Whimsical suds and a treatise on weird art
Hi everyone. Apologies I’m a little off schedule with this edition; life has been a bit too much lately. I have a few scattered announcements and thoughts this week…
I 💖 pretty soaps: the zine
At last, the pretty soaps zine is complete! This took a little longer than expected, but I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. The bright colors and whimsical subject matter feel like a little breath of joy right now. I’ll hopefully start printing copies soon, so if you’d like one, please pre-order a physical copy ($3) or reply to this email to pre-order a digital copy ($1.50)!
Filter Feeder feature: on the way, at last!
For those keeping score at home, the climate grief zine by Filter Feeder that I contributed to was supposed to be released last month, but that has been delayed to this month (I hope). There is a happy reason that partially explains this: Filter Feeder was chosen as a feature for the indie-famous Shay Mirk’s zine of the month club, so Arya was super busy preparing all that! I hope this means we will have even more readers of this beautiful collection. If you’re keen to get a preview of what it contains, here is one of my favorite essays from the anthology. Fingers crossed I can share more info asap!
Let’s make more weird art
From a few different places I’m seeing discussion of (or memeification of) art-making during these turbulent political times. Some see it as frivolous, superfluous, wasteful, etc.; some view it as a coping mechanism. Yet increasingly I’m seeing more calls to make weirder art, especially from marginalized groups.
Speaking to my own community, there are two really excellent Calls to Weirdness I’ve read recently: a piece about queer art in the age of techno-fascism by Charlie Jane Anders, and the radicalism of being a “weird little guy” by James Factora. The scope of the two are different but ultimately have similar emotional resonance for me, in that they advocate for queer art to forget respectability and create meaning on its own terms outside of the mainstream. I encourage you to read them.
I can’t help but place this conversation alongside that of the increasing presence of AI-generated “art”. As someone who works with data science for my day job, I have a lot of opinions about this on a lot of level, but here I’ll speak as an artist. (I did write a thing on LinkedIn already about the Studio Ghibli controversy — wow, that’s cringe of me to share here, isn’t it?) To me, AI-generated “art” tends to either have a very dramatic, cinematic sheen to it, or it totally by-the-book copies whatever style it’s specified to imitate. (Any artist or studio with a sizeable amount of art shared online can be copied; see the example of pop surrealist Kelly McKernan, who was a plaintiff in a 2023 generative AI art copyright lawsuit, though you probably haven’t heard of them.)
Regardless of the typical AI-generated look or a stylistic copy, there is a homogenization effect happening with AI-generated images, in terms of both style and meaning. I fear AI-generated images will wind up covering more contexts and skillfully copying more styles as time goes on. Of course, that being said, it’s likely — if not guaranteed — that generative AI models will develop more complex capabilities as time goes on, so the more probable outcome is that these models’ outputs will become harder to distinguish from human-created images. We all need to start getting better at looking for intent, emotion, and meaning behind an image, as well as researching the person or organization sharing a given image. Does the subject matter look like something I’d see a friend post on social media? Do I know how a particular information source finds images to use in their articles?
It’s boring and vapid for non-photographic images of a given category to look really similar; said images are basically equivalent to photos passed through fancy Instagram filters at this point. It’s not art to convert photos of a woman while she’s getting deported into Ghibli-fied images, and it’s beyond distasteful, but that’s where we are. We are at the point of using the well-honed style of one of the world’s greatest animators of all time to make human rights violations look cutesy. Images, after all, are our oldest means of communication, for better or worse…so we better get better at figuring out what they are saying to us, as well as remember the context and methods that made them.
Ok, so what the hell does any of this have to do with weird art? On a simple strategic level, if you continue to experiment with methods, style, and outcomes, it’ll be harder for an AI model to capture your essence. We know generative AI is good at taking text prompts and converting even the most absurd ideas into images, so it’s more the style that defines what your own work looks like to an AI model, imo. Obviously, too, don’t share everything with the Internet.
The way we tell the story of art history is in terms of movements — of changes in representation, medium, perspective, subject matter (or lack thereof), and philosophy behind why and how the art is made the way it is. Movement definitionally involves change and has direction. A movement, obviously, first starts outside the mainstream, and even if it becomes well-known it doesn’t necessarily join the mainstream. Regardless of how artistic AI-generated images may wind up looking in the future, I doubt they will be able to capture the fervor you can see in art developed at the start of a given historical movement. I doubt it will be able to replicate the raw emotion of a kid’s scribbles. It certainly won’t have the genius absurdity you see in really weird, experimental queer art.
So, not just to screw with the algorithm, but to make sure we maintain momentum sufficient to create a new wave, or even a new movement — of art, protest, or both — let’s keep making art. And let’s keep it weird.
In case you wanted to know about some no-context weird ideas I have on the docket…
Non-Euclidean romance stories (as opposed to romance featuring love triangles)
the IBD experience as told through tiny, highly specific Japanese novelty erasers
Queer math
More recent inspo
I finally convinced my spouse to watch my favorite TV show, The Good Place, with me. So far they’re enjoying it. This is bringing me much joy.