hi everyone! another month that's not my best month (seems like the theme for this year huh). i just... had some shit do down irt transgenderism that made me feel very upset and vulnerable. as much as i had wanted to come out when i entered uni in 2018 i just really wasn't ready back then, and so i carried on closeted so i wouldn't have to all the trouble of coming out and potentially dealing with shit etc etc i just followed the path of least resistance. i got sick and tired of that though, especially after two years being out to my hs friends, so i figured i'd not come out per se but carry on as if i already had, yknow? coming out extra-officially didn't last though and so after just like three weeks shit hit the fucking fan and i'm safe and all but just extremely upset i didn't get to live casually but also i think i just made a fool of myself and i fucking hate it here honestly. but it's ok. it's ok.
now for better news, i started real work on my thesis. i'm working on organizing allll my references and shit so i can make a concrete project. i'm not the best at talking about my concepts: they feel very real and natural in my brain, but it's not like people can go inside my head to just Understand everything i mean. for now i've settled on having a digital environment (ie walking sim / virtual museum), and making prints of screenshots of it for the exhibit. i'd like to organize the images i've saved over the months, to repurpose them. i'd like the "museum" to be organized somewhat like a timeline, the scale of each artwork growing as the world nears apocalypse. i do realize that's probably more than i can chew!
new on the site, marrow #2, about truly bad souless scifi and how it raises questions by refusing to acknowledge them, like a self-fulfilling prophecy or something, and marrow #3, about AI replacing artists as a smokescreen.
new elsewhere... i didn't post it anywhere bc it's not my point with it, but also i'd like to share that i made a capsule over on gemini: sol.cities.yesterweb.org (proxied here). gemini is a smallweb protocol that i've been poking around for a little while. it's pretty fun and cozy. here's a little introduction if you're interested!
kate crawfords' atlas of AI really had me thinking more about the hidden and occluded costs of AI / ML. no ethical consumption under capitalism etc etc but. oh i don't know, it's particularly easy to abstract and diffuse computer and cloud computing stuff. clicking "run notebook" feels like a harmless little bit of magic, like taking a uquiz or clicking on a random animal generator. truth is, hyperawareness is exhausting and unsustainable, and my individual impact is negligible. but there's some dissonance between what i know and think and my joy at clicking button to get image. in a way, there are more than enough images out there in the world already, and the ease of creating more (and hosting them, like with artbreeder) is kinda bonkers. we really do take them for granted.
the field of ML and generative models in particular still interests me a lot. i'm not dropping it just because it's easier to try and wash my hands of the matter entirely. i've decided to take some time off generating images — i have a lot of them saved, and i want to make more use of them, like a hunter using every last part of an animal. yes, these jpegs are animals and webps are like those fucked up teacup dogs and the whole internet is just a very shitty puppy mill.
well, and after this image talk it might be the right time to bring up digital degrowth, something i've been thinking of for a couple of months now but hadn't really written enough to think it's worth posting. i'm thinking of digital degrowth as both philosophy and art practice (oh i'm one of Those artists it seems).
philosophy as in: i think we need a break from the constant updates and upgrades of technology, to just chill out with our current devices, to stop pushing all performance and hi-fi boundaries, to create negative space.
art practice as in: choosing simplicity and relying on the universal round brush*, in the same old paint tool sai that's been with me since my early days, using "needlessly restrictive" indexed color palettes, generating smaller AI images even when i could go larger, or not generating new images at all.
i don't have a manifesto or a formula or a strict set of limitations to keep my digital footprint as small as possible — that's not even my goal. i'm just putting into words and practice a vague state of mind i know many others have. i think machines can be peaceful.
brushes are a touchy subject for digital artists. everyone has an opinion about them and if you ever find yourself in the wrong corners of art twitter you'll be sure to read more than enough brush takes for a lifetime — i'd rather not ever hear anyone talk about them ever again.
my official opinion: whatever you're using is probably fine. if your brush feels cumbersome ditch it. if you spend longer searching for brushes than using them, you're in too deep in all this.
so sure, i'm an advocate for the default brush and keeping as few brushes as possible and i think relying too much on stamp / hyperspecific brushes is kinda silly (and might be a hindrance)… i'd rather make as little noise on the subject as possible. it's all fine.
which is why i avoid twitter art discourse like the plague. i mean, whatever man. maybe make a personal site and you'll calm down.
ah, compression. the bane of digital artists everywhere. when posting to social media compression is something that happens behind the scenes, without your approval, obliterating your details, making your art catch a jpeg to the head. so when we post to neocities, we go all out with our large high res files... only for them to take forever to load. maybe it's a quirk of neocities' hosting, sure, but often i clicked on someone's art page only to leave rather than waiting forever and a day for the images to load. well, we can't have our cake and eat it too: we need compression.
i've been toying with compression for neocities. indexing is simple, flexible and looks quite nice. my css caps images at 800px in either direction so i don't need them to be any larger than that. it is, of course, lossy. if i lose the originals i'll never be able to retrieve them. but it's also silly to think of a website as a backup, so all in all it doesn't matter — it's more important for me to have pages that load fast. technically it also aligns with my belief that websites and digital stuff in general is far too bloated and could use being pared back, but i don't think personal websites should be held to such strict "limitations" as corporate websites, who are the real culprits here. so if you have an image-heavy page, have fun with it! maybe do consider downsizing what you can though! (and on the way, check out marrow #1, where i talk more about this).
not a lot of digital art this month, just one icon commission for curio over on flight rising (original)
also, this was months ago but i can only share them now, i made a handful of bug badges for earth's nature hike event! my favorite was the moth :D
from printmaking class, a small copperplate print! the engraving itself is pretty simple, but the actual printing process is a hassle, so this doesn't look very good (could be better if i had better paper too), but i won't be too hard on myself. it's definitely a change of pace for me, someone who draws fast and loose most of the time. also: i most likely have a copper allergy, so it's a bit of a fight for my life and i won't be coming back to this medium once the class is over (which is a little bit sad).
oh and maybe... an ascii version of this symbol? made with fsymbols, it's pretty easy to use!
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oh idk. i wanted to make a list of names for fun and profit but i don't want to take up an entire new page, so i figured i'd just put them in here haha
the end! see you next month!