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.
So much of my past lives on fecebook. People who believe in more than 2 sexes; the same “scientific” and “compassionate” articles on this subject keep getting re-shared by my former friends and acquaintances. Also denunciations of Twitter and declarations of moving to Bluesky.
I feel so disconnected from my past now. Who even am I? Young me might be aghast. Every article about policy responses to “climate change” makes me scoff. You’re 20 years too late, I think. NOW you’re trying to fix it? We knew back then it would be unfixable by today, but here you are insisting you can stuff the apocalyptic horse back into the barn. You’re only making it worse now, accelerating environmental destruction, mining for costly and short-lived batteries, building wind farms on my prairie, all this subsidized “green tech” becoming obsolete waste faster and faster. This, after you reduced all environmental impacts to a single vector, “climate.”
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions; electric cars will just drive us there faster.
Have I grown callous? Conservative? Uninformed? No, I have merely given up and wish to use my remaining years on this planet to accept Reality instead of imposing my bright (read: stupid) ideas on it. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions; electric cars will just drive us there faster.
Oh, and nuclear power is the new “clean energy” to save us and the planet. I don’t know if this is wrong. I don’t know if my passionate anti-nukes activism from the 1980’s was wrong. I only know, from living this long, that all these save-the-world virtuous environmentalist ideas are folly. Humans are gonna human. We’re idiots. Just look at fecebook.
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!
Snake Tree gloves. The backs and the palms have different, complementary designs, and can be worn either way.
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.
Finger-Snakes design, worn palm-side out. I want as many eyes on the road as possible when I bike, and these have 6 per hand!
Wait, did you say dermatillomaniacs? What?
Finger-Snakes gloves worn the way I intended, with the eyes on the palm and snakey sun on the back. But it doesn’t matter, they can be worn either way.The Finger Snakes twirl around each finger!
Garden Snakes gloves, with a leafy eye on the palm and flower eyes on the fingertips. They’re SNAKES not sperm, okay?
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.
Light stretchy white cotton gloves, sometimes called “eczema gloves.” This project started when I drew on a pair of cheap boring white gloves with a sharpie. It didn’t look great, so my only alternative was to design glove fabric from “scratch” (pardon my triggering language).
Gloves work! But they’re boring. If you’re gonna have fabric covering your hands, it should look cool. Hence, this project.
Night and Day gloves, backs
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.
The glove sides are paired up in my preferred combinations, but if you sew them yourself you can match any side with any other side design (except the “slim fit” ones, which due to printing distortions won’t match the rest, but will match each other). Be sure to order Cotton Spandex Jersey by the full yard only!
I launched an older T-shit design on TeeSpring over the weekend:
Minutes after I shared it on social media, it disappeared, with no option for me to re-launch.
So today (Monday) I emailed TeeSpring, and they replied:
There can be many things that may have caused your listing to be taken down. I’m unable to provide any insight about your listing being disabled, but I’ve forwarded your case over to our Trust & Safety Team for review. They’ll get back to you as soon as they can.
Good ol’ Trust & Safety. Yes indeed I can only guess why I was swiftly bumped off of yet another platform. However they did fix it:
It appears the listing in question was falsely removed by our image filtering system. We apologize for the error, and we have un-suspended your listing. This listing will appear in your dashboard in an ended state.
You can now relaunch your listing at any time from your dashboard.
The temptation to self-loathing, like the temptation to drink or use drugs, is social.
When women of a certain age (mine) gather, as time passes and trust develops, the conversation often turns to plastic surgery. This is a bonding ritual: a display of intimacy and offering, because plastic surgery is hidden as much as possible from the general public. Apparently it is much more widespread than a casual observer would believe. Countless women you know have “had work done.” Over wine and good food, cocktails and snacks, in comfortable living rooms and hotel bar lounges at the end of a long day, women offer to each other precious revelations of what face- and body-attributes they loathe and want to get fixed, and name the procedures they desire.
This reminds me of similar rituals I recall from my college days, where young women simply discussed aspects of our bodies we hated (ugh, my thighs!), despair at eating and weight gain, and commitments to diet and exercise.
Having suffered body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and deep self-hatred, I cannot partake in these rituals today. If I validate even a little physical “criticism,” I will fall into a well of self-loathing I can’t escape. The idea that my body is defective is bad enough; that it can be “fixed” with scalpels, needles, drugs, and money adds another layer of obsession I can’t afford.
Because women bond over finding themselves physically defective, and because I want to bond with them, these rituals incite in me both fear and longing. I long to be included, part of the group, and “normal.” I fear the price. I am reminded of alcoholics, who must give up their happy congenial social drinking at parties and bars. Their friends can imbibe poison and stop, but the alcoholic cannot. For me, indulging in physical self-loathing, even a little bit (just that line on my forehead! Just those hoods over my eyes! Just my flappy neck!) will send me on a bender.
If I mention this to other women, they invariably respond, “but you look great! You don’t NEED plastic surgery!” That is part of the ritual: Woman A says, “I hate _____ body part, I want to fix it,” all the other women say “nooooo you look great!” and then it’s Woman B’s turn to share what she hates about herself. It is generous of these women to try to include me with this symbolic offering. These women look better than I do; if looking great prevented body-focused rumination, they wouldn’t have these bonding rituals, and plastic surgery would’t be a big business.
If I elaborate, they understandably feel judged. I do judge the cosmetic surgery industry, and the social norms of excessive body scrutiny for women. I think these things are toxic. But humans have always enjoyed imbibing small amounts of toxins in groups. Maybe plastic surgery talk is the Ayahuasca of Upper-Middle-Class American women. Maybe plastic surgery itself, like bulemic fasting, simulates meaningful human sacrifice. Maybe I am missing out.
I could just as easily admire these women for being able to “hold their liquor.” That which sends me into a depressive tailspin is just another way to spice up an evening for them. I am fragile and sensitive; they can drink poison and get up the next day and conquer the world.
More power to ‘em! But I hope we can bond over something else, because feeling like an outsider to my sex and class is a bit of a bummer. Although not as big of a bummer as crying in the fetal position with suicidal ideation after overscrutinizing myself in a mirror at age 22 and ending up in a treatment center.
When I was younger, art skills were meaningful and important. Filmmaking was too expensive for any but the elite; there was more demand than supply of “media.” Animation was drawn by hand, every frame. Even a short animated film required money in digits that blew my mind, and whole teams of “talent” and managers.
So when I figured out how to make animated movies on my own, I suddenly advanced to elite status. I could do for little money, by myself, what many huge overfunded studios couldn’t achieve. And before that, I drew. When my work made it to print, I got thrills such as I never experience today. When my first T-shirt design, “Leal School is high class,” was chosen for silkscreening, I nearly peed my pants. When my first comic strip was printed in the Daily Illini newspaper, I secreted more adrenaline than I could handle.
Less creative excitement comes to me these days. I did make my first round of “Recovery Gloves” this summer, and I was extremely excited to put the first ones on my hands and photograph them. I guess I still care, a bit.
“Recovery Gloves”
The big change since my youth is that supply of “content” vastly exceeds demand. More writing, more art, more videos and music are made than anyone can consume. This has been enabled by tech, from “desktop publishing” (remember when it was unimaginably revolutionary?), to digital video editing, to phones — phones! — able to capture high-res everything, to AI.
The Attention Economy was coined a while ago and continues to be useful. Is my attention now a more valuable asset than my ability to create? Is that why I feel like I create so much less now? AI produces higher quality work than most humans. So what are we even for? Do robots even need human attention, or can they attend to themselves?
I am still a human being with a voice. I make art when I think something needs to exist in this world, and the only person who can make it so is me. Hence the gloves. Hence Sita Sings the Blues.
But plenty of other stuff can and does come into being without me. Pretty pictures don’t need me to exist. Articles don’t need me. Well, this one does, but it’s not that great. I’m not writing this to meet any demand, I’m writing it because my thoughts are bothering me and I’m trying to sort them out. That’s about the only thing that differentiates humans from AI right now, and maybe even that distinction will vanish.
Me: You are an artist experiencing a creative block. You feel you were more creative 20 years ago, before the Internet and AI. Write an article exploring why recent advances in technology may have suppressed your creative drive.
ChatGPT:
The Tech Trap: How Internet and AI Innovations Have Stifled My Creative Spirit
As an artist, creativity is both my passion and my lifeblood. Yet, recently, I have found myself grappling with a persistent creative block. Reflecting on my artistic journey, I realize that I felt more creatively fulfilled 20 years ago, before the pervasive rise of the internet and artificial intelligence (AI). While these technological advancements have brought about tremendous benefits, they have also introduced challenges that can stifle the creative spirit.
The Overload of Information
One of the most profound changes brought about by the internet is the sheer volume of information available at our fingertips. Twenty years ago, inspiration was drawn from tangible experiences—visiting art galleries, reading books, and engaging in deep conversations. Today, the endless stream of online content can be overwhelming. The constant barrage of images, videos, and articles can dilute one’s unique artistic voice, leading to a sense of creative paralysis rather than inspiration.
The Pressure of Digital Perfection
The internet, coupled with AI, has created a culture of digital perfection. Social media platforms showcase polished, picture-perfect versions of art, often enhanced by AI tools. This can create unrealistic standards for artists, leading to self-doubt and a fear of not measuring up. Twenty years ago, the artistic process was more forgiving, allowing for mistakes and imperfections that were integral to growth and creativity. Now, the pressure to produce flawless work can inhibit the experimental and exploratory nature of art.
The Erosion of Deep Work
In the pre-internet and pre-AI era, creative work was often a solitary and deeply immersive process. Artists could lose themselves in their work without the distractions of notifications, emails, and social media. Today, the digital age has fragmented our attention spans, making it difficult to achieve the deep focus necessary for true creativity. The constant interruptions and the temptation to check our devices can prevent us from entering the state of flow where the most profound creative insights occur.
The Homogenization of Art
AI, with its reliance on vast datasets, tends to produce content that mirrors existing trends and styles. While this can lead to interesting combinations, it can also result in a homogenization of artistic expression. Twenty years ago, artists drew inspiration from a wide range of sources, leading to a diverse array of styles and perspectives. Now, the risk is that AI-generated art, based on similar datasets, may lack the originality and diversity that come from human experience and intuition.
The Shift from Creation to Curation
The digital age has shifted the focus from creation to curation. Artists now spend a significant amount of time curating their online presence, managing social media profiles, and engaging with their audience. While this has its benefits, it can detract from the actual process of creating art. Twenty years ago, artists could dedicate their time and energy solely to their craft without the distraction of maintaining an online persona.
The Devaluation of Effort and Skill
With AI’s ability to produce art quickly and effortlessly, there is a growing perception that artistic creation is less valuable if it can be replicated by a machine. This shift can be demoralizing for artists who invest considerable effort and skill into their work. Twenty years ago, the value of art was closely tied to the artist’s dedication and the unique human touch that went into each piece. Today, the line between human and machine-made art is increasingly blurred, leading to questions about the true value of artistic effort.
Finding a Balance in the Digital Age
Despite these challenges, it is possible to find a balance that allows for the preservation of deep, meaningful creativity. Here are some strategies for navigating the modern artistic landscape:
Digital Detox: Regularly disconnecting from the internet can help reclaim uninterrupted time for creativity. This can involve setting aside specific hours or days where digital devices are put aside to focus solely on artistic work.
Mindful Consumption: Being selective about the content consumed online can reduce overwhelm and allow for more profound inspiration. Curating a digital diet that includes high-quality, diverse sources of inspiration can help maintain a unique artistic voice.
Embrace Imperfection: Recognize that mistakes and imperfections are a natural part of the creative process. Allowing for experimentation and accepting that not every piece needs to be perfect can foster a more open and innovative approach to art.
Seek Offline Inspiration: Continue to engage with the physical world—visit galleries, attend workshops, and have face-to-face interactions with other artists. These experiences can provide fresh perspectives and break the cycle of digital dependency.
Integrate Technology Thoughtfully: Use AI and digital tools to augment rather than replace the creative process. Embrace technology as a collaborator that can enhance creativity without overshadowing the human touch.
In conclusion, while the internet and AI have transformed the creative landscape in many ways, it is essential to navigate these changes thoughtfully. By finding a balance and reclaiming some of the practices from the pre-digital era, artists can overcome creative blocks and reignite the artistic spark that once burned so brightly.
