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A bunch of folks who think they know what art is are debating whether AI art is art over in the convention-running social medias.

So far every criticism I've heard is also true of someone whose works sell for millions of dollars. Kruger, Rauschenberg, Banksy, edited to add: Koons. (Did you know that a Rauschenberg recently sold for $89 million? I didn't until today, but I'm pleased that the reaction of the art world seems to have been "it's about time".)

Ultimately I think the question is meaningless. Is any given image art? If so, at what point did it become art, and how? To my mind, the first question is much more about what happens after it's finished than what happens beforehand. Trying to classify things as art according to their creation is absurd.

Somerville Open Studios is doing a hybrid online / outdoor in person event this coming weekend.  Some artists will be online using BoothCentral at https://my.boothcentral.com/v/events/somerville-open-studios-2021.  Some will be displaying art outside and socially distanced.  I will be doing both, with a thematic selection of 22 photographs set up on the fence along my driveway at #75 Lexington.  There are also a couple of artists nearby on Josephine St including Jeff Fullerton whose work and presentation have both influenced mine, and other outdoor artists across the city including Rachel Mello in a small group in the parking lot of Mad Oyster Studios in Gilman Square.

Much more information at www.somervilleopenstudios.org/

Come check it out!

I like to think of myself as a transportation cyclist, but for all that I don't really carry cargo very often. Today made up for that. R and I started out with a trip to Winter Hill to scan a piece of her art with my portable scanner (and computer, of course). Then to Home Depot to fill my other pannier and one of hers with bulbs of the flowering and electrical variety (and a few other electrical bits besides). From there we stopped at Mad Oyster Studios to pick up some art. This was where the clever design of my bucket panniers came in; the hooks are mounted so that the tops of them are exactly flush with the rack, providing a nice large flat surface that we pallet-wrapped a bunch of matted art to the top of. From there we headed out to 13 Forest Gallery to drop off the art, and then to The Shawarma Place for dinner before heading home, where we've installed two of the bulbs so far. Many more, of the other variety, to be installed tomorrow when the weather is supposed to be nice.

This:





... will be hanging at Bloc 11 for eight weeks starting Tuesday night! At print resolution, and all nicely framed up and stuff. The opening reception is a week from tomorrow.

Along the way I made 15 other icons (check out my user profile) and uploaded a few more that I had kicking around. The LJ userpic is the haiku of photography, being so much about composition, so often associated with a single topic or concept, and so difficult to make figurative. And I have an artist statement floating around my head about the presentation of photography in the modern world. Maybe I'll even be able to articulate that sometime.

A quick summary of the last month:

Dec. 6, miss_chance's birthday.
Dec. 8, last day at Permabit.
Dec. 10, ICA opening.
Dec. 17, fly to Puerto Rico.
Dec. 21, roozle's birthday.
Dec. 21, miss_chance's and my anniversary.
Dec. 24, home from Puerto Rico.
Dec. 25, Christmas, and two parties.
Dec. 28, drive to New Haven for nephew Charlie's birthday.
Dec. 31, more do-not-miss parties than I can actually get to.
Jan. 1, also more do-not-miss parties than I can actually get to.
Jan. 2, first day at new job at ITA Software.
Jan. 3, Tolkein's birthday.
Jan. 4, fancy dinner with some close friends.
Jan. 5, drive to New York.
Jan. 6, over the top bat mitzvah of my youngest cousin.
Jan. 7, another do-not-miss party.
Jan. 9, final deadline with the Arisia hotel
Jan. 10, Arisia runtime begins
Jan. 12, first actual official day of Arisia

Happily, my biggest real responsibility at ITA so far has been to organize ITA's presence at Arisia. We will be sponsoring the film program, as a tie-in to the movie nights that happen here twice a week. We'll have some HR folks wandering around the con. And we will be throwing a party on Saturday night after the Masquerade. We have about a dozen people coming down, from all across the company, a pretty good food budget, and a bunch of giveaways (nice ones, like shirts and hats and USB thumbdrives) that we'll be giving out to people who come talk to us. We're going to experiment a little with using video projection in a party context in a way that might lead to a very interesting immersive party concept for 2008. It looks like it's going to be a good time.

I've been using the format of the LJ icon like graphical Haiku. The 100x100 pixel and 40K file size limits are like line counts and syllabification. But an LJ icon, like a Haiku, has non-physical constraints. Mine have stories behind them. They're puzzles. They relate to the dual audiences of my close friends and random strangers on the net. I'm sure I could find other threads to tie them together.

I wonder how you'd formalize the stylistic aspect of the LJ icon art form?

I don't ordinarily remember my dreams well enough to tell if they're in black and white or color. But every once in a while, I have one which is very vivid, both visually and experientially.

This one was about reading an article in one of miss_chance's trade rags, about colored pencil technique. Only the article wasn't about that at all. Instead, it was about the making of the cover illustration for the article, taking an image from concept to execution through a seriously circuitous but always forward-progressing process, switching media at every turn, explaining the inspiration for the artistic choices (one of them was telepathically induced by the author's cat), with the image shown at each intermediate step, starting with the colored-pencil line drawing of a bunch of colored pencils, through the photographs and oil paintings and computer renderings, showing the additional elements being added and dropped and finally synthesized together, and winding up with the actual cover piece of the magazine which incorporated all of the techniques and elements into something greater than the sum of its parts. What was so amazing about the article, though, was that it showed how to shepherd to conclusion a completely unpredictable process without destroying any of the spontaneity. Now if only I could remember enough of it to express how that was done...

So my gym plays WBOS over the speakers in both the main workout area and the locker rooms. As I'm preparing to shower at the end of today's workout, I hear the DJ going down the list of concerts and cultural events going on. Any list of concerts in Boston naturally includes events at a club called Man Ray in Central Square. The DJ then moves on and describes a show at the Museum of Fine Arts. "This isn't like the usual stodgy stuff they have there," he says. "This guy works in photography, but he also does this really cool new thing where he takes the photographic paper and exposes it to light directly. It's a really cool effect -- check it out!"

Sigh. I suppose 80 years really is an eternity to Clear Channel Communications.