art Archives - Nina Paley

Reality & Mystery

I listened to a 2-hour video of this academic saying that Reality isn’t real, there is no reality without someone to perceive it, while I attempted to hand-animate a fat Earth goddess I called “Reality,” because that morning I had imagined praying to Reality, who doesn’t care about my feelings, and also to Mystery, who might. Reality and Mystery, sisters. Systery. My animation failed but I still wanted to draw Them. Is Mystery the snake that twines around the Goddess? Is Mystery Reality’s backside? Is Reality that which can be illuminated but seldom is, while Mystery cannot be illuminated at all? Is Mystery just the parts of Reality we can’t see, or is She something else entirely?

Anyway Mr. Academic says There Is No Reality, only consciousness, and “science” backs that up. Dude, I read The Doors of Perception when I was 17. Sure, “reality” is some informational plasma that doesn’t take shape (as we know it) until we interpret it through our senses. But that plasma triggers multiple flesh-instruments the same way; it can be measured, even if measurements of Reality aren’t Reality itself. He sounded to my ears like a freshman in a late-night dorm room, however:

I do love the idea that nothing is in fact real, that everything is an illusion, because it takes a huge load off. All my pain, search for meaning, criticism, loneliness, frustration, fears: they’re just artifacts of my mind, which is itself an illusion as well as a generator of illusion. My mind isn’t real, my thoughts aren’t real, reality isn’t real. Ohm.

On the same day I saw a video of a young mother who regrets motherhood. She’d always wanted a baby girl; now she has one, and while she loves her daughter infinitely, she hates the experience of motherhood, the physical and psychic changes, the long stretches of boredom and meaninglessness, the absence of fulfillment, becoming a lifelong host for a parasite, the pain and suffering and emptiness despite the love. The disappointment.

And I think: I feel the same way about having been born! What a colossal disappointment.

She urges women to consider not becoming mothers: it’s not worth it. And I encourage ethereal souls to not become incarnated on the human plane: that’s not worth it either. Spare a mother, spare a child, solve multiple problems at once.

Luckily, none of this is real.

Ohm.

New Drawings for 2025

Original Drawings are now available through my Store.

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.

20 Talk To Me, Baby

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.

Make a Bias Knit Temperature Blanket - Craft Warehouse