6 days agoRevisiting ‘Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand’In Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand, Malcolm McCullough writes, In the case of craft, interpretations focus specifically on the way in which content takes form. With art, however, the relation of form and content varies constantly. Computing transforms this relation too: the same content (bits) may take many different…Craft4 min readCraft4 min read
Jan 10Compositing AI Tools: A PrimerThe text prompt I started with was an art term: sfumato. Sfumato comes from the Italian language and is derived from fumo (“smoke”, “fume”). I was thinking about its use in famous paintings such as da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.” The painting gives an elusive and illusionistic rendering of the human…Midjourney3 min readMidjourney3 min read
Jan 2The Aura of AI-Generated ArtIn his 2004 essay “Why are Artists Poor?”, Hans Abbing writes, Walter Benjamin predicted that the technical reproduction of art would lead to a breaking of art’s spell (‘Entzauberung’). Art became less obscure, more accessible and thus less magical because of technical reproduction. … Benjamin’s prediction is not difficult to…Aura5 min readAura5 min read
Dec 26, 2022Afrofuturism 3.0 Revisited: 2015 to the PresentIn 2015 the book Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness was released and it examines the applicability of contemporary expressions of Afrofuturism, from several different points of view and disciplines of study. I wrote chapter two titled “Afrofuturism on Web 3.0”, which navigated…Afrofuturism3 min readAfrofuturism3 min read
Dec 16, 2022AI & Techno-Vernacular CreativityIn 2021, the MIT Press published my first full length book, Techno-Vernacular Creativity & Innovation. Artificial intelligence or AI is briefly mentioned through artists such as Stephanie Dinkins. Dinkins created a training model for an AI agent based on living oral histories and literature including Toni Morison’s Sula (1973) and…Reappropriation4 min readReappropriation4 min read
Dec 6, 2022AI Art Is NOT Theft Until It IsAs AI-generated art continues to grow, more and more critics are accusing AI art tools of stealing the works of living artists. The uneducated or uninitiated hear “stealing” or “theft” and are driving the backlash forward. But someone has to be really, obviously intentional to steal someone else’s image. That…Artificial Intelligence4 min readArtificial Intelligence4 min read
Nov 26, 2022Midjourney: An Image/Text-to-Image PrimerWhen I first learned that actress/singer Irene Cara had transitioned I immediately opened up my Discord server and private channel in Midjourney. Using version 4 (v4) I uploaded to photos of Cara and a string of words that included “sfumato” and “art deco.” Learning art history is helpful as far…Midjourney4 min readMidjourney4 min read
Nov 14, 2022Wakanda Forever in STEM & STEAM EducationIn 2018 I was commission by SyFy Channel to write something about Marvel’s “Black Panther” that was still in movie theaters. I decided to write about Shuri, a teenage Black girl character who was showing real life youth from underrepresented groups what thriving in a maker culture looked like, though…Wakandaforever4 min readWakandaforever4 min read
Nov 3, 2022Visual Storytelling Through AI: Color, Texture & SpecularityRecently, computer graphics expert Theodore Kim highlighted the differences in white and black skin tones for computer algorithms, claiming that the CGI industry is overly reliant on identifying and depicting white skin tones and fails to properly render darker tones. The former effect is subsurface scattering and the latter is…Artificial Intelligence3 min readArtificial Intelligence3 min read
Oct 23, 2022Mixing AI Art Tools, Dilla Time & The Changing SameLately, I’ve been mixing output from more than one AI tool. In the image of Sidney Poitier (above) I started with text prompts in Midjourney. Then, I used the output as a style for another image in Deep Dream Generator. I composited the results using Photoshop and extended the background…J Dilla4 min readJ Dilla4 min read
