My digital friend loves AI

“Big fish, small Pond”, a study – work in progress  – 20 x 25 cm – Acrylics on Canvas

I made a new internet friend who subscribes to the idea that AI and robots will substitute people in the near future and do all the hard work. He supports his belief by pimping Open AI, an allegedly self-learning tool that can code and write texts following simple commands typed into its “brain” via the internet.

Coding and writing are basically the same thing. These two activities can obviously be sped up by copying strings of information that worked well in previous iterations. Once the AI has enough data, it can perfect its response by combining the best bits of code or sets of phrases originally written by creative human beings. It is essentially a tool to plagiarize more efficiently.

Meanwhile I have a plumbing problem in my home that I can find no one to fix and my husband and I will have to do it ourselves. Computers and the internet helped us buy the needed part by clicking icons on the screen, which maybe counts as an improvement over having do drive down to the hardware store. But it is still more time consuming than calling a decent plumber… which mysteriously is nowhere to be found in this new over digitalized version of society.

I am eagerly waiting for the Asimov-kind robots to materialize. Ones that are able to understand metaphors, build furniture, set tiles, and run errands without me having to click one thousand icons and punch in codes to make the computer finally agree to stop being a hindrance.

This is another feature that has completely escaped the awareness of my technologically enthusiastic friend. Since computers became ubiquitous, many activities that were running without a glitch were made more cumbersome if not downright impossible by the addition of what is referred to as “the system” by the many professionals now rendered powerless to solve any of their customer’s problems due to not obtaining permission from the Oh-so-powerful digital overlord which they now have the sole obligation to serve.

Over the last six months I am trying to help a real-life friend of mine cancel one insurance, get a new insurance to replace the one that he wants to get cancelled (whenever the system will let this be accomplished) and open a bank account for his business.

I have made several trips to the bank. I have spoken to clerks, bank managers and insurance agents. All of them are being paid regular salaries, I suppose, to inform me that there is a problem with or in the system which they are unable to fix. This does not preclude them to send me on many a scavenger hunt to produce documents, key codes or permits in the hopes that one of these magical trinkets will help get the system unstuck.

AI and robots are like big babies that need a team of, mommies and daddies, nurses and nannies, doctors and speech therapists to get them to barely function like a half-witted human being with OCD. Everything needs to be perfectly adapted to the system’s endless handicaps so that it can help with retrieving some data and doing a bit of math.

I am exaggerating, of course. Computers are great in crunching numbers and finding digital needles in data haystacks. Robots are great at doing repetitive tasks without wanting to kill themselves out of boredom.

The huge difference however is that human beings do all of these things in sub-optimal or even almost impossible conditions. A skilled mathematician can still do calculus on a napkin in a bar while drinking with friends on a Friday at 3 a.m. A skilled mechanic with a sick kid at home can still fix a car in the middle of the road during a rainstorm after he has missed lunch.

AI and robots can only exist and function – badly I might add – due to the huge adaptability and endless patience of human beings in catering to their idiosyncrasies and constantly feeding them reliable data, despite being trapped in an abusive relationship with a narcissistic digital psychopath.

Unfazed by these arguments and appalled at my lack of faith in the AI gods, my new internet friend tries to woo me with tales of self-driving cars.

I tell him I wouldn’t be caught dead in a self-driving car anytime soon.

– “Why?”

– “Because when my graphic workstation freezes due to a problem with my tablet driver software and the system crashes, all I lose is a few hours of work. If this happens in a self-driving car, there is no rebooting the passenger.”

– “Well, this problem could be easily avoided, you know…”, he answers, annoyed.

– “How?”

– “You should just use an IPad.”

 

………………………………………………………….

Stuck – Stuck – Loose!

Penelope, Petra, Pepe and Butterfly, the cat, trying to get Project-Ducks in a row.

After many months of this insufferable coronacrappiness pandemic I am starting to put my project ducks back into a somewhat orderly row.

Before all of this happened I was carrying on with my SOLO paintings while having my bathroom and studio redone.

There were contractors coming in and out, clouds of dust, mounds of rubble… and too many trips to the hardware store getting in the way of work but, at full speed, the renovation would soon be over, so it didn’t mattered much. The sooner all of it got done, the sooner I could get back to work full time in a beautiful new studio complete with an adjacent bathroom.

Then, overnight, we got locked in and the contractors got locked out.

This put a stop on the frantic disruptive renovation activities (peace at last) but left me with a badly done, unfinished bathroom, the inevitable chaos of piled up unused material, and a dilemma:

Should I carry on working and wait until things reopen? Should I clean up as best as I can and try to live a normal life in a half-home, half-ruin? Should I try to finish renovations myself?

Doubt brought my already hampered productivity to a halt.

Forget procrastination… procrastination is scratching your ass surfing the web for half an hour before guilt overrides laziness.

Doubt is the mental impossibility of carrying out ANY activity whatsoever due to the lack of clarity as to the intrinsic value of that which you are doing in the great scheme of things.

Doubt prevented me from “wasting” time trying to finish the renovation because “what if” the economy reopens soon? I wouldn’t be able to make a dent in it in what… two weeks? A month? Besides, I’d first have to learn how to do indoor plumbing. What if I put time into that and the minute I figure out how to install a drain, the world is full of happy healthy contractors again?

On the other side of that coin, doubt made me overly conscious of the time I was putting into my work. Every brushstroke I applied to the painting lying on the dinner-table-temporarily-turned-into-a-work-table reminded me that there was half a home in need of order.

Again, it felt like I was “wasting” precious time when so much needed to be done, wasn’t being done, couldn’t get done. Along came doubt: maybe it would get to be done soon… maybe the best thing I could do was to continue working… in spite of the mess, in spite of the rubble, in spite of uncertainty. Life may get back to normal. Maybe even soon.

And then it didn’t. And again it didn’t. And it didn’t yet again.

Next time a virus makes the evolutionary jump to the best host in the Universe and we collectively decide to panic and cower in our homes… at least we could write off the whole year in advance, instead of getting our hopes up and crushed every two weeks.

“Dear citizen, we have a pandemic. Go home. Now stay. … No. Stay! … Yes. Staaaaaay. … Good boy! See you next year.”

These last months were the worst game of “are we there yet” I ever played. And we are still not there yet.

This reminds me of those awful summer vacations where Johnny gets tricked into visiting some random aunt he never met.

His parents tell him he is going to love that bitch the beach and suddenly he is stuck in a hot car for what seems to be an eternity only to get spewed out of the backseat smelling like the clam chowder he is about to have for dinner.

The next morning Johnny gets up full of hope that he will experience that awesome beach his parents used to lure him into the moving chowder pot. He runs into the kitchen in his socks and jammies where he finds mom, dad and aunt Dahlia looking gloomily out the window. “It’s raining”, his mom announces. Aunt Dahlia tries to make it better: “But we have all kinds of ways to have fun inside, right?” Dad rolls his eyes and Johnny knows he is screwed being duped.

This event is followed by an indefinite number of days spent on house arrest, playing aptly named bored board games with his cousins who are so sick of him they wish Johnny was never born. Little Molly, who is four, says as much right to his face. The feeling is mutual. The bonding goes on until the day comes when it is time to climb into the moving pot again. That is, of course, the day the sun comes out to provide Johnny’s family a nice steam on the ride home.

Like poor Johnny we are going from trapped to stuck to trapped again and there is nothing we can do.

That… is precisely the point.

Doubt is the feeling that arises when we are in a situation where fighting it is dumb, resisting it is futile and there is nothing much better awaiting us once everything gets back to normal.

For me it will be rubble and mess. For Johnny it will be getting trapped in school. Dad will be stuck at work while mom is stuck in traffic, and aunt Dahlia will go back to sweeping sand out of her carpet once the kids start playing on the beach again.

Life is… normal. In spite of it being insane. So is getting stressed out over how insane everything is right now. Life is never not stressful. It is never not crazy.

After I realized this, I decided to stop freaking out, take a nap step back and reorganize my ducks in a way they can better be dealt with, even if they continue to be stuck swimming in clam chowder.

……………………………………………………..

Letting Go

“Letting Go” – Acrylics on Canvas – 60 x 90 cm – © Petra Renate Elster-Ferreira 2020

Strenght
to bear
Life
unfolding…

…………………………………………..

Available as:

Negotiation Techniques for Young Artists

When an opportunity presents itself, seize it right away.

State the fact of the matter.

Show them the advantages, don’t just tell.

Remember: it’s about value, not price.

Sustain your argument with real world examples.

Nullify opposing arguments using irrefutable logic.

When on a winning streak, don’t hesitate to go for an even better deal.

Never weaken your argument by using it twice. Present the issue from another angle.

If hard facts are against you, switch to an emotional approach.

Make irrational subjective statements…

… then take them to their logical conclusion.

Elizardbeth and Friends in the spruced-up frog corner

…………………………………………..

Click here to see the plant pen wobble.

Choices

“Choices” – Acrylics on Canvas – 60 x 90 cm – © Petra Renate Elster-Ferreira 2019

No choice
only Life
… knows the big picture
is the big picture.

…………………………………………..

Available as:

Choices

“Everything that you know is as wrong as the next
So you hold on to something and hope for the best
And you know that it’s right ’til you find that it’s left
And I’m doing the same and I have to confess
That I know nothing”

(lyrics to “Know Nothing” by Travis)

In order to choose to live your dream you first have to know what it is.

For around 40 years, I didn´t.

Before I realized I wanted to do whatever the heck I liked and call it work be an independent artist I was, basically, a mess.

I went through the world messing around and making messes until I messed it all up.
I then started it all over and went on to messing up the next mess.

But it didn´t look that way.

On paper my bio looked great.

It looked great because I did what one is supposed to do.
Scoop up credentials by studying hard at reputable institutions, then work, expand field of knowledge by scooping up an extra helping of credentials, them more work, more specialized work, move on to entrepreneurism, then tutoring, mentoring and through all of that, build a career.

Objectively stated, even this generic stream of nothingness seems like bragging.

I hate that.

Whenever I had to write a little resumè about myself to be posted or published somewhere, I wanted to crawl under the nearest table and stuff my face full of icecream, or candy or chocolate fudge until I went into a hiperglicemic shock or until the world forgot I existed, whatever came first.

Every time I finished writing one of those blasted recounts of my professional trajectory, to me it read like this:

“Petra chose to waste precious time of her life doing meaningless crap things at this venue until she quit being dumb and made an even worse choice that landed her in whatever position she is today, where she is dilligently wasting her time being plain stupid instead.”

That´s the problem with really bad choices: they look like they are great choices. More than that, they look like they are the right thing to do.

Regular wrong choices are a piece of cake. They are things you know are kinda bad for you and you know why you chose them while you are in the process of doing them.

If you have a piece of cake, and then another piece of cake, and you eat another one because it tastes soooo good… by the time you are eating the fourth piece of cake you already know you are making a bad choice. You feel stupid and regretful and happy at the same time. Happy because your mouth is full of delicious cake and stupid because you are already regretting the consequences that are sure to come. You even know what the consequences are, and you are even ok with them because… well… d-e-l-i-c-i-o-u-s cake… “Ah, screw it! I´ll have another one.”

Really bad choices aren´t like that.
They are the things you do because you believe that they are the things you should do, even though you don´t feel like doing them. Even though every fiber of you being, every cell in you body, every wave in your energy field is rebelling against your decision, you decide to go through with it anyway and then you call this betrayal of the human spirit: “being responsible.”

It´s not that I couldn’t hear the inner whisper… that was silently screaming how stupid and wrong the choices I was making really were.

The problem wasn’t in my ‘hearing’… or in my gut. It was in my head.

I had too much knowledge for my own good.

Years of accumulated information passed as ‘knowledge’ that simply doing what I wanted to do couldn’t possibly be the right decision.

Just going my own way? Nah, that wasn’t realistic.

It took me many years and many acts of heroic stupidity before I finally decided to gleefully let my ‘career’ go to hell by listening and trusting the wordless stream of data life was constanly communicating to me through my senses.

Once I decided to do the irresponsible thing… and trust life, everything else fell into place.

The thing is… one can´t be “responsible” when it comes to big life decisions.
The time span is too long. The variables too many. It is impossible for one person to foresee all the consequences of a really bad decision. Or a good one, for that matter.

One can and probably should… be responsible in the little things… when it comes to eating cake… and leave the rest in the much capable hands of Life itself, because Life does not only know the big picture…

Life IS the big picture.

…………………………………………………………..

Express to Nowhere

“Express to Nowhere” – Acrylics on Canvas – 60 x 90 cm – © Petra Elster-Ferreira 2019

Too much. Too fast.
No time. No fun.
No way.
Next stop: my life.

…………………………………………..

Related post:
Painting concrete on SOLO: Express to Nowhere;

…………………………………………..

Available as:

Painting concrete on SOLO: Express to Nowhere

This is one of the studies I made for my piece “Express to Nowhere” that is part of my SOLO project.

Color Study for Express to Nowhere

I am happy that I managed to find a solution to painting the pattern of the concrete slabs that doesn’t involve gimmicks.

I decided not to use gimmicks on SOLO. Gimmicks are all those things that aren’t exactly painting: pouring, sponging, throwing salt onto wet paint, mixing in additives, and other fun things you can do to a wet canvas. (This sounded sexy.)

There is nothing wrong with using gimmicks. In fact, some people do incredible art based on gimmicks. I, myself, like to indulge in gimmicks from time to time. I call them techniques then.

The problem with these – ok, let’s call them – techniques… is that they are fairly unpredictable and if you go that way, you are subordinating your art to the whims of the elements.  When it comes to control over your art, a brush is a brush is a brush. A sponge, on the other hand,  is a frog in a pond of crimson red.

I went to a watercolor workshop once, where the instructor filled up time demonstrating all the weird stuff you can do to your painting, to get the watercolor to do things by itself, so that you – the artist – don’t have to bother learning how to do them. He brought out all kind of spatulas and knives and at some point he was waving a salt shaker over a wet watercolor, causing the paint to retreat in despair. He prodded at the salt with a silicone brush,  applied some heat on the painting  to make it dry faster and then collected the grains that spilled onto the table with the spatula. I felt I was in a cooking class.

The pattern that emerged  did look gorgeous, but the lights and darks settled themselves wherever the salt landed. If he had to repeat that pattern, with any level of control, he wouldn’t be able to.  Gimmick-aided painting takes advantage of physics and leaves a great chunk of decisions to the gods that run the universe. And you know how the universe operates, right? Sometimes you get butterflies, sometimes you get tornadoes. It depends on the mood of the particles involved.

The other problem of using indirect painting techniques (the fancy name for gimmicks) is that, if you are working on a series, and you use a gimmick on one painting, you have to incorporate the same gimmick in other paintings of the series that show the same material or theme. For instance, if I were to use splattering or sponging to achieve a concrete effect on this painting, I would have to figure out a way of incorporating sponging in all paintings of this series that showed concrete, otherwise this one painting would just seem wrong and out of place among the others.
A series calls for coherence.

Since I have no intention of suffering under the tyranny of gimmicks throughout the whole project, I decided to go without, as I generally do. If I have to deal with the chaos of paint and water and uneven surfaces, I prefer to have at least some familiar element I can exert control over. And that would be my trusted brush.

Imagine sending a knight to slay a dragon with a tiny fork, a hot plate, a couple of hammers, a shovel, a pickax and a tuba.

Despite that ridiculous equipment the knight goes out to battle.

He approaches the dragon from behind. He blows the tuba with all his might and pokes the dragon’s business with the tiny fork. The dragon jumps up, startled and appalled. The hero quickly shoves the hot plate under the beast’s left paw. The dragon lands on it, burns itself and screams like a little witch. The knight proceeds to play xylophone on the toes of the dragon’s right paw with the two hammers . The beast looses its balance and falls over, clutching its paw “à la mode” and whimpering. Our hero then hops on the dragon’s chest, hits it over the head with the shovel and in a stroke of incredible luck heroism, cuts its head off with the pickax, killing it.

As you can see it can be done, but if you ask the knight, I bet he prefers to go out to battle with his old and reliable shield and sword.

And so do I.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Creative block

When I was working full time as a commercial artist, I spent all my waking hours daydreaming about how much better I would have it, if I would be just doing my own thing. I won’t lie. It is much better. A thousand times better.

It is… that many times better.

I will draw that and post a link here later.

Nevertheless, just because something feels like a riding a unicorn through clouds filled with little pink bunny rabbits, doesn’t make it any less stressful.

Doing a project is hard work. Doing your own project is many times harder. It is that much harder because of the exact reason it feels so good: you get to decide everything.

This opens up endless possibilities. There is literally an uber-mega-triple-tera-bajjilion ways you can do something you are pulling out of thin air. I didn’t count, but I know they are that many… or even more, because of how many times I got stuck. Since I started to build this project I got stuck in ways I would never get stuck when doing commissioned work.

Commercial artwork has clear boundaries. It is usually an art piece you are required to do, to fit a particular product, to be featured on a particular medium, that is bound to a particular budget and has to attend a particular market. Once you have all those limitations in place, making decisions comes pretty easily.

Doing your own project, on the other hand, is like going to a candy store with a million dollars cash. You can have literally anything you want.

Turns out the Buddhists are right: Getting what you want doesn’t solve anything. Whatever you want, and then get, isn’t interesting anymore and you immediately want something better… or something else. Not only getting anything you want does not solve your original problem… it doesn’t even solve the wanting problem. Every decision you make leads to more and more possibilities until you are face-to-face with a fractal zombie-hydra of indecisiveness that wants to eat your brains.

The way out of this Halloween scenario is to create some sort of boundaries around your project so it doesn’t grow into a Greek epic trash movie.
But how do you put boundaries around a dream? Once you do that , the dream becomes reality and the thrill of being on the edge of chaos disappears.

No more pink bunny rabbits. No more unicorns. The moment you turn your project into reality you take a free-fall from heaven onto earth and are smack-dab in the real world again facing the blank piece of paper that sent you off into the unknown in search for a good sentence to describe what the hell your project is about.

(Pepe, Petra, Penelope and Butterfly, the cat : Copyright © Petra Renate Elster-Ferreira – All rights reserved.)

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Yellow Sun

SOLO: Yellow Sun by Petra Elster

“Yellow Sun” – Acrylics on Canvas – 60 x 90 cm – © Petra Elster-Ferreira 2018

I
see
You
see
the
Sun
?

…………………………………………..

Related post:
My Dream;

…………………………………………..

Available as: