Long live Collage

For the longest time, I’ve been thinking about starting a blog about AI. I keep finding myself in conversations about it where people are scared, confused, or just parroting headlines designed to make them fear it!? There’s always been fear around the future and technology but this feels a lot deeper. It’s about ignorance, A lack of understanding.

So I’m here to share my own experience with AI, technology, and art, in the hope that it helps educate, inspire, and demystify what’s really going on. I’ll share articles that reasonate and highlight artists I admire. If you have something to share of interest please get in touch via email ;-)

Like anything, AI can be used for good or for evil. The problem isn’t AI per se it’s us. It’s human morals and ethics or the lack of them steering the machine.

I truly believe AI can make the world better. It can find cures for diseases and solve problems we’ve been wrestling with for centuries. And it can also be used as a creative tool for art making… just like a paintbrush, a camera, or a pencil. It’s simply another way to make something. The outcome, like all art, is subjective and depends on the artist’s vision and skill.

For me, art has always been and always is about ideas. The strength of a piece lies in its message, in the feeling it carries. When that essence is strong, the medium and dare I say even the execution doesn’t really matter.

When I’m in a flow state riffing in a pure stream of consciousness that’s when the magic happens in art making. AI tools, like Midjourney or Runway ML allow me to access to access that state. They move faster than my mind, allowing me generate, test, and jump between ideas in seconds. That’s where I find the real art, in that fluid back-and-forth, that rapid creation. I’ll then take multiple ideas I like and feed them into Photoshop and rework them further. The process continues in a loop of collage from Photoshop back into AI and around again until I print my works and bring them into the physical realm.

AI art-making is the new form of collage. AI is collage.

AI pulls from everything scraping data from across the internet, the way a collagist cuts from books, magazines, and images. It’s a massive, ever-evolving archive of human culture, a collaged encyclopedic palace of everything…

Life is collage. Everything we do, see, make, and remix, it’s one mega infinite collage.

LONG LIVE COLLAGE.