#metacreation

While the art world wrings its hands over AI, French artist Quentin Nolot is in the back alley, turning digital junk into a new artistic language.

Forget your sanitized tech hubs and pretentious art galleries. In the gritty underbelly of Vancouver’s Future Proof Creative Studio, I’ve just witnessed the future of art, and it’s got circuit boards for brains and a punk rock heart. Quentin Nolot, a French artist with more DIY spirit than your local anarchist collective, is here tearing apart the rulebook on AI and creativity. This isn’t about…

We always have a choice on whether to make art or not. I know it’s become a standard thing to say “I have to paint,” or write songs or books or dance, but it’s good to know you have to decide to bring something into the world. These are difficult thoughts to try to focus in on. It can feel like we have to create, and that intense, fiery desire makes it important.

But I think it’s more…

The Sketch Is the Thing

I finally finished the 31 Inktober drawings, only a few weeks late. Sarcasm aside, it’s often worth it to finish a marathon, even when you’re far behind. Discipline can be its own reward.

Not to mention, completing things is precedent for future projects. The more we get used to abandoning the things we start, the easier it gets to never finish anything. (NOTE: This is in addition to knowing…

Rachel Cusk and Creating As a Mature Artist

https://vimeo.com/371574954

Cusk is a writer, but what she has to say here about her creative process and her growth along the path of it can apply broadly.

The photo above was taken during a D&D session at a friend’s place. I’d been rolling fair to terrible results, and this combo—a 20 to hit and 6 for damage—meant an automatic kill and success for a fight. I wanted to document it, because it’s the first time I can remember such a gaming success in many years, and it’s unlikely to happen again anytime soon.

But then, it isa success, and was a…

The Absence of Art Is the Art of Absence, or Something

Involved in a tabletop game the other night, I had a chance to hold forth—probably too enthusiastically and vociferously—on John Cage’s iconoclastic piece, “4′ 33″.” There’s plenty of analysis on the work, but what struck me at the time was the following: Claude Debussy is supposed to have said (among other similar composers/musicians), “music is the space between the notes.” Cage simply…

Am I the End Product of All the Memes I’ve Obsessively Absorbed Over a Lifetime

Richard Dawkins conceived the word, and his original concept was a nebulous musing, specifically that it was

[…] a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.

And I wonder if our ideas and concepts aren’t mostly a collection of these cultural chunks that swirl in consciousness. When we create, perhaps we are reforming bits of the meme stew into new…