Posted by cataPhil 10/23/2024
Jackson Pollock begs to differ.
Precisely. There is no skill in artistry, it’s rather just a developed sense of style, that doesn’t come from a medium or method, it comes from growing to know oneself.
Which is why I take offense to someone claiming that it selects for and requires skill. Especially because the ones making that argument are usually the ones arguing that they’re incapable of making art. I would tell them they just need to spend more time finding themselves.
And spend more time (and intentional effort) in making art! It's like people want a shortcut to end result, when "real" artists know that the process of self-discovery is the reason and means through which they make the art in the first place.
The map is not the territory. The purpose of the journey is the journey itself; the destination is simply a guiding star. A whole lot of aspirational mapmakers think if they only had "this one weird trick," they'd be gods.
Art is in the eye of the beholder.
Do you share your stories publicly? I’m curious what kind of stories you would write.
It would be cool to have an HN writing group!
It’s over here: https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/shards-of-a-br...
I like the pictures, and I can see how using AI would help a lot with that, especially in the context of existing characters, as matching styles and designs is something that AI is likely well-suited to do.
I read a bit about Shugo Chara to see what it's about, and it seems like an interesting series. The way you presented your story reminded me of Steins;Gate a bit with the reality manipulation.
Should I be familiar with the source material in order to appreciate your work better?
Thanks for sharing your work. Are you working on any other pieces?
Any anime recommendations, while you're here?
I've worked on other stories, but this is the only one right now. As to source material, knowing it would be beneficial, but it's all new to the protagonists and the only one I'd say is a must-have is Shugo Chara. Though not even that; several players did not know anything about Amu in advance. You'll be a little lost, but the wiki entry will suffice for giving you the basic idea. The story's set post-canon, with some divergences, so it starts off by trying to describe the current situation.
And anime... Magilumiere is great. Give it a try.
That's pretty cool! At first when I saw the boon/bane thing, I thought you were writing one of those RPG style choose your own adventure gamebooks I remember reading in the 90s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamebook
I wasn't disappointed, I just got my hopes up a bit. Once I figured out a bit more about the quest and how it worked, I didn't even look at the comments or votes, just went right to the reader mode.
Have you played any visual novel games or interactive fiction? I think you would be good at making one!
As for that anime, it seems neat from what I've read. I see that it's on Amazon Prime and also seems to have some fansubs maybe? How should I experience it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magilumiere_Co._Ltd.
As for myself, I just started watching the new 3D/CGI Gundam anime on Netflix, and it's pretty well done. I think they're using Unreal Engine to animate it, and the production values on it are really quite high, though I know 3D/CGI anime are controversial in the anime fandom, to say the least. I'm a Gundam fan though, and I like what they've done with the opportunity.
Maybe writing a story is your art… Part of self-discovery is in finding out how you desire to express yourself. There’s a reason many books have a an author and an illustrator.
Great if that’s how it works for you, but for me it’s a means to an end.
At one point in the movie his biographer says
> I think Elmyr's problem for years and the reason why he could not succeed as a painter in his own right was that the type of life he led prohibited him from having a personal vision.
Elmyr had great skill, greater than anyone alive perhaps, but he had nothing to say.
I would argue that he spoke volumes and had a vision so vast that he was able to take perspective from any other’s view. What a rich life Elmyr must have led.
All of us can already 'surface the inner world' (which I think is actually a pretty great definition of art, or part of one at least) - it's not skill based, it's practice based. Just start drawing, or writing or progaming with Processing or futzing with Ableton or what have you. Skill builds over time, expression needs no automation.
I don’t think the poor lad knows what Art is.
Put another way, we have hundreds of years of recorded philosophical texts and diatribes on what constitutes Art, and what art-making is. Often written by serious practitioners who dedicate their life to it rather than internet-dwelling dabblers and dilettantes. We have people who are deemed artists, not necessarily painters but people who are wired a certain way and are industrious with their abilities. Math geniuses attend certain schools and the other pupils may pick up a thing or two from them, but that doesn’t mean the other pupils are geniuses also. So too, do artists walk among us and may do what we do and we may imitate what they do. But that doesn’t put us on equal footing whatsoever.
Art doesn’t select for skill. This is a red herring and a misunderstanding. Art doesn’t select for anything, because if it did it wouldn’t be Art. This is an old somewhat trite topic that, historically, boiled down to no more than a pithy phrase: “Art cannot be taught.” as expounded by many teachers of incredible talent in their own right who have attempted to distill it into teachable material and realized their talent is not transferable as easily as they had hoped.
Most of what you read on this subject is nonsense sold to you by grifters who want your money. Now and today more than ever. I’m all for, say, “Art and Fear” and “The Art Spirit” and even a bit of “War of Art” to name some household items on the subject. These are all great recent texts. But let’s take these for what they are: self-help literature, and nothing more. The further back in literature you go the less of this patting-on-the-back attitude you get, and more serious the subject matter is treated (example: read the lectures on Art by the presidents of the Royal Academy, they are numerous, Archive has them all. One president basically tells students to choose a different profession, discussed as an aside topic in a book on portraiture from that time.)
Elsewhere in the comments people saying how art is simply good taste seem to be oblivious to the creations of artists that led them to make such a blundering conclusion. Your taste wouldn’t exist had an artist not created a thing to begin with.
We’ve used image generators for decades now. It gets the job done. The person using it may be an artist or just someone who wants a dynamic, changing generated image on the wall.
Thank you. I added those to my reading list. I don't think I ever delved into the topic.
<< Often written by serious practitioners who dedicate their life to it rather than internet-dwelling dabblers and dilettantes.
And yet, here we have someone not burdened by the serious business of art and gives his personal perspective on it. I am not saying a lot of everything is not mostly crap, because it mostly is, but I found this child-like honesty oddly endearing.
<< Art doesn’t select for skill.
Artist without a skill is just a dreamer, who can't put his vision into place. Barrier of entry has been lowered now, but I am relatively certain that was not always the case.
- cache the prompting somehow, unless you are doing dynamic stuff with the prompts, the language embeddings generated should be static (this depends on the architecture of the model that you are using, it's only possible with certain setups where the language processing is a separate part in the pipeline)
- consider fine-tuning an img to img model with your current outputs instead of using a language-coupled model. My intuition is that this is currently significantly over-engineered on the ML side.
- Play around with local hardware acceleration instead of sending everything to the cloud, you also probably don't need particularly high resolution for the images either.