WARNING this post dwells on self harm and you may not want to read it.
I’m just passing through this morning… minting the monthly Coblage retro. I have a brief few moments to try and move this closer to an automated experience. GLM (not GPT) hey, how can I make this better? How do I automate this job?
I run a bash script to fetch all the randomly composited images that were randomly batch imported into the WordPress media gallery last month. This will be the 70th such screencast recording I’ve made, of this strange slideshow of mashed together images fetched out of my RSS reader. It gives me a sense of what was going on in there, what did I miss? By chance I see that familiar photo of Sylvia Plath, her face obscured, but I recognise the photo. I did notice it before in the daily batch processing I do, it got lodged in there sometime toward the end of the month. She came to mind a couple times recently… just thinking about other things. I’ve listened to her recordings, read most of her body of work. Her voice pops in the old noggin from time to time at the odd moment. Daddy, daddy you will not do. Cutting of the surplus… Nick and the candlestick. Hauls me through air… she is there, in my mind sometimes.
Will I have the chance in this life to do any serious writing? My wife mentions Virginia Woolf in the car ride home last night. Can’t you see why they do it? These artists, they end it all? Can’t bring myself to write the words suicide… maybe I should post a warning at the top of the blog post, like they do on the news… 5 seconds before they show you some bloody mayhem, warning this next video segment which you will not be able to look away from contains themes of self harm and you might want to look away now, nope, too late we are showing it to you now. Where was I going with this… oh yes art, for me at least, it keeps me alive. Maybe if I had created some great art already, I would be like, ok, I’m done and it’s time to go. Off myself. Ouch. But I can’t help it, what do you have a blog for if you can’t write your uncensored thoughts. And that was part of the conversation I’m recalling now, maybe these people, they are just done. What is the point of going on. I say, save the best for last and let nature take its course. We are all just passing through life.
I want to create some things here, and if I took up painting now my wife would seriously ban me from the premises. My collage habit is enough, and the unseen images that pass through my RSS reader can form the basis of this digital art I create while passing through. While winding it down.
I will be setting up a studio, that is the abstract plan. It’s maybe coming together? Today I do a little work on it, on the concept, before heading back to the other work I must do to earn the bread. The studio does exist. I’m sitting in it now. I look up and see a framed digital print of this piece here:
Without Teia it would be just another random collaboration between the AI generator and random bits of images and prompts I fed it, and if I thought about it enough I could place it back in January 2023, but that page gives me a bit of an anchor. A version of it hangs on my wall. Layered over a map of Lake Zurich, which is layered over a map of California I stuck there at some point.
So I’m working toward this concept of the digital space, floydwilde.studio, what it will become. Not a portfolio or a shop or a polished gallery, something more like this room… messy, chaotic, layered. Alive for a time. A place where the experiments happen in view, where the work and the thinking behind it are both on display, where it’s clearly the back room of a working studio and not a clean exhibition.
floydwilde.studio, both a real and a virtual space, it’s sort of a dream. A real studio that’s also a digital studio. A collective that’s a place, not just a domain. Collective is the hint here. I don’t want to do this alone, but I put my name on it. I have to own it. It’s mine damn you, all mine! No no, I want to open the code base for Coblage and other projects. The reason it’s in a private repo now, is not due to some proprietary motivations, it’s just embarrassing. Who cares about some cobbled together code to make a coblage? I mean it’s really messy, but I’m working on cleaning things up. I’ll open up the repo “soon”. And the studio… well, for now let’s just say it’s invite only.
Teia Activity
I use this time, the slow parts of the retro, the minutes waiting on conversions, encoding… encoding! Thinking of the swashbucklers on XKCD waiting for the compiling to complete. I go and check what’s happening on Teia. See what people are making.
I saw this image, a swimming pool, and something in it caught me. We’re still sort of lamenting Hockney’s passing, you can see why it’d catch my eye. It put me in mind of him, an homage to the pool paintings. There was one left, for four tez, and I satisfied that impulse buy, I grabbed it before looking any deeper. It’s in my collection now.
But then I did my usual thing, which is to say my usual analysis: who made this, and what else are they doing? Digging one step past the surface. Buying is the shallow end; the deep end is going and finding the person behind the work. I went and looked at the activity tab on the artist’s profile. The account was created over a year ago. And there I saw the story.
It started as a big batch, a couple of hundred or so. Most of them got burned, sent to a burn address. Then ten images were made available. Nine of them had already been collected. One left. The one I’d just grabbed, on impulse.
My final criteria ticked over as I looked: minted on Teia, and swapped on Teia. Now, I’d already collected it, so I already knew it was on Teia. But I hadn’t seen the activity until after I’d grabbed it on impulse, and then I started wondering what else this artist had minted, and saw the whole story unfold. One minting, just the one. Strange.
So is this a new artist, just starting out? Or is this a persona another artist is creating, maybe it’s not real at all… I can’t rule that out.
Either way, I liked the image of the pool, and to me it reads as an homage to Hockney. And maybe us collecting the lot gives this artist some incentive to create more, to mint more, to swap more on Teia. That would be a good outcome, a collection becoming encouragement. And if they do, I’ll hope to swap in on it…
A swimming pool, a body of work gone complete, a purchase that becomes a small connection to someone making right now, on Teia, whatever the true shape of that someone is… The studio I’m heading toward is also this: a place of in-between hours, of finding small pieces, of the routine that turns into history.
Leave a Reply