the arcane subtleties of decent tambourine playing

Jo Shapcott, Of Mutability

It’s because you’re always on that damn journey of self-discovery.

guy who keeps trying to pick up girls at Victims of Communism Memorial Fund events

— Anna Louise Strong's "The Stalin Era"

on the surface I agree with “you have to communicate and tell people what you need” as a general principle, but I’m wary of some articulations of it because this type of rhetoric can be wielded against people (in my experience, espeecially women) in ways that go beyond that general principle.

then against this situation isn’t unique or surprising, since any type of rhetoric can be wielded to basically any end

"you have to communicate with people, no one can read your mind" is basically a true & necessary counter to the attractive but destructive fantasy some people have of a "good" relationship (thinking here about "romance," but probably other things too) as a site where negotiation, conflict, and even many types of explicit communication should never occur, because lovers should simply be "in sync."

but I think it can be used to defend the idea that it's unreasonable to expect someone to have any foresight or put any kind of thought into what's likely to upset you, or to exert themselves to offer you any kind of care or consideration that you don't explicitly ask for on that exact occasion.* "you should have told me not to do x" / "you should have asked me if you wanted me to do y" can turn into a sort of campaign of exhaustion where you're basically being taught not to expect someone to think about your needs...

and it also reminds me of the habit of calling women "passive-aggressive" even when we're being very explicit about what has upset us and why and what steps should be taken to redress it. "passive-aggressive" as code for "woman is upset with me for any reason when she should just shut up and be cool about it"

*of course some people just don't want to or aren't capable of offering the kind of care that some people want to receive, including this kind of intuitive needs-anticipation; this isn't an issue of any of these people being unreasonable, but just simple incompatibility

#comes up a lot in division of labour too esp household division of labour #either we're not doing the work of explicitly giving instructions for every task that needs to be done #in which case the fault is ours for not communicating #or we do this #and the fault is ours for being bossy/aggressive/whatever (tags via @ghelgheli)

I hope you don't mind my yoinking your tags because this was actually the next point I was planning on making in trying to explore the sometimes-gendered nature of this dynamic! the "mental load" of figuring out which tasks need to be done, seeing how they fit together and what needs to be done first, and planning when these things will get done and by whom, is carried out largely by women in any situation where anything needs to be planned.

"you should ask / should have asked me if you needed help" is a line that keeps this planning work firmly in the background by 1. acting like it isn't work and that it is just sort of women's natural state to "know what needs to be done"; 2. places the burden of communication on the women in these situations, as though men do not have the same capacity to think about what needs to be done, understand how these tasks fit together, and carry out any of these tasks independently or bring up the issue of working together to make a plan to divide these tasks themselves.

the parallel emotional situation sort of sends the same message of "you are alone in doing the 'background', post-hoc work of figuring out what has upset you and why, and you only ought to bring it to my attention once you've solved it. I will not be doing any of the work of looking for patterns in what upsets you (whether it's more 'ideosyncratic' or whether it's stuff that really ought to have been obvious, such as 'I don't like being treated like an unpaid labour machine') or making plans to avoid this situation recurring in the future. therefore each separate instance of you being upset will need to be addressed individually."

this is what I characterised as a "campaign of exhaustion"—eventually you get tired of this kind of "communication" and think okay, fine, I will suck it up. I'll ignore that hurtful joke / not expect to be taken care of when I'm sick / just do the laundry myself, whatever. moreover I think this is often the goal.

also, I think a lot of these conversations can be inadequately attentive to or compassionate towards why certain people (and again, this is often gendered) feel unable to communicate their needs clearly to people—like you said, it can be a 'damned if you do, damned if you don't situation' where you are also socially penalised for doing what you're supposedly meant to do and clearly communicating what you need! so in effect "you should have just asked / told me" doesn't even actually mean "you should tell me next time," but rather "you shouldn't be complaining now."

once more I'm not saying this is what “you have to communicate with people" 'really' or 'actually' means—I'm saying that this is one, cynical manipulation of the concept that I've noticed. basically any concept or line or rhetoric can be cynically manipulated in this way, so noticing a pattern in how some people actually contextually use a line of rhetoric doesn't mean "everyone who says this means something bad"

Do you ever forget about Jesse Pinkman for a while and then remember like oh my god oH my gOd jesse PINKman ohmy gofd

It’s the dog motif it’s the cages it’s the uncontrollable crying it’s the masculine posturing and what’s underneath it’s the loss of innocence it’s the self-punishment and the punishment by the world it’s the way he loves and loses and loves again and loses again it’s the Georgia o’keeffe it’s the way he took care of his aunt while she died it’s the Transgenderism it’s the blue hands it’s the actual profound moral reckoning in an amoral universe it’s what killing others did to him it’s what losing others did to him it’s the decay that couldn’t kill what was at the heart of him it’s the special little guy all the drug lords want to cook for them it’s the savageness he has within him it’s the desperate softness that leaks out at the edges of him it’s the ptsd it’s the bugs it’s the lipstick cigarette in the glove box it’s the kafkaesque it’s wire it’s the doofus who trips and knocks himself out in the first episode it’s the intelligence no one thinks he has but that saves Walt’s ass countless times it’s the parallelism with Skyler it’s the broken love he has for Walt that only grows as walt keeps kicking him and kicking him until finally jesse drives away from him and lets him die it’s the way there wasn’t a plan for him from the start so the story shaped and breathed around him, a second, stronger, even more gorgeous beating heart that bore this tragedy through to its end with the solace that jesse gets to live. Jesse gets to be free

It’s the way he is with kids!!!!

"Landscape between legs" (2004) Daphne Todd

Enjoy a drink on one of my special coasters. Yea I custom made them (the coasters) to be so light the drinks condensation makes em stick to the bottom of your glass, but still heavy enough that when it (the coaster) finally clatters to the ground it's loud as fuck and shatters your nerves and makes you spill your drink everywhere. Why am I doing this? Well, it's a sex thing for me

Pedro Friedeberg — Astroecological Clock (mahogany, gold leaf, black paint, enameled metal, ca. 1971)

I had a nightmare that Doug Walker rebranded as the Nintendo Pervert and I had to review his new content on youtube or I would get fired from my job but it was so explicit that I got banned on youtube and cancelled on twitter.

We are all posting about AI art, so I thought I'd fire off a few shots in this debate. It's more of a ramble than anything. I hope to present everyone's view fairly, and just sort of remark on some historical precedents I find interesting. I think I want to start by saying there are a couple of different threads of the anti-AI art faction that I actually find somewhat sympathetic. A lot of them look kind of similar, but I think needed to be talked through in different ways. But then I want to situate things a little bit by first situating AI as art, while talking about some of the asymmetries between AI art and traditional art production. My thoughts here are a bit loose and informal, and far more cursory than the subject probably requires. I have tried to avoid the sort of analytic defensive writing approach and tried to make voices heard even if I clearly have a horse in the race.

I am not trying to be glib when I say this, but you tend to notice something about the blogs that are most militantly against AI art. Most of them are people who identify as artists, and have an interest in mostly popular art, or I guess what you could call the folk art of the internet age, an affection for cartoonish types of stylization, and some of them make a more or less middle class life for themselves by doing commissions for their artworks. If your primary exposure to art is in the context of this more-or-less distinctively online subculture, your paradigm cases for artworks are going to be different from someone who has a background in art history or whose primary exposure to art is from museums and high culture environments. As such, there is different data that they are trying to explain when they do informal sorts of theorizing about art, its nature, and its purpose, as well as how they relate to it.

There a couple of reasons I bring this up. It will serve to contextualize some of my discussion, but it also makes one critical point more salient: the people who are most invested in opposing AI art are people who have socioeconomic reasons to do so. People commission these kinds of artists to fulfill some desire that they have, because they have the sorts of skills necessary to fulfill those desires. Automation, much like in any other industry, cuts out the need for certain kinds of specialized labor. So people with these specialized skills are seeing their financial stability disappear and become vulnerable to structural unemployment. If this describes you, it is rather sensible to be worried about this. But, if this case is anything like its historical precedents, then there is nothing you can do about it. Structural unemployment is more or less a fact of life. Begging the public not to use AI art is something that simply will not work any more than the Luddites smashing machines did.

There is actually a closer relation to early anti-industrialists than first meets the eye. Consider the Arts and Crafts movement in 19th Century England for a particularly lucid analysis of this. Making tables, chairs, clothing, and other household goods used to be something that was done by hand, which required a lot of highly skilled labor. If William Morris is to be believed, then these practices also looked a lot more like art than the sorts of mass produced articles made by factory labor. They were the work of tailors rather than an assembly line of specialized and largely interchangeable workers. This is why you tend to see some strands of medievalism in aestheticist sorts of movements — Remizov adopting old slavonic scripts and was an amateur medievalist and so on. It is also part of the reason that the decorative arts played such an important role for people like Wilde and Huysmans (let no one say I don't criticize my idols). Of course these aren't the only reasons, the main bit is about constructing a world of your own good taste, of realizing yourself in the visual medium. Nevertheless we've accepted mass produced clothing, furniture and so on. It is something which is both out of our control and necessary to clothe and shelter everybody.

Perhaps the more relevant example would actually be cameras. A lot of what professional painters did before the invention of the camera was work on portraits of very wealthy people. So a lot of artists were employed to just kind of make bric-a-brac for aristocrats and the rising merchant class, and in doing so they'd have to faithfully portray them along pretty category-standard lines. This job does not really exist anymore, at least not in the same capacity that it used to. So people with this highly training skillset were suddenly out of work. But we still don't ban cameras to protect the employability of these people. There is a rather human cost to this, but on the other hand, the artist is taken away from a kind of trifling activity and directs their energies toward other thoughts, other skills, other ideas, other projects, etc.

The change is inevitable, but there are small consolations. If you spend much time playing around with AIs, then you start to notice that they are actually kind of flimsy. You cannot get much that is really specific, even if you really clearly articulate what you are looking for. It gets a little confused by that sort of thing. Similarly, they aren't really good at writing much beyond rephrasing things you say to them, and really struggle with inferential moves funnily enough. And you might think writing is after something that isn't paraphrase-able, when the current AI tech works from paraphrase. Certainly more advanced and sophisticated machines and programs will come along though. So like, the displacement that's already happening does not entirely affect the online-artist-as-craftsperson career path because people are looking for you to make specific things with specific compositions. The real displacement is probably going to be much further down the line.

People do, however, give other reasons for thinking that AI art is something to be resisted rather than celebrated or merely tolerated. It would be circumspect for me to suggest that gesturing toward a general defeatism about the economic worries was enough.

First, people like to think that the skill of the artist is something that we are looking for in artworks; that skill is somehow a requirement for it being art or being good art at any rate. This, I think, is the result of some deceptive value clarity that comes from too steady a diet of artistic examples. There is in this respect, a sort of symmetry between the pre-20th Century account of art as the sort of triumphant march of the senses, that art history is the history of the clarification of a certain way of seeing, and the sorts of feelings that one gets from folk-artistic practices in which you spend time honing your craft and as a result get more positive feedback on your work. On both accounts, skill has something to do with motor function and being able to see how three dimensional objects can admit themselves two dimensionally. But I think we should be cautious of the appearance of value clarity here, because once we stop inhabiting these contingent historical frameworks and sociological vantages and look to more art history and high art practice, we come to see that something has gone wrong.

Duchamp's readymades are the commonplace example of this. Duchamp did not really have to do much to get the readymade produced, hence the name. Industrial manufacturers have already seen to that. But he situates the object in a way that gets people to either take this sort of distinctively aesthetic stance toward it or to have the social-instutitional framework of validation at the front and center. Skill — or at least the kind of skills involved with our more sundry examples, the ones that have to do with spatial transcription and motor function — has precious little to do with it. Malevich's suprematist constructions are also rather simple to make. The Black Square is quite simple. It is, after all, just that! But once we take a sort of formal attentive stance, or we start learning enough art history we come to appreciate it a lot more. The way it plays on earlier symbolist works, sorts of Schopenhauerian and Kantian accounts of aesthetic judgment, the way it interfaces with Andrei Bely's work, the way in which it vindicates Malevich's own statements about painting the reality of intuition and creates a bold way out of futurism, acting as a "zero of form" within a bombastic futurist opera, its simultaneous endorsement of automatism and rejection of decorative maximalism, and on and on, we come to think it's quite good. I think the Black Square is magnetic and fascinating. In fact, I think it is one of the greatest paintings of the 20th Century. It revolutionized the Russian avant-garde and was massively influential on the development of modern art. But again, it doesn't take much skill to make, even though Malevich was a highly proficient painter and illustrator. And this, I think, leads to a lot of dismissive, knee-jerk reactions that prevent people from accessing a really valuable experience and sense of appreciation for something.

The second objection I think gets conflated with the first. People like working on art and developing the skills to make art for its own sake. Becoming a proficient painter or writer is a source of self-esteem and satisfaction when you reflect on your life. There is a sort of eudaimonic happiness we get from cultivating this sorts of practical virtues. I think this is right, but I genuinely do not think that AI art presents a problem for this. Way back in the day, if you wanted to hear music, then you had to play an instrument or have a friend who plays, or have the budget to hire someone to play. Sound recording more or less put a stop to that. The demand for live musicians is somewhat lower, but still very present (though perhaps for reasons that are incongruent with the kind of thing that visual art is). But we still like playing music, even if we're not particularly good at it. I twiddle away at mediocre renditions of Rachmaninoff preludes even though I can flip on a Vladimir Horowitz recording that will show my amateurish twinkling for what it is. But I still love playing the piano and get some sense of self-worth from working at it. The idea that a computer could make some stunning renditions of Bach's chorales seems to be no more threatening than the recording. I would keep playing at it. We come to recognize the striving activity for what it is. If you'll permit me a somewhat vulgar anecdote: Zizek once gave this interview where he was asked about the ideal date. What he tells that he wants the machines to do all the sex for him and his date, and that frees them up to talk about movies, and enjoy themselves, and actually have sex in a way that isn't wrapped up in what he calls thinks of as satisfying the super-ego. We become much less wrapped up in the actual product that we are aiming for, and become more attentive to the process of becoming something and of working toward something. So AI art actually becomes clarifying because we are not always so interested in the product as we are in the process, in the becoming and so on.

Another reason people say that it is not art is that people value sorts of interpersonal connections that are mediated by artworks. People love buying biographies of artists that they like and learning all about them — I am certainly among them. I love learning bits of trivia about Prokofiev and Wilde and thinking "he's just like me for real." And we do not get the sense that someone is communicating with us when we see a piece of AI art that we reflectively know is AI art. I think there are some problems with this. First, the sorts of AIs that are involved depend heavily on getting the specified input in correctly and in a way that's going to make something good. There's also the act of curating, and throwing out all the junk that the AI produces even from a good prompt. So people can still communicate and feel connected with each other through this. There is also a way in which our very 20th Century ways of analyzing art can be brought to bear; we do not need intentions to find meaning or significance in something, even artworks. We also find things beautiful and significant all the time, even though they exist without some kind of final purpose and just as a matter of fact. This is, after all, the beauty of nature. Cracked rockfaces, stretches of mold infesting concrete, vibrant birds, and all the other little charms of nature do not have intentions or meanings. We still think of them as aesthetically valuable though. Consider the following, rather relaxed approach to the demarcation problem: artworks are just artifacts that have aesthetic value or are responsive to the kinds of reasons that art critics are interested in. Like any definition of art, this is contestable; but the contestability is built in. Art unfortunately does not have some pre-ordained class of objects that it is trying to capture, but rather is an idea that we negotiate over and debate about because the category is evaluative and figures into our practical reasoning in particular ways. I can credit Bertram and Sundell for parts of this.

I somehow doubt that any of this will be helpful for resolving anything, but they might make things a little more clear. If nothing else, I hope it provokes some more thoughtful discourse about AI art.

hello 🐙

This is not anthropomorphization but genuinely something theyre known to do. I've heard divers say octopuses and cuttlefish get fascinated by hand gestures and will sometimes respond to them like. We probably do look like we have little cephalopods on the ends of our arms, to them. Like we're always putting on a puppet show.

Babe come to the kitchen I made your favourite meal (oil fire)

"but if you're pro-union, why are you anti-cop-union?" because cops are not laborers. what cops do is not labor. they are enforcers of the laws that oppress laborers and exist solely to protect capital. don't bother me with stupid questions.