or even days) working with tape, listening to music.
Why would I take that from myself?
I wouldn't, because it was about the path and the process, as much or more than the end result.
I did teach other people how to work with tape, if they wanted, but most people didn't care to do it themselves. That's what I was for, and that's okay. The people who wanted me to give up the whole reason for doing it just to make there be more of it (or more money in my pocket for very little work) didn't understand that how I got there was important.
People who advocate for AI art don't seem to understand that, even when the art is mimicry, the point is expressed in the process of creation, as much or more than the final object or image.
And, frankly, on a personal level, as someone who thrives on the art of mimicry and caricature, of paying homage to prior art by capturing a new facet of it in the mirror of my regard, the twisted spew of a plagiarism machine makes mockery of everything sacrificed to feed it.
The journey matters to the destination. If it didn't, you could just look at the final page of a book and know everything important about it.
As a reviewer, AI makes it harder to find the next book I'll love.
As a writer, AI can't learn from the prose it synthesizes.
As a mimic, AI fails over and over to portray anything new or interesting from the works it stole. It lacks even the talent of a forger, while its prompters and proponents claim to be the real artists.
Art, whether physical, audible, digital, or some other medium, is an expression of the time that a person took to make something and put it into the world. This is part of why collaborative art pieces, where the artist writes directions and the audience participates, are just as much art as any painting on canvas. The people who asked why I didn't just turn my tape into an exploitative factory, or cover canvas with adhesive, asked because they didn't care about the process and didn't understand why I do.
 |
| Blue Dog (left) and Purple Dog (right) - January 2011 |
Comments
Post a Comment