![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Camtasia is making me hangry
Friday, 15 March 2019 05:15 pmMaybe I shouldn't attempt video editing before dinner. :B Anyway, while I'm waiting for this notoriously slow (even on Jerami's computer that he literally upgraded yesterday) program to do its thing, here's a collaborative doodle between Jerami, myself, and a robot on the internet.
As briefly mentioned in the Patreon post, I've always been interested in art generated by computers, whether intentionally by neural networks or randomly (I remember being 7 or 8 years old and poring over this incomprehensible accordion of gibberish that mysteriously spewed out of our malfunctioning dot matrix printer one day, or the time my scanner malfunctioned and made a cool glitch pattern before glitch art was cool).
More recently I've been thinking about why it appeals to me, and it's probably for some of the same reasons why I'm interested in dream imagery and things from the subconscious, or the idea of a "third mind" (originally from Burroughs, whom I haven't read because I am an illiterate hack, but also in the context of industrial music and postmodern pop culture via Alex Reed's Assimilate, which I have read). I think it's significant that DeepDream was one of the first neural networks I became aware of, and that the imagery it generates is described as hallucinatory or dream-like--in a larger sense, the idea of creative work emanating from something we wouldn't necessarily recognize as fully conscious, or from an altered or simulated state of consciousness. (And speaking of altered states of consciousness, I did have a few white chocolate snowflake martinis when I doodled my part of the collab linked above.)
Which, I guess, goes back to a parallel interest I have in abstract and automatic drawing and the particular state of mind I associate with it. I started doing abstract compositions in college as a way of coping with my mental illness and expressing feelings I couldn't otherwise articulate. Those drawings were mostly unplanned, made to fill whatever space on whatever scraps or margins I had available, and it's probably no coincidence that a lot of the early ones especially resembled circuitry or biological structures (sometimes both).
I used to keep a fairly elaborate dream journal and would occasionally try to draw some of the more visually extravagant ones. Jerami says he has a specific world in his dreams with distinct locations that are connected to each other, some of which he's visited more than once. I'd like to try drawing those eventually, and/or (if I ever manage to git gud at 3D modeling) actually make some sort of interactive environment based on them. But I think that's enough stream of consciousness for one day. ;P
As briefly mentioned in the Patreon post, I've always been interested in art generated by computers, whether intentionally by neural networks or randomly (I remember being 7 or 8 years old and poring over this incomprehensible accordion of gibberish that mysteriously spewed out of our malfunctioning dot matrix printer one day, or the time my scanner malfunctioned and made a cool glitch pattern before glitch art was cool).
More recently I've been thinking about why it appeals to me, and it's probably for some of the same reasons why I'm interested in dream imagery and things from the subconscious, or the idea of a "third mind" (originally from Burroughs, whom I haven't read because I am an illiterate hack, but also in the context of industrial music and postmodern pop culture via Alex Reed's Assimilate, which I have read). I think it's significant that DeepDream was one of the first neural networks I became aware of, and that the imagery it generates is described as hallucinatory or dream-like--in a larger sense, the idea of creative work emanating from something we wouldn't necessarily recognize as fully conscious, or from an altered or simulated state of consciousness. (And speaking of altered states of consciousness, I did have a few white chocolate snowflake martinis when I doodled my part of the collab linked above.)
Which, I guess, goes back to a parallel interest I have in abstract and automatic drawing and the particular state of mind I associate with it. I started doing abstract compositions in college as a way of coping with my mental illness and expressing feelings I couldn't otherwise articulate. Those drawings were mostly unplanned, made to fill whatever space on whatever scraps or margins I had available, and it's probably no coincidence that a lot of the early ones especially resembled circuitry or biological structures (sometimes both).
I used to keep a fairly elaborate dream journal and would occasionally try to draw some of the more visually extravagant ones. Jerami says he has a specific world in his dreams with distinct locations that are connected to each other, some of which he's visited more than once. I'd like to try drawing those eventually, and/or (if I ever manage to git gud at 3D modeling) actually make some sort of interactive environment based on them. But I think that's enough stream of consciousness for one day. ;P
