Post Truth (has always been there)
"The War of the Worlds" was a Halloween episode of the radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air directed and narrated by Orson Welles as an adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds (1898) that was performed and broadcast live at 8 pm ET on October 30, 1938 over the CBS Radio Network. The episode is famous for inciting a panic by convincing some members of the listening audience that a Martian invasion was taking place, creating a scale panic.
- from Wikipedia
Did you ever recall a childhood space, be certain it was that way, but revisiting years after, you discover your memory was inaccurate?
Most memories change in time, science proved it, I’m not making this up. Keep that in mind for a second.
History is written by the victors, they have the means to speak to the people of the future. Sometimes we discover obscured documents and oops, Noah’s flood was just a local flood, the rest is a playwright’s work.
Keep this too in mind for a second.
Last but not least, is the necessary but sufficient information we need, in order to accept something as real?
In moviegoer’s terms, it’s called “suspension of disbelief”.
You start watching a movie but if it’s good enough, you dive in, you take what you see on the screen as real; your disbelief is suspended. You enjoy what you see, forgetting that it’s fiction.
I could never enjoy horror movies because I lack that suspension. I don’t manage to tell my brain “c’mon, give the story a chance, you’ll enjoy it”. So I giggle, I laugh, when most people sweat in terror.
I attended a few hologram tours of deceased artists.
The music and stage set was real, it was performed by them, with the help of flesh and blood musicians (Maria Callas and orchestra, Frank Zappa and his original band members).
How much of what I experienced was real? I’d say 98% and that was sufficient for me.
The 2% missing was the material absence of main musician, who was not really there; also, the fact that some of the music did already happened, but in another time, on another stage.
I was fine with that.
Maria Callas live on stage in …2019
Comes AI generated art. Some claim is not art because it gets inspired by other artists, it copies their style.
I think the art world is super saturated with art makers, living ones, who do just that: learn from others, have an affinity for some predecessor’s style and make something new that looks like van Gogh but it ain’t.
Defenders of AI art claim that what the software creates IS art. Some of van Gogh’s progenies are humans, AI being on the same par, though it resides on a server.
Neither those nor AI art needs defending but I will say this: if a human being likes the way van Gogh painted, isn’t he allowed to continue in that live and paint his own stuff? The wheel is perfect, keep it round.
There will always be degrees of inserting your own DNS into a new van Gogh–like painting. Ask AI or some painter to paint the interior of a gay bar in van Gogh’s style. That subject is already the new contribution to what we’ve already seen painted by the Master.
You may think I’m talking about myself.
Yes, during my work breaks,... for my personal pleasure,... I ask AI to make such paintings, trying to break AI’s training and force it into unchartered territories, where logic... (something AI aspires to...) is suspended.
In my prompt, I mix artists, color pallets and subjects that a “normal human painter” would avoid.
All those generated images are just for fun..., though some moved me so much, I considered painting something based on the “reality” I saw in front of me.
Courbet, a realist painter, said:.. “show me an angel and I will paint one”. He painted what he saw and touched him, through his own emotional response and painting technique.
What I do, and this is giving away for free my “method”, is to choose a subject that sparks my interest, ask AI to “mash it up”, then I continue working on it in Photoshop and the result is a source of “reality” for me, it’s my “sitting model”.
The sitting model was the drive to this blog entry.
In terms of material composition, a model, whether a person, a basket of fruit or a hill with some trees, is pretty real.
That’s why artists like Dali were called surrealists, because they took some bits from a world around them, minced that though their minds and put the result on a canvas. That was NOT a reproduction of reality.
Isn’t that process very similar to what I described when I was having fun with AI?
As far as I remember, I had those metaphorical glasses on, an AI filter available in my head.
I look at a body, and if so desired, I see it together with the action it performs, plus the emotion I think that body goes through. I melt all that into a material form representation.
The visual result, as I drew or imagined in the past, comes very close to those weird AI creations I manage to get from the machine.
Thank you, AI! You’re an added room to my mind.
Most AI users are happy when Stable Diffusion gets better at hands, generating only 5 fingers. I am not! Maybe I’m by nature, constantly on mushrooms. I never used chemicals to disrupt my reality. When I allow it to be, it’s disrupted enough.
Returning to the blog post title.
Many greater thinkers have written volumes about what Truth might be. We need the illusion of truth, a necessary but sufficient truth is desired when we cross the street, when having open heart surgery or send a rocket to space.
As mentioned, history is written by victors, and these days, written by Fox News and every tweeting human. But in Art, why are we looking for one truth?
People talk about all these sources of information that speak of a true reality. They defend mathematics and hope the physical formulas are correct. They deplore or defend the accuracy of the media. They blow the whistle on AI.
In my view, Art is not part of this circus. Art is neither true nor false, Art speaks to us, to those that she does, as some food of an alien nature, for something that we might have but it’s still very alien to us:
Our spirit.