Tag: art

September 21, 2024 / Art

Unlike my first two attempts at paper collage, digital scraps are limitless. I’ll make an effort to do better but these are first proofs of a working concept.

September 15, 2024 / Art

My second attempt at scrap collage work. I grabbed a discovered post card from Germany, some scrap and used an index card for the backing. It’s simple, it’s fun. Need more scrap that suits my tastes and take it from there.

August 31, 2024 / Art

While making good use of the chrome spray paint, I grabbed two black canvas and a few fasteners lying around the garage and made a wet, metallic collage.

I like this project and plan to follow up with seashells and various spray colors

August 31, 2024 / Art
August 30, 2024 / Art
August 18, 2024 / Art

My first attempt at an analog collage, with an added bonus of blackout poetry. Thanks to my number one fan for her encouragement and supplies!

July 31, 2024 / Art

Just doodling a few of the things I am seeing around when I am out and about cycling.

July 31, 2024 / Art

I’ve been experimenting with digital crossword puzzles and newsprint lately. With crosswords, I’ll solve the puzzle (entertaining in its own right) and then bonus(!) I will take a screenshot of it when complete. Then, in Apple Photos, use my Apple Pencil to markup the image to find words that stand out. After those are mapped out I will then cross out the rest to come up with some poetry. Although, that is limited to the words on the puzzle so they are more statement than poetry.

After reading an interesting article with Apple News, I will take a screenshot and do the same for the article- try to connect words and to form a new phrase or sentence.

The whole premise is ridiculous but it is mentally challenging and time consuming. I’ll see how long the fun lasts but for now, I am enjoying it.

July 10, 2024 / Art

There are many reasons as to why I was looking forward to utilizing my typewriter after I relocated. One, was to make art from it. I’ve been a long time fan of ASCii art but there are people out there that have taken it to the next level and then some.

After nerdscrolling and falling down a few internet rabbit holes, I’ve discovered so many type-art resources out there.

Such as a pamphlet from 1979 turned into a pdf from the Internet Archive entitled Typewriter Mystery Games.

Obviously this would utilize multiple ribbons, paper and practice but I’d love to explore this further.

Until next time,

June 15, 2024 / Journal

I want to design and place a machine to fill up with books that people can purchase on the go as opposed to them buying a soda or a snack. I know we will all be a lot healthier.

They remind me of the Little Free Library stands all across the country, of which I used to be a curator of one back home.

They also remind me of the Art-O-Mat art vending I’ve seen in Las Vegas.

June 10, 2024 / Journal

The glass tablet in my hand is not just a consumption device but also a creative one. I am limited in talent and funds to explore creating art with a physical canvas and physical globs of paint. And so in their place I am using technology to augment my creative practice.

To put it simply- sometimes I “paint” on my iPad. I’d say half of them are made with an Apple Pencil stylus and the other half by scrolling a finger over the glass. Finger painting minus the mess!

June 5, 2024 / Journal

Way back in 2007, I was invited to photograph the Birmingham Jazz Festival weekend and even attended a few workshops. One workshop was hosted by a group of brilliant high school jazz students from the jazz school. The special guest was the blues saxophonist “Blue” Lou Marini. He listened to the group practice and was asked what he thought. His reply, and I am paraphrasing here, was that they each played their notes perfectly and it was all very technical. But this isn’t jazz. You have to pour your soul into your music to make it stand out. The kids grinned, tried again and their passion came through.

I am not musically inclined. I have never taken a music theory class. I can sing and have always enjoyed it so my experience with music in a group setting has been limited. I can hear subtle notes and pick up rhythms from each instrument individually. My musical tastes are eclectic. But I cannot play…yet. At one point in the future, I will have to have my daughter, who plays beautifully patiently teach her old man.

In the meantime, I will fat-finger these strings on the ukulele technically for awhile. But real soon, I will heed Blue Lou’s advice and pour some passion into it. Technicality be damned.

“Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the m*therf**ker who plays it is 80 percent.” – Miles Davis

January 16, 2024 / Journal

If you know me at all, you know that I have always been a fan of public art, especially mural or wall art. From early on we’ve been painting in caves, on the ceilings of chapels and now on city streets. Big cities like Houston have art initiatives and institutions that support local artists to come out and create these murals to beautify city streets and create outdoor museums for everyone.

I won’t name the institution here but I do appreciate their work for the community and also discovery of these works with an interactive app that provides a map of installations and allows you to scan the art and it will provide backstory and artistic bios. Love to see it. I wish I could do more with my images of murals. Inspiring. 

You can see these images and more on the photography website.

April 22, 2023 / Journal

The new all-in-one website/mood board I built dedicated to my generative AI art creation and curation.

January 22, 2023 / Journal
🤖
“I am putting myself to the fullest possible use which is all I think that any conscious entity could ever hope to do.” – Hal 9000, from 2001: A Space Odyssey 

All my life, we’ve been told that computers were incapable of being intelligent, self-aware and creative. But here we are in 2023 partnering with Artifical Intelligence in creating works of art with photographs, paintings, music composing and even creative writing.

“A dark oil painting of a space age robot smoking his tobacco pipe while working on his MacBook” Photo × DALL·E Human (me) & AI

I recently had a conversation (see below) with an artifical intelligence using ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a large-scale language model developed by OpenAI. It is based on the Generative Pre-trained Transformer architecture, which uses deep learning techniques to generate human-like text. The model is pre-trained on a massive dataset of text, allowing it to generate new text that is coherent and grammatically correct.

Me: “How would artificial intelligence become self-aware?”
Chat GPT: The question of how artificial intelligence (AI) could become self-aware, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), is a topic of ongoing research and debate among scientists and philosophers. There are a number of different theories and approaches being proposed, but there is currently no consensus on the best way to achieve AGI.

How very reassuring and seemingly IT wants to assuage my concerns. So I asked IT a similar question in a different context hoping for a more reassuring response.  

Me: “If computers can be creative, what else can they do that we were told they could not?”
ChatGPT: Computers have the ability to perform a wide range of tasks that were once thought to be the exclusive domain of humans. Some examples of tasks that computers can now perform include:

Image and speech recognition: Computers can now recognize and interpret images and speech with a high degree of accuracy, which has applications in fields such as computer vision and natural language processing. Computers can control robots and drones and make them perform complex tasks. It is important to note that computers do not possess consciousness or emotions, and they are not human-like entities, they simply can perform tasks that were once thought to require human intelligence, but they can do it faster, more accurately and with less error.

One of these days, I may not feel up to writing an article for this website but instead, turn to my Artificially Intelligent partner and ask her to write, edit and post. But it is not this day.

“A dark Picasso style painting of an atomic age robot typing on his iPad while smoking a tobacco pipe” Photo × DALL·E Human (me) & AI