THIS POST WAS FROM 2019 - DON’T ASK. Or do and I’ll tell you.

I came here to talk art and chew gum, and I’m almost out of gum.

I started the MA in October officially. It’s a really really good course; so rich in information and the tutors are extremely talented. I had intended to blog about the lectures and my thoughts, but the lectures are so frequent and my thoughts are currently in a whirl and take too long settle, to allow for regular posts. So I will use this as a space to hopefully spew my thoughts out and refine my ideas over time.

The big challenges ahead of me are:
1) Managing my mental health whilst on the course.
2) Managing my time between, Uni, some form of work, child care and being social.

On paper..um in pixel format that looks easy to my eyes, and I’m guessing your eyes too.
In reality I know it’s going to be really tough. I’m only in week 2 of the course (it feels like week 5) and I’m back in the crisis house. So things are difficult on the mental health side of things. It might seem frivolous to you to want to be social, but my big issue (it’s not a magazine for me) is the feeling of isolation I have. It’s a constant sense of being alone, even in company. But if i start talking about it I’ll get myself down and side tracked.

After week 2 where are my ideas at. The tutors are pushing us to look at our own practice and to treat our practice as a form of research. For me this currently entails the nature of creating work and I guess the nature of creativity. If we look at current technologies neural networks are creating works of art using deep learning. One has even created ‘The Next Rembrandt’ .
In an environment like this where algorithms can learn to create artefacts and can exhibit creative tendencies I find myself drawn to the question of what exactly is creativity.

I think as humans we baulk at the idea that a machine can create. That a series of instructions can result in a unique or creative response. That’s exactly what attracts me to the issue. I think of artists that explore algorithms, not that they would have thought of their work like that. Sol le Witt, and the conceptual artists spring to mind. They thought of the idea as the art, in which an artefact was only a solid form of the idea, not the actual art. My thoughts on this need refining and teasing out. Hopefully here is where I can do this.

The other strands to my ideas are as follows ( I might not peruse these strand on the MA but they are elements I think about often.)
1) The illusion of choice.
2) Art that can never be seen in it’s final state; temporally, spatially or both.
3) The scaffolding that exist behind plastic and virtual structures. ( I use the term plastic to refer to physical things in the real world IE not solely digital.)

(I’m on new medication and either its starting to have an effect or my mind is tired, either way my thoughts are cloudy.)

My starting idea is below.
1)I have used processing to create a basic drawing program.
2) reduced it to 90 characters, ignoring the white spaces between the characters.
3)the information was translated to binary.
4) the binary was encoded in to a visual image.
5) the binary of the program was transferred to a canvas in pencil. ( it needs to be tidied up a lot.)
The idea is that, the code that creates the drawing program is a scaffold to allow creativity. By drawing binary on the canvas I have in my mind at least drawn a scaffold that allows infinite drawings to be made. The canvas is not a only a drawing but a gateway to infinite drawings. But only if you understand the syntax used. ( I don’t really know why that last point feels important to me yet.)