just another cyborg elf
(msp * nola)
​
I am an artist of many genres: electronic music, installation art, creator of magical objects, interactive code, LEDs and lights, and lately a peculiar kind of collage.
I grew up in the late 90s, in the whirlwind of a cyber-rave-utopia subculture. Cyberpunk may have been about ubiquitous Corporations, hacker mercenaries, and machine gun implants. But rave culture was about this new thing called the internet hammering at all the old structures we were rubbing up against. Unashamed to be queer, transhumanist, psychedelic, multi-racial - we were paving The Way To The Future.
And here we are, not anywhere near utopia. Even the internet is a piece of crap awash in get rich quick scams, the ever present marketplace of cheap crap, with a new hate machine of fragmented identity politics and shadows run amuck that seem to counter any chance of deep loving solidarity, or at least it sure is a bummer.
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AI runs on third-world labor, coding pictures and text for a few dollars a day. It endlessly churns out decent-enough output to threaten any precarious jobs we have. What was the dream again? Can we find it underneath? Maybe...
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I took up collage art a few years ago in the aftermath of a fairly abusive and difficult time. In the aftermath, I was adrift. Intuitively, I found myself playing with images for hours every day. Somewhere for my eyes to focus, somewhere for my brain to rest, somewhere for my pain to wander, somewhere for my dreams to emerge. Meticulous and repetitive, to calm. Endless play of images, to invite the subconscious back online.
But I am a cyber-utopian at heart still. Hackers and DJs and remixers never did believe in copyright, and I am looking at art generated with AI with a mixture of awe, and play, and deep wariness. But, it did serve my purposes. Endless source material. Endless tinkering. The remix beckons...
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Each of my images starts with 250-500 AI generated images around a theme I am mulling over. The final image usually contains anywhere from 50-250 of those images - chopped up, resized, filtered, mangled. Or perhaps, found letters, scanned. Or something from the street I took a picture of.
And yet, the images I want to include almost never make it. An image I don't like provides a perfect background to the upper left corner. The source material from a different theme glides towards this one.
We are out of the realm of composition and into the realm of experimental improvisation. No mistakes in jazz or collage, just add another layer, and crank the delay effect a little more.
