At my desk I have a paint station. Throughout the day I paint little parts and pieces. I go back and forth between referring to something and looking away. I am trying to see the thing I am painting emerge from the canvas. I want it to be born of creation. I want it to be familiar but unique. I want it to have soul. I want it to be original. I want it to be loved. I want it to be wanted. I want it to be of value.
I feel that way about my work as well. I want it to be of value. I want it to be of purpose. Much like the paintings on the canvas or other things I produce, I find myself creating original things that aren’t really that original. A few weeks ago, I went to the hospital for a routine thing and as I walked the halls, I saw beautiful pieces of art valued at thousands of dollars. I was looking for all the things. I was looking at the complexity, the simplicity, the beauty. How did it make me feel? Did it make me feel something?
I have found a nuance in art that I am trying to sort out. I wonder if some people find a way to imprint themselves into the art. Do they leave a tiny part of themselves there? Do they put their soul somehow into the thing they have created? If so, did they lose a piece of themselves or are they endless boundless energy seeding the things they create?
There is something to it. I am not sure what it is. It is a feeling that comes from the thing. It can be from music, any kind of art, writing, dance, and beyond. It can come from a raw talent or practice. When it manifests itself, it isn’t about the artist at that point. It is about the person or people receiving or reacting to it.
The invisible thread of connectivity that runs through all of us is most likely the mechanism in which we experience these feelings.
It is in this shared connection that art finds its true value, transcending time and space to touch the hearts and souls of those who encounter it.
Still working on it. Not finished but are we ever?
I’ve been answering too many questions about AI recently, so I’m tending to view a lot of things through that lens.
We are the sum of our experiences and everything is correlated and…well…experienced by how it connects to our own memories and the patterns laid down in our brains. It’s one of the reasons that the more we learn, the easier it tends to be to learn even more new things. We have experiences and memories to connect the new input to and integrate the new information rather than simply relying on memorization.
In art, music, literature, dance, etc. the patterns are more open to interpretation and that “fuzziness” allows our brains to correlate them to more primal and visceral memories and experiences. An artist or performer may also be able to express more fundamental patterns that get lost in words or the straight edges of modern communication. It’s a way for people to communicate subconscious to subconscious and bypass a lot of the filters.
It’s one of the reasons why I think that we have a long way to go with AI. AI lacks our sensorium, our primal programming and the common drives honed by countless generations of natural selection. It can ingest and infer a lot of the surface patterns, but even when we get to AGIs, they’re going to struggle to ever have a human perspective without all of that evolutionary and experiential baggage (and blessings). They’ll be able to parrot human interpretations and impressions, but they’ll be unlikely to ever be able to actually experience what we do without having gone through the human experience.
This may be the unique value that keeps us relevant in a post-AI world. Our art is more than just random chance going through an aesthetic filter, it’s a product of the shared human experience and something that will be hard to truly codify or train into an AI.
That’s amazing!!! So much detail!