This post will probably rattle around a bit, as I am just going to bang it out (as I imagine Danny Dyer might say).
We had our first supervisory meeting today and I want to get my thoughts down quickly, partly because I have a tutorial tomorrow and I know that will probably change how I think about the things we covered. I want to keep the two moments separate because I am finding the journal a useful way of tracking my thinking as it shifts. This stuff is not linear. Not every idea improves on the last, and sometimes it is useful to have a record that allows you to go back a step and follow a different path.
As ever, I really enjoyed listening to my fellow students’ ideas. I wanted to do a Fine Art masters rather than a painting-focused course for exactly this reason: the breadth of ideas, practices and approaches is genuinely inspiring. Painting’s place in contemporary art can sometimes feel a bit like the UK at Eurovision; it always seems to have a prime position at the table, whether it deserves it or not. That said, I do think painting, and certainly the expanded context of painting, still has something to offer in this space. I just don’t want to think about it in a silo.
The broad upshot of the discussion today was that I seem to be on an ok track and should carry on. I think the ideas are there, but I also know that I need to work on the focus. That will partly come from reading more, but also from making more decisions about what I am not going to pursue. At the moment, the field still feels very large, and I am trying to distinguish between the things that are genuinely useful to the research and the things that are simply interesting.
There was a particularly useful part of the conversation about research being “up to date”. This is difficult when the subject is something as fast moving as AI. I have been reading Hito Steyerl’s Medium Hot, which was only published last year, but even as I’m reading it, I find myself thinking, “well, that’s moved on.” I suppose this is something you have to make your peace with as a researcher, especially when working around technology, but I can also imagine it becoming stressful. There is always the possibility that something significant changes in the interstitial space between writing and publishing. The ground is shifting while you are trying to describe it.
One of the things I’ve found most rewarding about this course is the way it has helped me piece together an assortment of interests that I might not previously have thought were connected, or even still active.
I have arrived at this partly through trying to read Derrida this week. To be honest, I have been trying to read Derrida (and Proust), on and off for about thirty years. I have never really got on with the highfalutin style of French academic writing. I often like the ideas, but I hate having to excavate them from beneath all the obfuscation and hedging (see also De Certeau). There is part of me that remains sceptical about the idea that, if the ideas are really that good, they need to be quite so difficult to access. I understand that you’re brainy, but also……
Coming back to the point about interests, I am enjoying the way the course has helped me understand what I am actually interested in. One of the useful things about being an artist is that you can be a wide-ranging scavenger. I often encourage students to find things that interest them, regardless of whether they can immediately see a consistency between them. It is the person doing the looking who creates the continuity. The pattern does not always have to be visible in advance. In fact, I would probably argue that it is often better if it isn’t. If the pattern is too clear too early, it can become limiting.
Through this process, I am beginning to see a pattern (re)emerging in my own work. I have been more than a little worried recently that my detour into thinking about AI might be a self-destructive dead end, or at least a distraction from the things I was already doing. The research paper has helped me see that I am not simply interested in AI as a new subject. I am attracted to the issues raised by AI because they were already my concerns.
I have long made work that deals with iteration, versioning, origin, repetition, and individuated experience. I am interested in how the world is understood differently by different people, and how an image or object can emerge through layers of decision, accident, memory, and revision. In that sense, AI has not appeared from nowhere in my practice. It has sharpened a set of questions that were already there. It is funny how easy it is to feel a little bit lost, as though you’re reaching around in the dark, and then realise that what you are doing is actually a continuation of a loose continuum of interests.
Which brings me to Debord. I will undoubtedly use a picture of Debord’s psychogeographic map of Paris as the image for this page. I both overestimated and underestimated Debord when I was an undergraduate. He was a blagger for sure, but he was also onto more than one something. I think it’s interesting how often we still encounter his ideas, even though they are treated as slightly sketchy by significant areas of academia. There is something compelling about that tension. His work can seem inconsistent, vibes-based, and often half-baked, but it also keeps returning because it names things that still feel recognisable.
I think Debord has something to offer to the current discourse around AI. I cannot imagine that he wouldn’t have something to say about the way AI image generators endlessly intensify the spectacle. They don’t just produce more images; they produce more images detached from lived experience, material labour, specific origin and direct encounter. They accelerate a condition in which the world is increasingly encountered through representations of representations. That feels very close to the territory I am trying to understand.
There is also something quite funny about Debord in this context, because he was himself a great appropriator of other people’s ideas. He robbed a lot of the thinking around psychogeography from his fellow Lettrist Ivan Chtcheglov and was also pretty free with the ideas of Henri Lefebvre, Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe and others. In art and theory, we have often been fairly comfortable with borrowing. The interesting question is where, when and why we decide to draw the line. Maybe the issue is not simply whether something has been borrowed, but how it has been borrowed, what it becomes, and who gets to control the process.
This really is quite scattergun, but writing this also makes me wonder whether I should go back to Baudrillard and the simulacrum, which again demonstrates my point about this being part of a continuum of interests rather than a sudden new direction. I keep circling around questions of mediation, repetition, authenticity, origin, and experience. AI has given those questions a different urgency, but it has not invented them for me.
Perhaps the most useful thing, then, is that this period of research is helping me see AI less as a rupture in my practice and more as a pressure point. It presses on questions that were already there: where images come from, how they change through repetition, what they conceal as well as reveal, and how meaning is produced through unstable origins.
I think what I am coming to understand is that I shouldn’t worry too much about finding a neat consistency in my outputs too quickly. The answer is probably to make more work. It may matter less if the medium varies, or if the outcomes look different from one another, provided the underlying questions continue to develop. The consistency might not be in the surface of the work, but in the pressure of the ideas underneath it. That feels like a useful thing to hold onto. I can do that.
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