Art

On The Couch In The Art Studio

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

My good friend Serdar has a smart discussion on the idea that one’s artistic creations can be therapy. I won’t comment per se because his piece stands on its own. Instead, I want to explore my own thoughts on the matter.

I am automatically suspicious when someone says that their public art is therapeutic – the art on display, that is sold, etc. Some of it feels disturbingly exhibitionistic in an uncomfortable way, someone sharing things that are very intimate with you and everyone else all together. Some of it feels manipulative, trying to affect your feelings or demand you have a certain reaction or you must react. To share very intimate things very openly makes me suspicious and uncomfortable, and thus “here is my therapeutic art” is not an announcement that immediately compels my attention.

This is not to say that one cannot share very personal and intimate experiences in art – indeed for some artists that is the goal, to connect and share. In cases like this the sharing is part of the experience, the revelations and experience are communicated in a way that reaches me and the audience and treats us as people. Some “this is my therapeutic release” art in public gives me the feeling that I am not a participant, but someone there to nod, or acknowledge, or just feed attention.

Now can one do art for therapeutic purposes? I’d say entirely yes, and in fact it can be very positive. To explore expression, mediums, and so on is very useful. So often we can’t reach what we want to say, and art can help us do it – some things can’t be done in words but can be done in paint or dance or music. I am all for different modes of therapy – but I think there’s a question of when and how you share what comes out.

I don’t ask to see your therapist’s notes, and it might not be healthy to share them. Essentially publishing them makes me suspicious unless it’s done in a way that communicates with me as a person.

There I think is the difference between therapeutic art that makes me suspicious or uncomfortable and art that is, well, art – that the artist is taking on the role of an artist as well as expressing the issues they are coping with. If an artist is able to explore their issues and present them as an artist, connecting with an audience as artist and a person I’m for it. It might even be more inspiring than something with less connection to the artist’s issues.

Art therapy is great. Producing art is great. It’s when you have both that the artist may need to pause and ask where they’re coming from – because they might not be going where they intended.

Steven Savage

I Will Not Give Up My Mistakes For Robots

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I often discuss the impact of AI on creativity with Serdar. We’re both authors and in technical areas, so it’s something both personal and intimate for us. You can probably guess neither of us is happy about it – and being authors we like to discuss that often at length.

Serdar recently did a blog post on LLMs and intelligence, and it is quite worth reading like all of his work. But one thing he discusses in the post, and in our own discussions, is how LLMs use treats writing as a product. That fascinates me, because there are people who want to do creative work but don’t want to be creative – they want to push a button and get a product.

I could go on about the psychology of this – and indeed I probably will in time – but these are people who want results without making mistakes of their own. You can’t decouple creativity from mistakes, false starts, false ends, and sometimes just producing utter crap. Those aren’t problems, that’s part of creativity.

Creativity is not a linear, mechanical process, as much as we sometimes want it to be. Creativity snags on edges, creativity takes strange detours that somehow get you to the destination more effectively. I’m sure you’ve seen human made creative works that were created just a bit too mechanically, and there’s something wrong when you partake of them, a kind of metallic mental taste in your mind.

Part of this creative work is screwing up sometimes in epic ways. Actually, I’m sure if you’re any kind of creative, you’ve made some awful stuff, and trust me so have I.

Anyone who writes, draws, cosplays, and acts has a mental list of things they regret. They went out there, did the thing, published the book, went to the audition and completely and utterly whiffed it. Creativity in its unpredictable glory gives us infinite things to make and infinite ways to humiliate ourselves.

Creativity requires mistakes, and sometimes you don’t know if you’re making one until you’re done with a work. To complete a work even if it turns out to be lousy is to fully explore your ideas. So often we have to get something out if only, upon completion, to finally understand why it was a stupid idea. That’s fine, that’s what creativity is all about.

Even the journey is necessary. To wrestle with a concept. To implement it. To get it out. Every terrible novel or lousy cosplay or mediocre piece of art is a testimony that someone could get it done and learned on the way. They might not be thrilled with the result of the journey, but at least they made it.

I think this is why some trashy works and B or Z grade films fascinate me. The flawed nature reveals the author’s dreams, ambitions, and efforts. Bad as they are, there’s also a drive there you feel and relate to.

The creativity-as-product takes away all these passionate, painful, wonderful mistakes. It takes away the informative disasters and the joy of hardheaded persistence against your own good senses. It is just pushing a button and at best you become a better button-pusher, but you don’t become more creative.

To make creative work, even if you make something awful, you need to create. You need to be that author or artist. You need to grow from the experience, even if it’s painful. It is to be, i na way, a better person for what you did – even if the better person might be the one who admits “my writing is crap” and move on to something else.

Just pushing a button and pummeling the resulting writing product into a marketing-shaped form isn’t creative. No matter how well the work sells, you run the terrible chance you won’t screw up as much as you need to.

Steven Savage

But What Does It Mean?

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Recently a friend found an AI generated fake trailer for a kind of 1950s-1960’s live Sailor Moon. This, it turned out wasn’t the only fake-retro live Sailor Moon trailer generated by AI. Somehow I feel the infamous failed Saban Sailor Moon has driven people to imagine such things differently (forgetting the rather well done live Sailor Moon from Japan).

Now I find these things amusing, but there was a strange emptiness about them. What, I wondered, was the point? I can imagine these things in my own head, and in fact have – once in the form of a late night discussion of Lucille Ball playing Sailor Moon (I was assuredly sober). Do I need someone to use tetchy AI to illustrate something?

As I contemplated the weird meaninglessness of these things, a friend who’s a talented cosplayer note that there was no point to such creations. What would have been truly amazing would not have been someone tossing prompts to an electricity-devouring toy, but to have rallied cosplayers and shot it live. Suddenly I got why so much of this AI art feels meaningless.

Let us imagine that some cosplayers had gathered to create a Sailor Moon trailer true to the spirit of the 50’s or 60s. They would have done research and studied costume design. They would have sewn, crafted, created, re-created, and perfected their work. Those doing the filming would have figured the angles of the time and how to get the color just right. Voiceovers would have been chosen to fit the period, perhaps finding veteran actors or new talent.

The creation of a few minutes of trailer would have involved people making, learning, researching, bonding. They would have made friendships that lasted a lifetime, spoken at cons, and taken their skills elsewhere. Someone may have used such a creation as a senior thesis, others in a portfolio. One small bit of fun would have impacted many people, echoing through their lives.

Or you can throw things into an AI. Sure there’s some talent in tweaking the prompts, calling the best shots, and so on. The editing of such things definitely requires skill. But so much of it is disconnected or not as connected as it should be. I won’t deny that a person with AI uses talent and inspiration to create a larger creation, but it lacks that big, meaningful picture of an effort without AI.

An artistic creation is a lot more than the time you watch it on screen.

What AI turns out is results with little human connection, history, inspiration, or meaning. It makes “product” in the most empty use of the term – something designed to appeal to someone’s interests, something to sell, a result not a thing with history and meaning. We’ve taken an interesting tool and now people pitch it as a substitute for being human.

This is another reason I’m skeptical on AI creations beyond some more personal and specific uses. Where’s the human connection? The team that learned from making a show? The author you love and get angry at in equal measure? The voice actors to fan over? The choices only a person could make – even if they’re the bad choices of an actual human? Where’s what comes next, with lessons learned and ideas built on?

It’s not there. Just a machine turning out stuff in the rough shape of what we asked. It doesn’t mean anything.

Steven Savage