Automatic Paintings for Future Friends
For this series of works, I have composed paintings and experimental poems about the desire of being-ness and connected-ness in the Posthuman era. As machines become more and more a part of our lives, I am curious about the ways they will be integrated as companions and assistants. Currently, multiple startups are developing applications and devices that are cleverly designed to simulate friendship and emotional support. I am speculating with these works that art and astrology could play a role? After all, asking someone what their sign was use to be a go-to ice breaker, as a way to get to know someone based on collected facts and esoteric charts.
The process of making these nine works were inspired by the artists André Masson and Hilma Af Klint, both proponents of producing works without the intervention of conscious intentions, believing that the artist’s hand was theoretically responding to the dictates of their own unconscious thoughts; combined with my research and fascination with personal forecasting apps that employ esoteric systems of divination, like numerology, astrology, and tarot. The result is a collection of similar yet unique and amorphous colorfield paintings. Methods of chance, in relationship to text and application of materials, play a key role in this work, leaving the viewer to discover figures and scenes within the suggestive forms and phrases, allowing them to assume the task of assigning each a subjective meaning.
To create the poems that scroll on LED based electronic signs, I used the "cut up" technique of “automatic writing”, similar to strategies used by the Surrealists and modern song writers. This process of assembly, deconstruction, and reconstitution is combined with prompts designed for ChatGPT, an LLM that helps me synthesize the main attributes of a selection of source text and distilled down the paragraphs into short phrases and then whole collection of phrases are cut up again to make the poem.
The text reads, "blissfully selfless and boundlessly ambitious, sharing beyond limitations, to be remembered and to rise in the material field unobstructed"