OpenLoops.09

I’m back in the city, and back in my studio where it’s hot and humid and my body feels heavy and moves slowly. Where my data plan is unlimited and so are the inputs. All my synapses are firing.1

I thought that I had digested what the first 8 or so instalments of Open Loops were scratching at through my IRL/URL piece. I polled a few art world friends about their own thoughts on how AI fits into their creative practice and honestly felt satisfied with where things landed. If I really crudely TL;DR it for you, we all kind of agreed that AI is best used as a tool to get the boring parts out of the way so we can dig into the most fun parts of our practice. Which is to say, most of us still enjoy whittling away at code and craft very much. The full article is here if you’d like to hear a more nuanced version where people dig into their process and share their opinions in their own words.

I want to be done with this topic, I really do. I know most of you probably do to. I want to just accept that it’s here, and move on. But I can’t because it’s everywhere and just keeps serving deep questions and realizations.

At least I know I’m in good company.

My new favourite slogan:

°˖✧･ﾟ:* “counterculture of whimsy over productivity” *:･ﾟ✧˖°

…which I came across this week in a post but NYC based computer artist Viola, v10101a on ig, who shared about why they continue to find value in teaching creative coding. It resonated so much.

I followed some of the links in the article and landed on a piece that sent me spiralling down a philosophical cybernetic rabbit hole.

Legibility Of Effort written by Nolen Royalty, was about heuristics and it explores how we can no longer easily judge what is worth giving our attention to because our main heuristic to judge whether something was worth our time to consume used to be the time that someone put into building the thing. That time put in insinuated a certain degree of care and consideration towards the thing being created. “Back in the good old days,” we were trading our attention-time against someones care-time, caring enough to take the time do something well, to pull it out of the mind and place it in the world and tell other people about it. With AI we loose that.

And I would tend to agree. And in the same breath, I also defend that AI allows us to double down on the parts of our practice that are important to us and offload what is not. That usually means project scaffolding, setting up utilities and sorting out tooling (the “boring parts” I mentioned above, which are super personal to me, and apparently my friends. But no shade to any tooling lovers out there!)

It feels strange and peculiar that moving forward we’ll have to find a different marker for the care, consideration and time someone might have put into their work because a polished finish won’t mean anything real. It already doesn’t.

Viola also wrote a really great piece on the Violence of Alignment in LLMs and after reading it, I could not stop thinking about how the way AI is being engineered feels very much the same as how society is and has been engineered.

One of my favourite parts of the article and an I-was-today-years-old-when-I-found-out moment was this quote:

The word fiction comes from the Latin fictio: to shape, to mold. Its original meaning, much like “fabrication,” was something brought into being through craft (Gallagher, 2006). The word fact, or factum, also derives from making: facere, to do, to make. Both fact and fiction are, etymologically, things that have been produced. Modern usage of those words, however, has obscured these roots. Beginning with the scientific revolution, fact was reconceived as something discovered rather than made. It became a format for presenting knowledge as self-evident, detachable from the apparatus that produced it (Poovey, 1998). This distinction hardened into infrastructure: verification systems, empirical methods, and eventually the entire epistemological hierarchy that venerates language when it corresponds with reality.

Viola He | Violence of Alignment

If that has peeked your curiosity at all, I highly recommend reading the article in full. Viola is a great read across the board.

Otherwise, I offer you a twist on the usual loose threads in the form of a mood board of thought snippets that made me “uff,” “mhmmm” and laugh with my whole body this summer. An ode to my old tumblr2, iykyk.

A lot of great new music and mixes have come out this summer as well, and that has made my heart really happy. Enjoy it here, as a flat image or poke at it on Sublime, where you can play the songs and link out to them to save them if you want.