Official Declaration of Production-Year 2023–2024
It’s my 8th year of Official Declarations of Production-Year. I’ve always produced forward-looking statements about my art practice. I feel that it is important to limit investors’ exposure to uncertainty about my practice, so I engage in the practice of producing an Official Declaration of Production-Year once a year, usually in the fall (though I sometimes start early, as I have this year). All it is, really, is a bunch of forward-looking statements of what I plan to be working on in the next “Production-Year”, which is always one year ahead. It’s similar to how cars are produced and shipped, as well as Design Houses and their Collections.
Here are my previous Official Declarations:
Production-Year 2016–2017
Official Declaration of The Production-Year 2017–2018
Official Declaration of The Production-Year 2018–2019
Official Declaration of Production-Year 2019–2020
Official Declaration of Production-Year 2020–2021
Official Declaration of Production-Year 2021–2022
Official Declaration of Production-Year 2022–2023
Vision for Production-Year 2023–2024
First of all, let me define the term “forward-looking statement” as it pertains to my art practice. I’m not using it in the same sense as a Corporation might use it or an Investor or something when speaking about Securities or things of the sort, or the performance of an Instrument on a financial market. I’m simply stating, for the record, what my plans are for the future. Since I am the one making the plans, I can safely make forward-looking statements. Perhaps my error is in calling them forward-looking statements, but I feel that the term applies. I may begin speaking instead in terms of my “Vision” for the coming Production-Year. That might get me in less legal trouble.
As you may already know, I had two main artistic projects roughly between th years 1998 and 2004–2006. These projects were in essence interdisciplinary, they included the creative production of Images, Sounds, and Text, as well as research in the above. The first project, circa 1998–2002, was called The Exhibition in Tonal Cinema, and the second, circa 2001–2004–2006 was called The History-Project. In more recent years, I started a sequel to The History-Project called The Archives-Project. I’ve written a great deal about it on this Medium account before. I just wanted to say that I’m still working on that.
I mentioned in my previous Declaration that I was working on a sequel novel called Integration/Disintegration. I continue to work on this, in a new style I invented especially for the sort of introduction to the piece, if you will. Even though The Archives-Project is far from being finished, I’m already thinking “Beyond” The Archives-Project.
The idea is that this great sequence, of The History-Project, followed by The Archives-Project, and the work on Integration/Disintegration, is meant to be part of a larger, grander work called The Revolt of Fiction, which is like my magnum open and “Grand Finale”.
I also want to work on the subject of Alienation/Disalienation. These concepts come into their own in Integration/Disintegration, which is made to look like ancient texts missing segments, is meant to be fragmentary/fragmented, like a schizoid mind.
I’m also working on a kind of Grand Vision/Life Project. In many ways, I’m trying to restart or reboot my art studio, The Historiotheque. I’m not as productive as I used to be in my art studio at home, though I’d say I’m still busy honing my skills as an artist-researcher, mostly focused on the research part of the enterprise. I want to write a piece about the concept of Patient-Partner, maybe about a man who is living on disability and is working part-time as a Hospital Archivist. I thought of the idea, as well, of an Unreliable Narrator, perhaps with a degenerative brain disease, a kind of deconstructing narrative. I thought of working on this on a kind of project called The Prescription Data Project, which would mix biomedical vignettes with stories or novelistic phenomenologies related to my life as a patient.
Last time around, I mentioned my idea for a kind of Metaphysics of Happiness. That’s still in the works. Or a piece called Happiness or Death. This is all part of the research that’s been going on behind the scenes, in the Rebooting of The Historiotheque. I began studying Vajrayana or Tantric/Esoteric Buddhism, mostly on the practices surrounding the so-called charnel-grounds.
I decided that I was fed up of being afraid of death all the time. I’ve suffered my entire life with severe hypochondria, and decided that I wanted to stop suffering, to stop being obsessed with sickness and death. That’s part of where I got the idea for The Prescription Data Project, where I would mix a kind of log of prescription data and a kind of Tabular Accountancy, similar to how I envision Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Sometimes they read as a kind of transcript of ancient documents consisting of fragmented lists or whatnot.
I want to go back on something I just said. I spent some time studying everything I could find about the charnel-grounds practices in Tantric/Esoteric Buddhism, and wanted to quote the following:
The idea of meditating amongst decomposing, putrefying bodies is something that I learned a long time ago, when doing guided meditations from a book by Anthony de Mello. One of the meditations was imagining one’s body going through I think it was 7 stages of decomposition or decay. It was a revelatory experience for me. More recently, someone was talking about the cycle of life and this meditation came back to me in vivid detail.
I’m obsessed with death as well as with failure. This brings me to the concept of Reliability Engineering, as well as Safety Engineering, Hazard Analysis, Risk Management, and so on. I want to write something called The Risk-Project that would exist WITHIN The Archives-Project. As the characters of The Archives-Project work to discover what caused the abject failure of The History-Project, they would work on a “Risk-Project” concerned with the above-mentioned practices of Reliability/Safety Engineering and Risk Management. The idea would be to fully investigate the “project risks” to the Archives-Project. Failure Analysis is another methodology that would fit into this.
I’m also obsessed with the idea of Code Genres as well as what has been called Woven Text, what I see as an ancient form of Tabular Accountancy. In its ideal form, this is something I’ve been working on for a long time called The Refcards-System. It’s a kind of flat mini-internet made up of index cards, not dissimilar to Paul Otlet’s vision of the Mundaneum. I refer to these as “Refmats”, short for “Reference Materials”, in my art practice.
About the art practice, Rebooting The Historiotheque. I want to develop “Operating Concepts” for the Historiotheque/Art Operation, plus produce General Status Reports, on my other Medium account associated with The Historiotheque. I want to collect “Refmats” for my “Art Operation”, and work on my idea of The Refcards-System, as a kind of foundation to everything I do in the studio. I consider myself what I call a Field Artist. That is, I work in the field collecting data in various forms and then I work in the studio, generating creative pieces of art, these cultural artifacts in various forms.
I’ve thought of the idea of Executable Documentation as well as Literate Testing. It’s something that I want to incorporate into my art practice. I’ve always loved the idea of Literate Programming, as introduced by Donald Knuth. I find it an interesting programming paradigm. As you know, I’ve been programming in the Python programming language for 10 years now. I’ve trying to incorporate that into my art practice as well. I will keep on working on programming projects in the coming years.
Promptism, or Prompt Engineering and its Consequences for Professional Art Practice
Promptism, or Prompt Engineering, is a form of text-to-image artificial intelligence that generates an image or a series of images based on a text prompt that you feed the natural language processing algorithm. I’ve been playing around with this quite a bit, and am fascinated by it.
I wonder what this will mean for the role of artist in society, especially as the models and methodologies of prompt engineering become more and more advanced. We’re already at the point now where a prompt can generate an image that is nearly indistinguishable from the work of an artist or content creator. What does this mean about art ownership? About copyright? Who is the creative one, is it the one writing the textual prompt or is it the algorithm?
I’ve written before about “computational creativity”, the idea of machines engaging in creative work, in generating cultural artifacts, like artists do. Much headway has been made over the last few years, yet machines are still not as capable as humans at creative tasks, though they are getting closer and closer to human capacities and could be expected to reach human capacity in the next dozen or more years, if things keep evolving at the current pace.
I made “prompt art” using the the Pollinations website, using their text-to-image method called Disco Diffusion. My prompt was “Mondrian Monkey”. I’ll be testing all new prompt engineering websites and models using “Mondrian Monkey” because I think it is a wink to the early work using machines on “pseudo-Mondrian” art.. and monkeys, well who doesn’t like monkeys? No but seriously, the idea is another wink to the Infinite Monkey Theorem.
Who “created” this “Mondrian Monkey”? I came up with the prompt, with the concept, but it was entirely computer-generated.. using a complex model and some AI magic.. and prompt engineering methodology, using natural language processing and so forth. I have to admit that my understanding of the intricacies of prompt engineering is limited, and I’ve been unable to find very many sources that explain it to a lay audience.
In any case, in the coming years, I will be following this. In recent years, I played around with Neural Style Transfer, and now I’m playing around with Prompt Engineering. I like to dabble in new media, new technologies. I’m not at the level, though, as a programmer, to be doing these things myself, though I’m sure I could learn. There are vast numbers of tutorials out there that explain how to do it. I might not currently have the right resources, but I could get them if I really wanted to do these things myself. Then maybe you could argue that I would have more “ownership” over the generated content, since I was actively engaged in generating it, whereas as of now, I’ve only ever punched in a prompt in a text box and had it done automatically for me.
The Art of Portraiture
I’ve practiced the art of portraiture, including self-portraiture, for decades. That is one thing which I’ve always done and plan to continue doing for years to come. Someone may ask, however, how come my portraits are seemingly only of women? Why no men, and why always young women? Well, there are many factors that go into that. One is that I happen to find those some of the most interesting faces to depict. It’s much harder to depict children or the elderly. So I stick with something relatively easy to do, and as you may notice from the above image, I tend to do it in a kind of sketchy manner.
Another factor is that portraits of females, other than self-portraits of course, happened to be the first subjects that I chose years ago, and I’m not finished “studying” that subject, if you will. So I will be doing portraits of older people, as well as of people from other races, and also people of various gender expressions and identities. It just happens that for the time being, I’ve mostly made portraits of young females. Though if you paid attention, I have done portraits of men as well, as well as older men, and older women too. It’s a work in progress.
Recap on Noise Fields
Over the last ten years or so, I’ve developed a form of pixel art that is based on what I call “Noise Fields”, that is, images of noise, made up of randomly distributed pixel values, either in black & white or in RGB values.
Above is an example of what kind of images I start with. Then once I have some noise to begin with, I begin “modulating the noise field” by applying basic image processing functions, to modulate the noise so that it takes on some sort of structure. I iterate the process until I get something I consider “visually interesting” or which has a given value of “visual interestingness” or VI as I call it. Here is an example of the process after maybe 30 iterations:
The point, though, is that I always start with my “noise fields”. The results can look very different from one “series” to another. A series is just a given “population of images”. That is, as I go through the process of starting with a noisy distribution of pixels, and modulate the noise field, I end up generating a population of images I call a series. Then I use a kind of “fitness function” to decide which images are “visually interesting” and I iterate on those images, until I reach a point that I’m satisfied with the overall look of the image, then I sign it, and share it on social media. Here is another example of the process:
I use various basic image processing functions, like adding noise, using blend modes, especially the difference blend mode, between layers, or other arithmetic blend modes. I pixelate as well, and use other functions that make up my “magic sauce”. What I noticed in recent years, though, is that “foundation models”, those models that generate images based on a textual prompt, what I called “prompt engineering” earlier, they start with a noisy distribution of random pixel values as well, when generating images.
So the best, state of the art, technology in artificial intelligence for generating images from textual prompts, uses the same basic methodology that I use in creating my images, my little “noise fields” as I love to call them. I think that most people don’t appreciate this aspect of my style of “pixel art”, the thought process that goes on behind the scenes. I think that most people just see the same thing each time, and can’t tell the difference between one and the other. But the distributions of pixel values are not the same. I start with different kinds of noise, I modulate them differently. I work really hard to give each one its own unique features, morphology, color palette, etc. Here is another example just to show the breadth of this kind of work. Here I thought that my final image resembled the style of one of my favorite visual artists, Jean-Paul Riopelle, a Québécois artist of the 20th century:
I often call this methodology “digital synthesis”, because really that’s what it is. I’m starting with noise and “synthesizing” images with varying levels of “visual interestingness” or VI. In the coming months and years, I will continue to refine this process and produce my little “noise fields”. My Noise Field Theory, at base, has to do with the fact that I believe all things are just “modulated noise fields”, that everything starts as a noisy distribution of pixel values, or quarks and other elementary particles and so forth, or what I like to call “n-bits” or “noise-bits” at the quantum level.
At the quantum level, you have indeterminacy. I see this as a probabilistic “field” of random values that take up concrete values as the system “evolves” or “progresses”, as form “emerges”. I think that everything, though, at base, is a noise field, a noisy distribution, before anything takes up any given “shape” or “morphology”. And the process iterates in the background, generating all content, real and imaginary. I even have a special planet of sorts in my fiction called “Construction-Land” which is said to create “all matter, real or imagined” in the stories themselves, but also in the physical universe. I see this “noise field creation machine” as a kind of “Construction-Land” or “C-Land”, where all things are created. That’s my Historiotheque, or workshop.
To be continued…
A.G. © 2022. All Rights Reserved.
