Original Drawings are now available through my Store.
New Drawings for 2025
Category: art
The Limits of Automation
Despite my desire to have my art gloves “stolen,” it’s possible – actually it’s likely – they can’t be mass-produced. Conforming the stitching to the printed image isn’t the only technical challenge. Precisely matching up the 2 sides of each glove is even trickier, and maybe impossible to automate. Pattern-matching takes the most time in my own making, using a backlight to align the prints as accurately as I can and pinning them together.
I don’t know how that process would be automated, especially on a stretchy knit fabric which would distort further if stabilized in a frame.
It is possible to print on garments after stitching, and this is done on some mass-produced gloves:
Notice the design does not extend into the seams. That’s because there is always a gap on the seam of dye-sublimated finished garments, and even though this gap can be as small as 1mm each side, it would ruin the look of my own gloves, adding a white stripe all around the hand.
This is probably why there are no super-cool looking mass-produced art gloves. Although I could design something cooler than reflexology patterns for dye-sublimated finished ones, they wouldn’t be as beautiful as the ones I sew on my dining room table.
Maybe my gloves are more special than I reckoned. Maybe they are worth $25 a pair. Some say I should charge even more, but I designed them to help dermatillomania sufferers, not to become a luxury fashion brand. I really wish they could be cheaper and more accessible. You can still buy your own fabric and sew them yourself. Other than that, handmade-by-the-artist-for-subsistence-income is the best I can do.
“Steal” my Gloves!
Copyright zealots insist every good idea will be “stolen” if not “protected”. If only that were true! In case it is, I’m putting this out there: PLEASE “STEAL” MY GLOVE DESIGNS AND MASS PRODUCE THEM MORE CHEAPLY AND EFFICIENTLY THAN I EVER COULD. I put the high-resolution artwork at archive.org. If you want me to modify it, just contact me (but only if you can actually mass produce them, don’t waste my time otherwise). I can make new designs too. Usually “knock-offs” are inferior imitations of the real thing, but I am offering you the real thing! For Free! Because I want the copies to be as good as the original.
Sewing hour after hour at my dining room table is fun and all, especially in this cold weather, but really I’d prefer my gloves to be mass produced. They would be much cheaper and easier to get into and on the hands that need them. I appreciate some people are willing to pay $25 a pair for the ones I sew myself but let’s face it, that’s unsustainable: I can’t keep sewing them for a subsistence income, the price is beyond what most people can afford, the novelty of being a one-woman glove factory is wearing off fast, and the tiny market of friends and followers demanding them will be fully saturated soon.
I could invest in having them produced overseas, but I don’t have $25,000+ lying around. Nor do I want the responsibility of storing and distributing the product. I would much prefer someone already in the business to produce these designs. Admittedly they might require some custom production architecture; most mass-produced gloves don’t conform precisely to a print as these must. I’m sure the technology to sew and cut using automated visual feedback exists, but not in my backyard.
Soul and Intention
People assure me AI art is “soulless,” that unlike human artists AI can’t be “original.” It can only copy. This reflects a widespread misunderstanding of how human artists work: we copy, and there’s no such thing as “original.” I understood this 16 years ago.
We draw from more or less the same pool of culture that AI does, only our pools are necessarily smaller as humans simply don’t have the capacity for exposure to as much stuff. No matter, because all works carry the influences and language — be it verbal, visual, or musical — as the works around them. You don’t need to see every painting to get the styles and grammar of its time and place, just as you don’t need to hear every English speaker alive to learn English. But AI can read, see, and hear vastly more cultural artifacts than any individual artist can, making it capable of a much broader stylistic range.
All creative work is derivative. AI simply derives faster and better than humans.
What about Intention? The intention comes from the human prompter. All that AI art is prompted by someone; that’s its intention. Is that its Soul? No, its soul is the soul of human culture, that vast pool of source material it draws from and imitates. The same one humans draw from and imitate. Humans aren’t individual geniuses, we are imitators. Our “genius” lies in our shared* culture, and our skill in copying.
This is why I don’t hate AI, but marvel as it shakes the ground beneath my feet and blows apart my orientation to culture and my fellow human beings. Those who hate it believe in the myth of originality and think copying is theft. They were delusional 16 years ago when I freed Sita Sings the Blues, and they’re delusional now. Delusionality is part of shared human culture too, and AI will imitate, remix, and regurgitate it just like we do, only much faster and more efficiently.
And, perhaps admirably, without the ego.
*Shared despite countless delusional egos insisting it’s private property. Fools.
Buried in Diamonds
I have no desire to animate. Add my work to a media stream already full of fascinating hallucinations? The creativity of AI exceeds my own, with its innumerable fingers and multiple arms and morphing cat heads. Things turning into other things used to be magic worthy of hard work and years of study. Now it’s a mere artifact, a waste product generated in pursuit of the more mundane.
All my work will be forgotten, because there is so much work. Art used to be diamonds the future could sift from the dust. Now the dust is made of diamonds. I used to imagine I was making Art for the Future, but no future will find mine. I guess it’s just for me, and a small audience of the Present, and God. That’s enough, but it’s humbling. A glove has no more or less value than a feature film.
I thought Sita was future-proof because of Free Culture, but that only protected against Copyright. Cancel Culture was still to come, and there’s no protection against that except cowardice, which kills art before it’s born. And now the glut of “content” is on steroids. Attention is fractured and overwhelmed. Anything I make is buried in diamonds.
Still, I make, like writing this now. Like the countless un-named and un-indexed photos I take on my bike rides, not even worthy of my own efforts to organize. I make little posts on social media to be forgotten by the next day or, at best, next week. I chatter to my fellow monkeys, amidst the chatter of robots, as if monkeys are so starved for chatter we have to build robots to do it for us.
Yesterday at my women’s meetup M and L brought knitting. M finished a blanket she’d worked on since 2023. Every row was a different color yarn, to represent the high temperature of that day, 365 rows total. It has no commercial value. It represents countless hours of work. It will be used only by M, and seen only by a few of her friends (like us). It is Art. It will be forgotten like all art, and like all of us. We are here today only. That has to be enough.
Summer of Glove
A little project I thought would take a few days ended up taking all Summer and into the Fall, but now it’s ready to go into the world.
Update 11-14-24: Limited quantities of finished gloves sewn by me now available at my store!
Here is my “Recovery Glovery”, art gloves for dermatillomaniacs, trichotillomaniacs, and everyone else. They’re lightweight stretchy cotton-spandex, designed for indoor use but can be used outdoors too; I’ve been wearing mine on bike rides.
Wait, did you say dermatillomaniacs? What?
Dermatillomania, also known as Excoriation Disorder, is compulsive skin picking. Trichotillomania is compulsive hair pulling. They’re a subset of body focused repetitive behaviors or grooming disorders. Lots of people suffer from them, but they remain poorly understood and seldom talked about. Some think they’re a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD); others consider them a type of addiction, giving rise to recovery programs.
Light stretchy cotton gloves are one tool to help dermatillomaniacs and trichotillomaniacs settle the hands and relieve the tactile “triggers” that drive them to attack their skin and hair.
Gloves work! But they’re boring. If you’re gonna have fabric covering your hands, it should look cool. Hence, this project.
After designing, printing, and sewing 6 rounds of prototypes, I have made my gloves fabric available on Spoonflower, for which I get a whopping $1.40 per yard sold. I currently have no way to mass-produce gloves for sale, so sewing-your-own is the cheapest way to distribute them for the time being. However I kinda enjoy sewing them now, and will make small amounts of my handmade ones available for sale soon.
Currently I’ve only designed and sewn gloves to fit women’s more-or-less medium-sized hands. The cotton-spandex jersey stretches to fit a range of sizes (smallish to large-ish women’s hands), but there are limits. If there’s demand for it, I will make my next prototypes sized for men, or bigger hands in general.
Meanwhile you can order fabric here:
And here’s a sewing tutorial: