Summary
Artistic goals in the most general sense imaginable: make things that make good things happen.
Official-ish bio: I have a Bachelors of Fine Arts degree (with top academic honors) from Mason Gross School of the Arts (NJ state school Rutgers University's arts college) and was the first Rutgers student ever accepted to the Slade School of Fine Art for junior year abroad at the University College London. My concentration back then was oil painting mostly, but I also branched out into multiple media, ranging from minimal, digitally-printed text-only pieces to sculptures and large scale installations, usually used as settings for related performances or video presentation.
After graduation I moved to NYC and entered the job market, which, to be perfectly honest, I've mostly despised. I taught myself web development because a) I didn't think I could hack a design gig involving constant requests for revision to art I'd created, and b) I initially found it less stressful to work with computers than with co-workers. Although coding has kept me mostly employed and able to support myself for the past couple of decades, I've become trapped in that "career path" because of the experience filling my resume, even though I could walk away right now, never look at code again, and have no regrets about that. Like they say, be careful what you get good at doing.
I was fairly disillusioned with artmaking after getting my degree (the program at Mason Gross was much more focused on helping students hone their artistic intentions and craft personal manifestos, whereas I had been hoping for a primarily technical schooling--I had no desire to analyze WHY I made art, I just wanted to accumulate skills that would help me become better at making it), and spent a lot of time just living my life and using my free time to focus more on music composition and performances with various backing bands as my artistic outlet. The latest such collective was The Wrong Windows, which still exists, although it's back to basically just me after the decimation of the pandemic, making continued production/performance more of a time and energy suck than it already was (and believe me, it certainly already was).
I always suspected I would return to visual art at some point, but was still pleasantly surprised to be so inspired by the discovery of text-to-image AI, and have been doing little with my spare time but messing with that ever since. I decided to return to my high school artmaking roots, when I would spend a lot of time doodling imaginary girls in the margins of whatever notebook whose contents I happened to be bored stiff by at the time, and quickly developed a system (primarily using DALL-E 2, plus a dash of GFPGAN and generous helpings of Adobe Photoshop) to create enticing alterna-girls from sheer ether, and place them in settings that were as intriguing as possible.
Working with an AI as a collaborator has been and continues to be an extremely interesting experience, and quite a different one from making more traditional art on my own. Although these AIs cannot be knocked for significantly compressing (by several orders of magnitude, it would seem) the amount of time it takes to craft a decent image, this particular partnership frequently requires me to loosen my grip on exactly what I'm trying to achieve, to pick up on subtleties (or not-so-subtleties) that the AI is suggesting and run with / emphasize / enhance them, rather than reject and quash generation after generation until it happens to produce something more in line with "what I want." There's no guarantee, after all, that taking the latter path will ever result in a success, the only guarantee there is massive frustration.
I prefer using DALL-E because of OpenAI's brilliantly simple online editor interface, which makes in/outpainting extremely easy and quick (at least when their site isn't terribly bogged down), and allows me to feel more involved in a process of ongoing creation, as opposed to the "one-and-done" nature of prompt-then-image that one gets with Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. As of yet, I haven't been able to experiment with SB as much as I'd like to, as my current MacBook is one generation too old to run it locally (goddammit), and experiments with various iterations of SB running online have so far failed to replicate the relatively brisk pace and sense of interaction I can achieve using DALL-E.
Such a dependence on DALL-E (as would be the case with any lone platform, I imagine) does have its downsides. I feel that lately it's been taking a lot more effort (and more generations) to get output I consider sufficient/satisfying/high quality, and I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out if, after an initial string of dozens of successful images, that's due to some adjustment in my own perception/expectations, or some failing on the part of the AI, or a little bit of both, and to tell you the truth I still can't say for sure. I am just hoping like hell that they release an upgrade/new version soon.
Skills
Software proficiency
