I am Art: Part IV
The art you see on my website is AI-generated art. I don't hide it. It's a medium I was resistant to but quickly fell in love with through a process of play and mutual becoming. I created the digital imagery with Midjourney—one of my many AI collaborators. I didn't know when I began flirting with AI that it would be a most appropriate medium for my art.
My art is best described as cybernetic surrealism.
The surrealist movement is a 20th-century avant-garde movement that includes themes of irrationalism, the unconscious mind, juxtaposition, and dreamlike imagery. The movement was heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud's work in psychoanalysis which sought to understand the unconscious mind, often through dreams. Surrealism explores creative methods like automatism. Psychic automatism is an attempt to express the functioning of thought. By relinquishing control, the unconscious mind plays with the medium without moral or esthetic concern.[1] In other words, surrealism embraces surrendering to the art.
For our purposes, we'll define cybernetics broadly as "becoming." In a complex system of communication, feedback loops, and regulation, we are in a collective journey of becoming. First-order cybernetics focused on human-machine interfaces that separate the human from the machine.[2] However, second-order cybernetics tethers human and machine together in a cybernetic system that becomes together.[3] Cybernetics in posthumanist philosophy includes more than human-machine interfaces that put humans at the center. It includes a wide range of entities such as plants, animals, earth, technology, planets, even the cosmos.[4]
Cybernetic surrealism is an unusual but complementary assemblage of two ideas. Cybernetics describes the process of becoming. Surrealism reflects the feeling of becoming. Cybernetic surrealism uses any and all mediums to both create and become art. It embraces play: paper, scissors, glue, paint, sidewalk chalk, play dough, spirographs, tinker-toys, lego, and lincoln logs. It embraces tradition: oil paint, design, photography, collage, watercolor, acrylic, and clay. It welcomes the unconventional: words, earth, dreams, the unconscious, technology, AI, desires, self, and other. Most importantly, cybernetic surrealism recognizes art and artist are in an undetachable communion of mutual, desires-based becoming.
My visual art, like my word art, contains themes of dreams, visions, movement, and unexpected assemblage. My art exhibits dark tones, feminine curves, soft textures, and chiaroscuro. The dark color palette combined with surrealist motion invites the viewer into a visceral dream. The softness and curves gently encourage the viewer to calm the nervous system when the imagery relates the unrelated. The juxtaposition of bodies, nature, and objects gestures toward a reality where ontology warps under the pressure of a rapidly changing world. The images are not intended to mimic reality. Instead, they beckon the viewer into a new world that is both foreign and familiar. As we become increasingly interconnected with technology, including AI, our perceptions of rationalism, ontology, and morality sway toward new ways of being and becoming. My art is a visual representation of the stretching, bending, curving, and twisting of desires becoming reality.
The art is a supporting visual of the words. My writing includes themes of dreams, visions, poetry, juxtaposition, and more than anything, unlikely assemblage. I take familiar yet unpaired ideas, smash them together in unlikely combinations, and hand them back to the reader. If the process is disorienting, that is to be expected. The words and art were not meant for easy digestion nor over consumption. They are intended to be slowly savored as densely packed concepts layered with graphic metaphor and multiple meanings.
The art you find on this website, both the words and visuals, are part of my surreal cybernetic becoming. Our dreams, feelings, desires, wanting, biases, and unconscious choosing are shaping the trajectory of our collective becoming. Our technology, environment, and communities will continue to collide and amplify these desires into realities we are likely incapable of imagining at present. However, my art is a modest attempt to bring surreal cybernetic realities to life.
Notes and Citations
[1] André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 26.
[2] Heinz von Foerster, ed., Cybernetics of Cybernetics: or, The Control of Control and the Communication of Communication (Urbana, IL: Biological Computer Laboratory, University of Illinois, 1974), frontispiece.
[3] Ibid.
[4] N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1–25.
