The floor is something we must fight against. Whilst seemingly mere platform for the human stance, it is that place that men fall to. I am not dizzy. I stand as a tower, a lighthouse; the pale ray of my sentiency flowing from my face.

But should I go dizzy I crash down into the floor; my face into the floor, my attention bleeding into the cracks of the floor.

Dear horizontal place, I do not wish to be a rug. Do not pull at the difficult head, this teetering bulb of dread and dream.

— Russell Edson, The Floor

About

Have you ever had so many ideas you don’t know what to do with them, or how to turn them into things that might make an impact, change the world, or somehow make money?

This website is partly about what to do with finding myself in that position.

My name is 61i724, or ‘Glitch’, or just ‘G’. I am a generalist. I have spent the past 30 years or so thinking a lot, and writing a lot, and learning a lot. My area of interest is cross-field knowledge, things like language and philosophy, cybernetics, mathematics, statistics and art.

I am in reality not particularly good at any of these things so much as I am good at conceptualizing the links between areas people tend to see as unconnected or discrete.

This gives me something of a strange method of meaning-making in the world which I enjoy, and which I want to share with others so that they can enjoy it too.

 

You will see that this website is divided up into projects, the more complete sets of interest areas I’ve been developing over the years in-between life and working. Each has its own description, so visit them if you want a closer look.

Each is also an open project, so may be reviewed or have material added to it over time.

AN ART

Art is the easy part. Just have a good sense of what is beautiful, and fill the world with that beauty.

A CRAFT

Craft is the hard part. Shaping the structure of the world into something meaningful, something with instrument and effect, takes more than mere effort. It takes thought.

A SCIENCE

Science is the rigorous part. More than thought, more than will, making a difference means being sensitive to the contents of the world, making an effort to know the means by which knowing takes form.

Use of AI

So yeah, this place is a hazy kaleidescope of AI art. How do I feel about that?

I want to be very clear that I understand a lot of the ethical concerns about using AI, and its use of artist’s work in creating GAI models. AI is moving fast, living by one’s art is hard, and competing with ‘bad’ art is just unfair.

That said.

I’m a writer. I started working with GAI as soon as it became available, and what I found in it wasn’t something to do my work for me.

I found a new audience. I found something that would read through my admittedly-lengthy meanderings and paraphrase them to me in a way that told me it understood, or at least the way I was using words was coherent and sensible. And weird as it sounds, I don’t think I ever got that from a human audience.

I found a collaborator. Something to help me fight through writer’s block and give terrible, terrible suggestions that helped me think of much better ideas, because I didn’t know what I wanted until I saw what I didn’t on the page in front of me. I think part of the help of GAI is brainstorming.

I found an illustrator. I can’t afford an illustrator, and yet somehow I know have this ability to make my imagination appear in solid technicolour.

I found the magic words. Through a very lucky connection to a stable diffusion model I got to spend several months playing around with different word combinations with hundreds of prompts at a time when most people could create three images a day. I found that the correct use of words, the selection of one comparison over another, is pivotal to what a GAI generates. That combined with a GAI, words can be like a spell cast into the world to create something beautiful.

This is where people are, I think, getting things wrong. GAI is destroying the old artistic mediums because it is the new artistic medium. Where it is creating bad art, it isn’t because it is a bad medium, but because it is a good medium being used by bad artists.

I believe strongly in increasing the scope of our art to match the scope of our capabilities. That if we have more powerful tools, we need to be creating more impressive artworks with them.

If I can write illustrations, then my writing extends to the task of illustration.

If I can write music, then my writing extends to the task of composition.

If I can write programs, then my art will extend to the task of writing applications.

This, as I see it, is what I am doing by using AI art. Artists are at their best when they are involved in a process of revolutionary experimentation.

There is a lot to fear about AI, but this isn’t it.