Artful dEvolution vs. Extinction in the age of A.I.

I want to talk about survival of the fittest and having the wits to embrace an uncomfortable paradox in our dystopian age. Having always been an outlier in my approach to things, these days it means moving forward by going backwards. Such logic is counterintuitive (and quite possibly insane), but exactly what about the life of a hard-bitten artist can be considered normal?… I’ve ‘been there and done that’ with digital imaging, and with the advent of Artificial Intelligence, I think it’s time to head back to primitive mark-making, using unashamedly primitive tools.

30 years ago I created this award winning artwork for Floyd Vincent’s EP “Caveman” and won the Gold for image editing in the Desktop Magazine awards. It’s remarkable to think that an image of this complexity was made using “primitive” PhotoShop 2.5.

Back in the day, before layers were introduced in PhotoShop, every element in my composition was cut from another document and pasted into position, where it was stuck for good. Without multiple undos, you were forced to commit to each and every move. To make this task even more challenging, the machines were underpowered and the memory positively anaemic, even by today’s lowest standards.

I photographed Floyd in the sun on the rooftop of Marrickville shopping centre car park and used the rubber-stamp tool to remove his undies. I hid his nether regions with my strategically placed “Axe” (a play on the “axe wielding neanderthal” trope) that adds value by suggesting that Floyd is a more evolved, articulate and cultured artiste than your average grunting hack. The axe itself is 100% illustrated, rendered without reference, as were the body and facial hair.

As a fully-fledged Qantel PaintBox artist in 1993, I saw the future of image making in Adobe software on desktop computers, and decamped from the exclusive Qantel crew to become the resident Macintosh artist at my work. Everyone in the studio saw it as a step backward because the ultra high-end PaintBox was not only a proven commercial success, but its purpose-built mainframe supercomputer that ran the software was considered state of the art, and mostly because it was a matter of fact that access to the driver’s seat of such a machine was a seriously exclusive privilege.

For reasons I can’t explain, I took to computer graphics like a fish to water at university (even though I was an abject failure in basic computer programming in high school). I’d studied art and learned to paint like the old masters, but the advent of computers in the world of design presented a wave that I was determined to catch in order to beach myself on higher ground. Betting on my education, I was determined to evolve, and as a poor working class boy, I was especially determined to make my talent pay. In short, I was not going to be satisfied with a world that I saw going the way of fossils.

Back in those primordial days of digital art when mainframe dinosaurs ruled, I’m proud to declare that I was prescient in my gamble. Even on the pitifully weak early 90’s Macs, I could see that PhotoShop promised to relegate the million dollar PaintBox to the scrap heap, as it did in the most literal terms.

Fast forward 30 years to today, AI is generating mind-bending results for anybody that can string a few commands together.

But the problem is that tools don’t make humans, humans make tools, and we have arrived at a point where performing ‘superhuman’ feats of creative flair with the use of AI being accessible to anyone with a computer. In my opinion, the results are brutally unedifying, and personal mastery should only be taken for granted by those who are happy to cede their capabilities to the artificial.

Where can an artist go when everyone is an artist?

I have opted for painting on canvas, and eschewed digital art, because I believe the voice of the divine drama can not be found where there is a lack of intellectual or spiritual investment. Such a move is yet another gamble in my chequered career, but I’m betting that “precious” will always be defined by rarity, and that whatever comes easy and can be duplicated without limit, will prove itself to be ephemeral in the end.

Anyone betting that the art market can inflate artificial value indefinitely, is betting on the wrong dinosaur in my opinion. At the very least, unique artefacts such as paint on canvas can be retrieved as fossils when the world goes dark.

Is there a ghost in the machine?… I reckon that both NFTs and digital art exist in a space that has no dimension and has no soul. Without the potential for what I call “process failure”, a work can never be singular. It is the scars of process that imbue a work with individual character, and allow appreciation in the viewer, and thus generate its inherent “value” — but that is a story for another day.

I ask whether humanity is happy to ‘create’ itself right out of the picture with perfect heedlessness towards the artificial, or will it continue to celebrate character (with its inherent flaws) allowing the best of us to rise again as primate? I’m betting on the latter. I’m betting that regressive is actually progressive when it comes to generating value in the fine art space< Looking back, here’s to good old Photoshop 2.5 and not making things easy with respect to personal attainment.

In the end, work that lacks depth, soul or risk, makes the contrivances of artificial art a waste of precious time. For as elemental as gold is precious — all that glitters is not.