Imagine if the world is not logical. Cause and effect all messed up. Events are not caused by what comes before, but are instead caused by what comes after, have no cause at all, or are caused by conceptual rules. For example, rain, if caused by something in the future, could be because the ground will be wet, so the rain must come down now. If caused by nothing at all, then looking up might be a sunny and clear sky. If caused by conceptual rules, the rain may be caused by the weather forecast saying there will be rain.
Making: https://youtube.com/shorts/smidfc7Po0A
The video was a bit flawed. I remember I did record the wet window of the taxi to indicate there was rain but when I went back to see the clip it was not there. The clip was to express that what if the world is not logical? what if rain is not caused by clouds and humidity and such but caused by what happened after, or caused by something merely describing it, or caused by nothing at all?
Our body is made of mostly water, we need to retain it
Why do we need to retain it?
To remove toxins from our body
Why should we remove toxins from our body?
to cleanse our bodies from what we eat/drink
Why do we need to cleanse our bodies?
If we keep the toxins we will die
The idea for this mural started with the concept of water storage.
I decided to create a mural to convey this message about water and toxins. In the mural, the mouth is “vomiting” toxins. This is counterintuitive because, on one hand, we store water in bottles to live, but on the other hand, if we store toxins in our bodies, we die. So, our body is like a bottle that needs to take in water but also needs to expel toxins to maintain health.
I remember not long ago, I felt reassured that artificial intelligence would probably take over all the manual labor jobs before they threaten the creative industries. It felt like creative industries would be the last frontier for AI to break.
When I saw the rise of Dall-E, Midjourney, and NovelAI, I felt reassured that there’s no way generative AI would be able to replace professional creatives anytime soon. The Dall-E generations are at best a good laugh and at the very least, discardable garbage. The NovelAI generations would try to mimic the style of illustrators I like but I just couldn’t feel the heart behind the drawings, because there wasn’t one. However, I realized that as time passed that people who paid money for a generative AI and put in a few keywords were pathetically calling themselves “artists” and consumers were not only disregarding, but actively supporting the severe copyright infringements
Recently, I watched a heartbreaking video of a designer that goes by “Nadestraight” online be let off from the company he worked at for 8 years. The reason why he was let off was because the company deemed his existence redundant after they had nonconsensually taken his design work and fed it into an AI model. This is not what we were promised. A commenter under the video said it best, “The future is the opposite of what AI bros promised: You will do the mundane factory work so robots can create art and music.”
This is the source of my “Why” question: Why are creatives losing their jobs to generative AI?
The past 2 years have been hell for anyone in the visual arts industry.
Clearly these “artists” are in it for the ego and fame, the same way TikTok content farmers make the same video with slight alterations to farm views and followers. These “creators” have never cared for art, they’ve only cared about the benefits of what good artists have. This truly disgusts me.
The funniest exchange I saw in the past few months was between a suspecting self-proclaimed AI “artist” and a critiquing commenter.
As if it wasn’t the perfect setup, this pathetic Ai “artist” says “not even in your dreams would you be able to make an illustration like this”. The same commenter would soon find out that this person has been a long term animator for the One Piece TV series. Boy would I pay good money to see his genuine reaction.
Here is an infographic I made to quickly educate someone who doesn’t have strong feelings about the topic.
At the end of this day, I ask myself whether creativity has lost value in the general populous’ hearts. Will non-creatives ever see the integrity behind an artist putting their soul onto the canvas just a few decades from now?
It’s hard not to lose heart when I see peers, sometimes even in the same field, argue in favor of using generative AI to “speed up” the work they need to do. If the AI was trained purely on their OWN work, maybe there’s an argument to be made! But this?
This is different.
That work was never going to be done anyway. These people are using other people’s works and calling it their own. Stand up to these people. Let them know what they’re doing is wrong.
If that’s too hard, then the least you can do is educate yourself on the topic and follow the developments of this issue.
Maybe because it reminds them of something or a feeling
Why would color be associated with an object or a feeling?
Because everything has color
Why does everything have color?
Because otherwise everything would be in black and white
Why black and white?
Because black and white is the opposite of color
Why is black and white the opposite of color?
Because old movies were in black and white
Why were old movies in black and white?
Because cameras couldn’t capture color
Why did cameras not capture color?
Because they weren’t advanced yet
I pondered a lot about what “why” question is going to be my first, nothing seemed fitting. I looked around me for inspiration and suddenly saw purple everywhere, purple shoes, purple watch, purple bag, purple hoodie, so i asked myself why do I have so much purple stuff lying around. And it spiraled from there.
After ten “Why?” questions, i found myself thinking about cameras, about black&white and color, happiness and sadness, life and death, love and heartbreak. All these parallels inspired me to write a poem. Which really surprised me because I hate using words and writing. When given the choice, I always avoid using words to express myself, but for some unknown reason, I found that I could express myself best through a poem today. I do not know much about writing a poem; It’s my first time doing something of the sort, but i had fun experimenting with it.
After I was done writing my poem, I decided to put it on a poster or design some sort of frame for it. I used colors and objects that resonate with the theme of the poem.
For this assignment I decided to start off with a thing I love and that is Basketball. So I asked myself, why do I want to play Basketball so much?
Because I’ve been playing it my whole life.
But why have I been playing it my whole life?
Well because I enjoy it.
Why do you enjoy it?
Because its fun.
Why is it fun?
Something about pushing myself and using my strength and mind together.
But why are you pushing yourself?
Because I am young and I want to test the limits of my body
But why do you want to test the limits?
Because you only live once…..
Even though I did not choose the last option I decided to make a little soundscape of how it feels to play Street Basketball and added a little funny element to it, with a coach yelling at the players that they are Trash! (bad). Enjoy
All my whys and creation for this are recorded in the docs above. I wanted to dive a bit into why people may think that video games are harmful (because I love video games and this narrative has been said to me since forever). Since the end result is YOLO (You only live once), my mind immediately jumped to a bucket list of things to do before I die. But then I realized that I hate doing things only once. If something is worth doing once then I think it is worth doing multiple times. So I decided to make sketches of tokens that would help me decide what to do when I am bored and indecisive. All the activities are things I enjoy doing. I also included a dice at the end in days that I feel extra indecisive. The dice would help me pick a token, or if it lands on wildcard I will just go ask a friend what I should do.
My ‘why’ starts from why do people travel to a reflection on loneliness and the need to express. I decided to create a dice called DICEtination. Travelling is never about the result, but the process. Your destination is in fact not a location, but where your heart lands in the process. Dicetination leads those who might find no more joy in traveling to a new way of looking at your trip.
Why do people want to travel?
Maybe because they are curious in things that they haven’t seen before
Why are they curious things that they haven’t seen before
Because curiosity is a human nature and we’re all driven by curiosity
Why are we all driven by curiosity
because that’s the way we getting in touch with the world
Why do we need to get in touch with the world
because we don’t want to be alone
why do we not want to be alone
because being alone is very scary ,
why being alone is very scary
because you won’t be heard when you are alone
why do you want to be heard
because I have things to say
why do you have things to say
Because I because my brain functions normally and I generate thoughts based on what I observe,
why do you observe
because I have eyes
why do you have eyes
because I’m a human being and yeah,
why are you a human being
because I was part of a collective mind and during incarnation, my individuality was separated and put into this body And my mind plus my body equals to a human being
Why are you a human being? Why are you not a tree?
I would like to say this reading was kind of all over the place. Some advanced thinking mechanisms were discussed but I will explain how I “dumbed it down” in my mind :).
I started thinking differently about the mind, the brain, kind of like a program with thousands of lines of code. Among these lines we have functions which represent some patterns in our lives. Now what I found the problem to be in these is that the variables of these functions were mostly stored locally. That contributes to us thinking more vertically than to think laterally. The quick fix? Global variables 🙂 Sounds simple right? Well, not really. Storing some values globally will gives us more opportunities to be creative, but we will have to make this functions (patterns) ourselves. We also need to salvage existing functions (patterns) and create new ones, as much as we can.
This is how I understood this reading, instead of just thinking vertically and just saying what the reading is about, I decided to dissect it and connect it to programming, and this actually made me break it down and swallow it much easier.
I was especially intrigued by Mariana’s process for creating music, because technology and sound is something that interests me and something I want to explore as a computer engineering major. The way she invents her own instruments is very cool, and at the start of her talk she was explaining that the difficulty in performing her prepared piano in different venues, and I’m not sure if that’s what made her start creating her own instruments, but I remember her saying that it was something that pushed her to perform her own instruments instead. So I think a lot of creativity can be inspired from necessity.
