At some level there is a connection between art making and adventure. The place this can happen is in the making of art. Arts practice. Arts practice could be seen as a journey of uncertain outcome. A big part of the adventure journey is the travelling rather than the destination. The journey is made in the walking of it. So it is with art making. I will give you two ways.

Art as Adventure – No 1

The Journey of Uncertain Outcome

I had an art adventure this weekend (Oct 21–22 2023) on Adobe FireFly here. Adobe is doing a big sell on their new service, FireFly. This is an AI image maker. Kinda controversial in some quarters. Some AI image programs scrape art off the interweb and quite rightly some object when art is scraped but not attributed to the maker. Everybody wants the artist to do some art for them for nothing. Hey it’s good publicity right!

But Adobe base FireFly on their product Adobe Stock of 2 million or somethingorother images here and here. For this you sell them a photo or artwork and they then own it, then designers and advertiser and artists can buy other people images for their art/product/service etc. So Adobe scrape their stock of bought art and images, where the artists are paid. Fair enuf. But this is then used to drive their AI image making machine. They then sell on this service to subscribers. But this all goes (or went) live November the 1^st , the paid bit that is. But ’til then it is (or was) up for grabs for payed up subscribers for nowt. I have the ‘Photography Plan’ so I experimented with it. This was my adventure. I put in ‘a monkey in a tree wearing trainers and smoking a pipe, looking at her mobile phone,’ and this is what I got…

This begs the question ‘Did the monkey agree to this and did she get payed and is she in Equity?’. Art can be so difficult.

My interest (beyond smoking monkeys) really was not in such concrete manifestations but in more abstract ones. Below are some images and the text prompts I gave for more abstract ideas. I wanted to see what I would get.

I prompted with ‘cycles and cycles and cycles of dark foreboding substrate’. I got this…

Then I changed parameters, making the image ‘oil painting’, or ‘archtectiral drawing’ or ‘bright colours’ or included say, ‘three cycles’ and got these.

It was impressive. I suspect this will make millions for Adobe. Designers no longer need to trawl through image libraries, if they want a ‘a monkey in a tree wearing trainers and smoking a pipe, looking at her mobile phone,’ for say, a New Scientist article on hominid evolution in the age of the interweb. They subscribe to FireFly on their device, type in the aforementioned prompt, and then there she is, on their PC in about 5 seconds if you have the latest Intel chip. So as mentioned, from Nov 1^st on you will be charged for this as part of your plan.

So my counter cultural alter ego kicked in and I decided to make a little artwork from the initial text prompt ‘huge face with big white blank eyes with no pupils looking up’ and got these.

Part of what I was after with my little artwork was some critique of the Attention Economy (see here), about how young people particularly are being trained by social media and their device centric social life to make money for the shareholders of multinationals see here. Adobe apparently read my mind. Uncanny. Scary. My Lu’d I rest my case. Adobe initially gave me children with big trustful eyes.

But to be truthful in this case I was after a more specific image so I typed in ‘huge grinning smiling business man face with huge big oversized white blank eyes’, then ‘huge ugly grinning smiling business man face with huge big oversized eyes looking at viewer’ and got these (amongst many more, unlike a real human artist, AI never gets tired or wants to eat or go to the toilet).

Now FireFly is connected to Adobe Express, a thing to make graphics and images for social media. Express is a quick and easy way to make graphic design. So I made this…

It kinda worked but was not quite what I was after. I moved on and planned to come back to this ismege agian later. But this moving on made me think.

Art as Adventure – No 2

Artworks as way-markers (and as cheating).

This act of art making lead me on to my No 2, Art as Adventure idea, the art object as way-marker or ‘flash’.

On an adventure the ‘flash’ was a thing you left on a tree with your hand-axe. In the wilderness an axe mark can only be the work of a human hand. A bit like a work of art. It was a way to mark your trail, so you can find your way back to whence to came, or have someone else find your remains if you were eaten by a bear say.

People are afraid of bears as people are afraid of art. Like avoiding hungry bears, people avoid making art for fear their art be seen and critiqued. Publicly. In my school if you had your art put up on the wall it was sign of a being a sellout, see here and you were shunned in the dinner queue. Harsh, but just. I got CSE grade 1 in Art and Physics. Social pressure has a lot to answer for. I did a BSc.

So to overcome this fear a suggestion is to see each little artwork you make as a way marker, a flash, a flash in the pan, a thing to be discarded and left behind, a thing to show where you have been not where you are. A thing only you see. A small sign of moving on.

A bigger art work, a project, a show, an article on your local radio station, then a national, then Breakfast TV, Sky Arts, the Venice Biennale here the Turner Prize here, can be seen as an encampment. You set up camp and make a lot more mess. A midden, a dunny, a campfire circle and some discarded lager cans. You know…. ‘Culture’. An encampment will make you officially a ‘Real Artist’. Is it an old tent or Tracy Emin’s artwork? See here. I have seen her tent and I loved it, don’t get me wrong.

So I made the image above and moved on. The lettering did not work. The £ and $ signs ended up upside down so it kinda missed point. The face was great, but I did not make it, AI did.

So what? Well some principles from the arts therapies and experiential learning apply. Whatever thought or idea you had becomes concretised, reified, made a subjective object see here. You make it as art and this experience becomes concretised, reified, made a subjective object. You get to view and re-view yourself, your inner world. You go beyond being a consumer of images and become a producer. That nobody sees your way-marker but you removes you from the echo chamber of on-line life. Like a sketchbook or journal, you see your journey unfold and know where you have been that you better see where you could go. I believe this can make health. It can aid recovery of whatever need to be recovered. It is recovering your own ground. It is in the process in which states become traits to quote Dan Siegel see here. It is art in process. It is art making with intention, attention attitude. I intend to make art, I attend to what I make and what happens when I make it within an attitude of openness and the capacity to non-attachment. This is a just way-marker and I let it pass. Nobody sees it but me. It shows where my adventure took me. This is art not ‘Art’. I do not have to account for it. I am a safe in the dinner queue.

So check out Adobe FireFly. Or ignore it out of principle. But remember David Hockney said ‘The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist.’ See here and here. My business man was not a beauty, nor was my art, but I was a bit of a cheat so maybe I was being an artist. If you cheat, you too can be an artist. Just avoid the dinner queue.