AI DECAY — an NFT Journey
My goal as an artist participating in NFTs was to create a visual representation of decay in AI. Coming into this space from the purely physical side of art, I was extremely daunted by our abilities to replicate what I thought were unrepeatable emotions through AI. An art form I held so dearly to my heart as a way of healing, being taken over by numbers and code was something that sat very uncomfortably with me.
I made it my mission to create a series of works that would gradually show the decay in my control. WACK! was not only the start of my brand but the first example of my journey in control. 200 pieces, all hand drawn, and not altered at all by a generator. I simply uploaded each piece onto the NFT platform of my choosing (OpenSea) and released them to the public. Simple enough, it was a great achievement for the first collection, and emotionally didn't present itself with too different of a feeling than selling my pieces online.
Then I created wackies. wackies was a challenge for sure. I had to let go of my need to have control over composition, structure, and emotion and let myself give in to the idea that I couldn’t possibly create 1,000+ NFTs on my own. This submission was the 2nd part of my decay into AI. Seeing the generator throw together all the layers I had carefully crafted together was truly amazing. I witnessed color combos I would not have envisioned before, and emotions through the mismatching of features that I would not have organized myself. It was as if I had poured my heart into a machine, and it was reading it back to me. Not all of it was full to my liking all the time, however, that was part of the experiment. Even so, wackies took a lot of time to craft. I knew how the generator would spit images together generally, and spent a lot of time trying to piece each attribute together in a way that would still be cohesive to myself.
Lastly, there was e_e. very fittingly, right before the release of e_e life became very chaotic for me, both with the NFT art world and personally. I felt that I truly was losing myself and my touch with what art meant to me in some ways. I created the name ‘Everything & Everywhere’ because that was how my brain felt. There were constantly a million possibilities of how my life could go. A hundred ways to win, and a hundred ways to fail. I felt small. I started crafting pieces of work that resonated much more closely with the sketches and paintings I use to fill in my diaries or workbooks. I let go of what I thought visually looked best on a wall, or what would evoke the most emotion, and dug into myself. Then, the AI decay. I put my work through a generator and was just blown away by the results. I felt so little control, yet so much freedom looking at my work. I hadn’t spent more than one minute thinking about composition, and whether or not certain colors would ever overlap. I let myself go, and the AI we used pieced it together in such a beautiful way. In a sense, I was pieced together by our code. The AI software studied how I worded my attributes, and the moods I portrayed, and pumped out a poem in my own words and style per NFT. I felt the decay. I feel it now.
To learn about how this all fits into my brand WACK! stay tuned, and sign up for my next article.
