We live at the seashore. The daily media sea belches strange cargo onto the beach each day as we walk along its edge. The post I was planning to write was sailing into these waves…but the sea deposited too much on the shore this week for me to stumble over.
Two related written pieces, the first for Persuasion, by Francisco Toro. His subtitle, An optimistic take on AI, creativity, and chess.
This excerpt stands out…
Creativity keeps being used as the central pulse of these new tools. I think it is worth discussing what creativity, art, meaning, and making actually are.
The second piece is a workshop offered at the FITC——wait for it——Future, Innovation, Technology, Creativity conference launching in Toronto this week. The workshop with Gene Kogan…
This lead me to an interview with Kogan…
There we go again, that word ‘create’ and both pieces expressing the idea of ‘expanding’. If by expanding they mean quantity, I totally agree, we have more visual detritus than ever. Here wonderfully expressed and slyly displayed in a former church by the Dutch designer and artist Erik Kessels.
If we mean a qualitative expansion of creativity I have some real world experience working with people in art with engineered tools and to quote Fargo’s Marge Gunderson, “I’m not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work, there, Lou.”
Human creativity is forged by mistakes, and is transcendent, not a collage of everything that a brain or some collective brain has diffused together, but an embodied experience that is as physical as it is cognitive. It is not based in game theory, or bounded by the stacked transformers that no matter their billion+ dataset, is still a box. A box that cannot create the spark that will bridge the gap that no 1 or 0, or game piece move can encompass.
The spreads I have shared in this post span 25 years of collaboration with the incredible designer Tom Brown. His unerring attention to scale, image, colour, texture, and content, has made my art better every time we worked together.
I believe there is something unique that each of us brings to a collaboration, as we interpret, iterate, and build the content—-the process is the power—-the muscle memory and capturing the spark from the colliding vision of the designer and illustrator.
More next week on the incredible contradiction at the heart of the word to image generators….