Hybrids: An Amalgam of the Ages
Hybrids: An Amalgam of the Ages
Introduction
My father was a sculptor whose media was marble and bronze. He maintained a studio in Pietrasanta, Italy. There he cast and carved many of his bronze and marble works. He was a modernist, a contemporary and acquaintance of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. He had a moderately successful career and supported his family mainly as an academic running several art departments for universities and liberal arts colleges.
I owe a tremendous amount to my dad, for inspiring me in the way of artistic creation. He taught me the value of art history and attention to detail. He worked both figuratively and abstractly. He was capable of carving an effigy from a series of photographs that raised the hairs on associates of that person. I respected his figurative work, because he was so darn good at it, but it was his abstract work that I admired the most.
He sent me to art college in the UK and introduced me to Bernard Leech as a possible apprentice because of my interest in ceramics. Mr. Leech was in his late eighties at that time and no longer accepting apprentices. He did, though,recommend West Surrey College of Art & Design where I applied and was accepted. It was while at art college in the UK that I discovered the magic of photography. That was not because photography was on the curriculum; it wasn’t. However, they did have a photographer who would photograph students’work. It was in his dark room, I saw a technological marvel develop right before my eyes for the first time, and then I was hooked.
My father’s position was that if an artist was to produce abstract art, then that person should know what it was that they were abstracting from. In other words, learn the techniques of realism before doing any abstractions. Now my father had a very strong personality and would not accept photography as a fine art. He said that it was a craft, like ceramics. I saw photography as the most contemporary medium of our present day and age for art, in the early 1970s.
I have always had a fascination with technology and how things work, pulling things apart and sometimes not able to put them back together. At ASU where I completed my BFA in photography, I learned to make gas lasers of various wavelengths and began making holograms. That opened a door into a branch of physics that would change my world view. I had a strong interest in science and technology and aimed to merge that with my art. I became a photographer working in Chicago and that led to being hired at AT&T Bell Laboratories. There I was introduced to the depths of Information Technology and completed a Master of Science at Northwestern University.
Because of past experience with holography and knowledge of disruptive technologies, I was able to see trends in photography long before it was commonplace. Many photographers were adamantly analog and chemical based. They viewed the emergence of poor-quality digital cameras as a passing fad that could not be printed in a fashion that rivalled prints, not able to reach the same levels of beauty and resolution. I saw it differently. I had already been working with 3D computer animation on an Intel based 386 computer.
I had seen how the lack of interest in the marketplace for holography led to it being nearly impossible to find high resolution silver-halide film. There was simply no demand. At this time, I was running a video production facility before I moved into information technology. Bell Laboratories was like going to college for the entire fourteen years I was there. I knew that chemical-based photography was doomed in the market. In 1998 I sold my Hasselblad and Sinar equipment, knowing I could still fetch a good price for the investment but not for long.
My purpose in writing this brief background of influences is twofold. One, to indicate my awareness of the synergies and controversies with technology and art. And secondly, to demonstrate that I have been a digital native since 1985.The term digital native loosely means a person who grew up with the presence of digital technology or in the information age. Having “grown up” in Information Technologies’ presence, digital natives are comfortable with and fluent in technology.
Today with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it is a little surprising that many of the controversies with technology and art are once again raising the same types of reasoning and fears that I encountered in the early 1970s and that have most likely existed since man began making art. Is it Art? Is it a photograph? These two questions I understand and have contemplated for many years. Even today, I sometimes feel like a maverick tilting at windmills. However, nowadays with the boundaries of contemporary art spread across an array of media, asking if something is art or a photograph seems ridiculous.
If we go back a few hundred years, the camera was merely a painting device. From within that historical view, we discover something that instructs today. In the early days of photography, the question was what do we call an image not done by the artist’s hand? Everyone knew that a photographer merely executed technical knowledge for a detailed record, better than could be done by a painter’s hand. Making a photograph was simply following the laws of nature and letting light draw the image.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, presented with the question of art, some photographers took a few steps back. They had accomplished the aim of all painting from the late Renaissance up to the early nineteenth century. The camera obscura was a tool often used by painters of that time.
The answer in part to this question was pictorials in photography. Photographs by Steichen, Demachy, Stieglitz, Eugene, Cameron, Strand, Evans, Colburn, Kasebeir, are examples of pictorial images. Pictorials were evocative and mysterious images that stressed composition and a soft focus to allow for the play of visual imagination.
The next step in the art of photography came when Alfred Stieglitz began shooting his cloud series and he titled them “Songs of the Sky”. Later, he replaced that title with the one “Equivalents”. Stieglitz explored the possibility for photography to create art that was abstract and metaphorical, rather than llusionistic of descriptive settings and themes.
What we call a photograph and what it has become over the last two centuries is interesting. The first photograph was a photogram, drawn with light without a camera or lens. Today a photograph can be an image of the gamma ray distribution of the Milky Way. It can even be something drawn with a certain kind of camera without light or a lens. With these “synthetic” images the computer is the camera.
In some instances, new tools and materials are blurring the categorical lines of what we would historically define to be a photograph. Is it a photograph that is now displayed and viewed on a monitor rather than in print? Is it animated or does it evolve or move across the screen? Indeed, we have moved into the age where digital artworks are "images", sometimes purchased on our personal computers, iPads, Smart Phones and TVs; works that can be acquired now as unique NFTs. They are not, necessarily, physical works to be hung on a wall. We might call this new development of image making “digitwork” in the same spirit that Alfred Stieglitz invoked when he referred to the art of his pictorials as camerawork.
Within the context of Alfred Stieglitz’s equivalents, art is a way of knowing, at a place where meaning is born. There is a certain process that occurs for all of us when we encounter a work of art, at a particular moment where we connect in a unique way, where a greater truth is revealed. The nature of art can be thought of as the entire composite of such moments, moments that enfold and unfold in whole or holy movement.
This movement, interestingly, is observable through the relational information exchanged through a work of art, between creator and viewer. For an artwork to truly exist in a projected moment it must have at least: a creator, or conscious will from a higher dimensional order that issues the creation; and a viewer from that same order, to whom the creation must be shared. Art can be thought of as a field with an ever-flowing exchange of discovery and meaning that enfolds and unfolds knowledge in meaningful relationships.
In the end, an artist’s works may divulge more information about the viewers than they do the artist who creates them. And why not, if we consider the true process of imagination; of creating images to communicate truth. It doesn’t matter what name or label we give to a work, but it does matter what function it serves. Is there meaning conveyed and new knowledge gained that brings the creator and viewer into a greater understanding of truth? That is the essential question, should we endeavor to understand it. The function of art is to communicate what eschews banality and excites the imagination; what motivates us to dig deeper and fly higher to gain truth.
Today when artists work with various algorithms, filters, and visual modulators, they discover worlds that couldn’t otherwise be seen. They begin to understand the process at work and how an image can be achieved. Today, artists are exploring worlds that exist implicitly, but only manifest through a particular approach using a unique set of instruments. The abstracting and pictorial processes become quite mysterious as images and various incarnated equivalents reveal themselves on a stage that speaks to worlds more real than real. When that synthesis occurs, something happens that transcends the boundary of both viewer and creator, in which a greater truth is revealed — art’s mysterious ministry.
NFTs Ohmygod!!
I eschew fads and mass hysteria, especially when it comes to art. But that is not because I think NFTs are not art. They are a solution for digital artists to have more direct involvement with their patrons, to prove provenance, and to even collect royalties on the resale of their artwork.
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) went viral in the media and the public‘s imagination a few years back. Along with this viral explosion came a hype inflated environment that was, perhaps rightfully, open to cynicism from the established art world. The hyped up NFT field was clouded by thousands wanting to sell digital works (good, mediocre and bad), thousands wanting to make a quick ETH in the exploding speculative world of NFTs and crypto currencies, celebrities and sports figures entered the fray, 3D animators with substantial technical resources and skills were selling “realistic” and sometimes chicane/chic items, giving the illusions of something real that is virtual (value for your money), along with crypto punks and edgy street artist who have long been in the space. UGH… Let me out! Well thankfully this NFT market is now nearly dead.
However, NFTs do offer a technical solution to a problem that the world of collectors and artists have long faced, that is, how to sell digital art that can be copied exactly and easily reproduced. They also offer artist a way of selling their work directly to collectors and interacting with them. Each NFT is unique and cannot be copied, i.e., it is copy and rights protected, both legally and contractually. NFTs are usually tied to a digital image or work of art but there is nothing stopping the contract from also being tied to something physical.
Art markets have always sold non-fungible tokens. They are unique works of art, where their values are measured monetarily. It’s the same game with the crypto art, only virtual.
A NFT recently sold for $53 Million USD at Sotheby's - it was a Jackson Pollock painting. There is no difference between this art market and the crypto art market. Both are selling NFTs as an investment mechanism.
When the NFT bubble caught the public’s imagination, much the same as generative AI images have today, people were asking if NFTs were indeed art. It seemed a bit silly and sophomoric to ask the question “What is Art?”, at least in the 21st century. However, the question was being asked a few years back about NFTs and still is being put forth, now towards a form of digital, computer generated, art which is referred to as “AI-generated”.
I think we need to stop and look at our hubris to even ask such a question. A good friend of mine, Daniel Ambrosi, once posed the question, "If an artist was able to manifest their artistic vision fully formed with a snap of their fingers, would that artwork have no value?"
Generative AI produced art has received the same treatment as NFTs and photographs. In fact, the answer to my friend’s question appears to be a sound“Yes”. And they cannot be copyright protected as such, according to the US government.
I will present an assessment of my artwork that deals with generative AI as opposed to the various other techniques of machine algorithms I have used in the past. I should note that here, I elucidate contemporary ideas of artistic function. Indeed, the artist is still intricately involved with volumes of decisions in the creative process of working with a generative AI program such as Midjourney (It’s not all about the prompt). It is still very much a creative process. Here I speak of the artist as not only creator but also the artist as observer, curator, and collaborator. The artist is the one conducting a unique discovery of art and presenting to the world his “discoveries” and then rightfully stakes claim to the unique instance of work that he or she is sharing with the world.
This is exactly what I have always done as an artist using the camera to make photographic art. I don’t create the scene, necessarily, that is in front of me. I creatively involve myself with a physical reality that is presented to me or that I encountered and discovered, through the lens, captured on film or IC chip, then applying creative processes I present a finished work of art.
I have been making art with AI generative processes now for three years. Before then, I was using generative algorithms that I would patch together to create visual images. In that process, I have generated thousands of images. The following is some of my thinking, as an artist, working with generative AI platforms.
Dream Mathematicians
“Art is an ever-flowing exchange of discovery and meaning in moments that enfold and unfold knowledge in meaningful relationships.” - ja
There is a strong correlation of the above statement with dreaming and also working with an AI. For example, while falling asleep, I love to watch my mind construct hypnagogic imagery, thoughts, and scenes completely on its own without any input from me. It‘s a game of hide and seek.
I suspect these mental hypnagogic states are performing actions like my mental waking states, where the mind calls upon deep data sets, data that it has been collecting from day one, to construct this observed reality from various sensory and perhaps non-sensory inputs. It does the same thing when I fall asleep.
Occasionally I become aware of myself in these dream states, not as the creator of them but rather as the observer. During states of lucid dreaming, when I am awake inside the construct of a dream, I am aware that my mental state is dreaming. At times like these I can provide input into the construct as instruction sets or parameters to influence the direction but not create the dream. For example, I might will things like flying inside that dream. However, the course from there evolves to something beyond my control. I am not solely the creator but have also become an observer and collaborator with my brain.
This is similar, in a way, when working with an AI to create artistic images. The AI draws from huge data sets and learning instructions built into it, performing on its own, based on my involvement. I can provide input parameters into the AI process to influence its direction (like willing to fly inside a dream) while still, the creation of the image is somewhat beyond my control. Here, I find myself to be a collaborator, observer and not the sole creator. I like this because it leads to greater meanings and discoveries than I would not have found otherwise.
When working with the AIs, I focus on various processes and how I can use them to channel my creative desire for the output. I sometimes let them run through several hundreds of iterations and then select the final image, performing the operation of a curator.
In my digital work, I am discovering worlds that couldn’t otherwise be seen; exploring moments that exist implicitly, but only manifest through a particular collaborative approach using a unique set of instruments and processes. In this activity, the abstracting and pictorial process becomes quite mysterious as images and various incarnated equivalents reveal themselves on a stage that speaks to worlds more real than real. When that synthesis occurs, something happens that transcends the boundary of both observer and creator, in which a greater truth is revealed, art’s mysterious ministry.
Here are two of my favorite quotes about photography which apply in a similar fashion to the above discussion. For me, the computer is the camera.
“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”- Dorothea Lange
“The camera is much more than a recording apparatus; it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.” - Orson Welles
A Digital Native
I am natively digital. I don’t carry around massive Epson or Canon printers, rolls of paper and expensive inks and heavy inventories anymore. I do produce high resolution images for the collector who wants a printed work. For those who prefer the nonporous and luminous screen of a computer or smart TV media there is my website, social media and NFTs. The physical prints can be contractually tied to an NFT and its digital counterpart for provenance and royalties.
I was so happy, with the advent of digital photography, when it was possible to move away from a negative/positive wet and caustic, darkroom approach. I was relieved to become unencumbered by the darkroom process by using digital technology. However, the dry digital post process and printing on paper also started to become a drag. Especially when I preferred a more nomadic lifestyle. Hauling around a massive printer and inventory of art was cumbersome and expensive.
I had already resigned myself to the fact that producing items for people to hang on a wall was an incredible investment for a poor artist who simply loves making and sharing art. It was also digital. People could copy it with impunity. Everyone is utterly spoiled and inundated on the Internet with free and often quite amazing imagery that flashes past our eyes in seconds and then is gone, to be replaced by more visual fodder.
This begs the question of what the role of pictorial or abstract art is today in our society. You see, I have spent nearly my whole professional life of 40 years on a screen. I take to virtual environments like a fish to water. What will it be like for our society in perhaps twenty, thirty, or a hundred years? People here in Italy sometimes think I am insane and hate this whole computer/internet thing, wanting to get back to art that is collected, fills the walls of a home, and provides visual enjoyment. Virtual worlds are seen as sick and an indication of all the things that are going wrong in our world today, especially the increasing isolation, the loss of locality and community because of technology.
But this brings up the question of why a person would collect a work of art. It must be for some sort of love or joy. To do it as a collector or rather investor of things simply relegates its value and meaning to objects of financial and historical worth. How does something originate in the ether and find its way across time and space to resonate and find meaning in the heart of a person? That is art’s mysterious ministry.
But I digress. I understand people’s view about virtual life and environments. I doubt that many understand how archaic and ancient it sometimes seems to me to find a frame for some art and then hang it on a wall. I don’t often see the need anymore.
I used to make art and publish it on the web, thinking that’s it – it’s the best I could do. The thought or hope of making a little money with my art was always in the background but not the main objective. Then along came the blockchain and now things are changing a little bit. There are still the same games with folks looking to make a killing, with gated communities and galleries pretending to be decentralized, often through a progressive franchising matrix. But one thing remains solid with blockchain.
There is provenance now that becomes indisputable for a digital work, there are rights of ownership. When I mint a piece of art on the blockchain it’s there forever, as long as there is an Interplanetary File System. Long after I am dead and gone, the work is still there digitally and there is the chance that it will mysteriously make its way into the heart of another person or many people. So,I am digitally native. That cannot change. I would like, though, to also have the work recognized and published via traditional art channels. And so …
Hybrids: An Amalgam of the Ages
This exhibition is born from a lifelong fascination with the entwined paths of human consciousness and extraterrestrial/dimensional contact. These works, the fruit of over a year-long journey through procedural digital sorcery, reflect an amalgam of the ages—where ancient wisdom converges with the future‘s untold possibilities.
"Hybrids“ represents the fusion of different realms of experience and knowledge—specifically, the intersection of human consciousness with extraterrestrial or dimensional contact. It symbolizes the blending of the mystical or otherworldly with the human experience.
“An Amalgam of the Ages” poetically conveys a rich tapestry where different eras of thought and wisdom merge. The artworks draw from both ancient insights and futuristic possibilities, creating a dialogue between past and future.
The title encapsulates the exploration of how human consciousness and extraterrestrial or dimensional themes intertwine. It reflects a journey where ancient wisdom and future potentials converge in a digital and surreal artistic expression. The "Amalgam of the Ages“ poetically suggests a synthesis of timeless and futuristic elements, bridging the gap between the known and the unknown.
In essence, the exhibition is a creative exploration of how humanity’s understanding and imagination evolve, integrating ancient mystical traditions with speculative future visions through innovative digital art forms. It was an interesting coincidence that I ended up with forty-two images and that they filled all image slots available in the virtual exhibitions platform that I use.
I find this synchronistic in a way that 42 is a number I often use, when editing my images, as an in-between value between 34 and 55 in the Fibonacci series. Also, in sync with the subject matter’s theme, 42 is the answer to life, the universe and everything in Douglas Adams‘ “The Hitchhiker‘s Guide to the Galaxy,”. A longtime favorite of mine since it first appeared, it has become a fixture of geek culture. The descriptions in this exhibition were provided by a longtime friend, Max Chevron. Thank you, Max, for your keen eyes and eloquent descriptions. I present the exhibition’s images here for the reader’s enjoyment.
For more detailed analysis of the business case contact the author.