Monday, July 17, 2023

The Grumbling of Mondays

The Grumbling of Mondays

 

So, it's another Monday morning, 5:30 by the clock, but I've been up for a couple of hours. This seems to be the new sleep pattern: down around nine, up around three. Despite the warm nights, both cats have taken to sleeping on the bed, and I don't mind.

It has been a week of hard work on both the stone, and the Lost Canyon project. I'll be doing a presentation/performance of the Lost Era slideshow at the closing reception for The Hills Are Alive show at the Whittier Museum on August 5th. I finished re-formatting all the pics for the Arkhaven uploads. I'll be composing the text and image panels this week. I hope to have it all in the cue in the next week or so.

 

I always manage to work myself into a tight cramped space in the stone sculpture, some spot that needs to shaped just so, and almost nowhere to fit the tool into that space to shape it.

 

  And I need to do  something more with the back face of this thing, and I still haven't figured out quite what that something is. This is fun, right?

 




 The morning tour through the bookmarks is depressing as always. I won't even bother with news and current events. 

Thought Experiment:

Imagine a restaurant serving computer generated 3D printed non-nutritional synthetic food simulations.

 Just like real food only without calories or nutritional value!

 People could eat there, have three meals a day, and  stay full and satisfied while slowly starving to death. In this age, and time there would be suckers lined up around the block waiting to get in.

So it is with our newest techno-fetish, AI.

GAB is infested with AI "art" these days. Every horny ass fanboy, and his uncle is "composing" images of anime fetish girl pin-ups in sexy costumes. Fantasy scenes like the covers of cheesy sword and sorcery knock offs are popular as well. Other are making digital abstracts. 

Elsewhere, every wannabe writer is employing the chatbots to compose essays and articles.

It's all shit, and it's creepy as hell. Not one of these clowns could pick up a pencil and draw a cat, or write a paragraph.

Writing is hard work. Art takes a burdensome investment of effort. Both are fraught with failure, and frustration. Pardon the melodramatic metaphor here, but a writer, or an artist picks up a sword, and does battle in the war for Goodness Truth and Beauty. The real guys work very hard to produce food for the soul and spirit. AI clowns are wanabe cooks in the no-food restaurant. They're pretend warriors with imaginary swords.

So that's it for me being all creative, n' stuff. Breakfast is ready and I have things to do.

Thanks for stopping by.

3 comments:

  1. I love how this sculpture seems to be telling a different story with each face.

    Re. AI, I can see it being sorta useful simply as a jumping-off point, but like the vaguest type of rough draft one should never submit it as a final work. At least, not if you want to call it yours. Just, like, my opinion.

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  2. Good point, Julie, and thank you, Mike.
    If you can't tell, I'm in a particularly curmudgeonly frame of mind these days. Tying to pull out of it, but getting about a C- for my efforts. It'll get better, soon.

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  3. Hi, quiet morning. You are so right about writing or painting or carving stone or any of it. I do feel like it is a lonely battle fraught with much possibility of dismal failure, or at least the possibility of producing a boring piece of the obvious. Sigh. Onward. I will be fighting this battle as long as I am on this planet.

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