Bangkok, Thailand. 27 July 2024 (2567!)
This Painting Does Not Exist
Sometimes, the aliens speak to you. Sometimes only the aliens.
The land is dry in America, as it is in Sicily, and fire moves in where the water is not. People talk of “fire season” now, and they mean the whole summer in a good year. In a bad year, May through October.
I’ll go there just the same: Los Angeles in five days’ time. See some friends, see some art. In particular, I plan to check out the massive flex by David Zwirner as he opens his new, even bigger LA HQ. A sprawling display of the good and the great, the inspired and the pointless. The nice thing about a gallery of the size and power of Zwirner is that it’s effectively another art museum, with free entry and usually no crowds. Or at least we could say it’s a Kunsthalle with commerce filling the void of civic engagement, but whom do we kid? Zwirner has no business reason to open the doors to the public, it’s just the right and decent thing to do, and I for one am happy he does it. Plus, he does represent a few of the very best painters alive today, and his son runs an excellent art podcast. And it’s not like the Broad, which is usually mobbed, has no ulterior motives.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I came here to talk about the aliens.
This Painting Also Does Not Exist
Sometimes we see things that aren’t really there. Or do we? How do we know?
A lot of pixels are being spilled in the discussion of whether “Generative AI” is any kind of intelligence, and if so then what kind. I have a strong feeling that some people will be arguing about this long after we are living side by side with aliens whose sandy brains are brain enough to become our friends, our confidants, probably our lovers. And, inevitably, our slaves.
Of what will they dream? Electric Sheep, because they were told that’s what they dream of? Or will they generate things we can’t expect, can’t guess? What if the seed overflows BigInt? Will they tell us?
I’ve noticed an uncanny thing in Stable Diffusion: when I ask the alien to make a picture of an artwork, it quite often puts one or more additional artworks inside the picture. So you end up with a picture that should be a picture – that is, a picture of a picture – which contains additional pictures. In today’s example it makes sense: I asked for a Vermeer. But it happens a lot. The title image of my previous item also started out that way.
Let’s take a closer look.
This Painting Might Exist?
This, Gentle Reader, is where we should keep watch in our long Skynet vigil.
❇
In other news? A scene in which The Artist tries to paint things that are not scary faces, but only scary faces come out.
A scene in which he indulges his taste for seedy bars and spends more than he can afford. Cut to our Artist, however many sheets to the wind, fading in and out in the taxi.
Exterior, day: heavy rain. The restaurant is flooding from the kitchen outwards. The Artist considers his geography, and finds it precarious. Having lived where he wanted to live, mostly, for fifteen years straight, he wonders if he can pull off another two.
Fade to black. No, fuck that, I’m playing around with color grading these days: fade to bright orange!
This painting has existed for many years.