I’ve flopped on the #100dayproject more times than I count and when I was thinking about trying again this year I got all up in my feelings about “failing” so many times and then realized the biggest obstacle I’ve always faced was overthinking things and making so many rules for myself there was literally no way I could have “succeeded.”
Art brain is exhausting when you’re all over the place creatively.
How do you pick something you won’t get bored doing 100 days in a row when there are so many different types of things you create?!?
It occurred to me the answer to this question is simple: stop thinking.
So…not thinking too much is the goal here. Literally the only goal. Following my interests. Working quickly and intuitively. Letting the work suggest the path and following that parth.
Easier said than done 😬
Let’s talk about this!
Since I was already following a path when the 100 Day Project kicked off I decided to keep working with it. I’ve been doing a lot of generating images in Midjourney and playing around with storytelling and illustrating and collaging so I decided to dig into practicing my digital collage skills.
Digital collage isn’t something I’ve worked with much because I like the challenge of paper collage — you have to make the pieces fit together as they are.
So I made the first one as low-effort as possible. AI image + collaged/glitched physical midcentury advertisement.
Before you @ me…yes, I’m fucking around with AI. Way back when I first dipped my toes in I wasn’t sure I could. Relying on a robot to make art for me based on the words I fed it felt too easy.
But this?
This is different.
It’s collage in a way I’ve never experienced. Instead of hunting down images in my stockpile of books/magazines I’m mining ideas from my brain in collaboration with AI and combining those ideas into work that would never have been possible using the paper sources at my disposal because these images literally don’t exist without the suggestion I make to AI to create them.
I love this.
I may not do it forever but right now it’s a lot of fun pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
Anyway, I know I can do better than the first one. So here:
One thing I’ve learned over the years is that I’m susceptible to accidental habits. Like, have a giant bowl of vanilla ice cream with honey and cinnamon one night, sure. No problem. Do that two nights in a row? Eh, it won’t hurt. On the third night there’s a little resistance creeping in but easy enough to ignore. On the fourth night, though, there’s no argument – ice cream before bed is now a thing.
Bam.
Accidental habit.
Whoopsie. 🤦♀️🤷♀️
Luckily it’s easy enough to avoid. I just never do the same thing twice in a row. Including art. 😘
Which is why I run on pizza:
Weird thing I noticed about Midjourney is that while my prompt included “1960s” most of the images generated included women runners. That wasn’t at all a thing in the 60s – it wasn’t until 1966 that Roberta Gibb was the first woman to run the Boston Marathon and even then only after concealing her gender and hiding behind some bushes so she could sneak into the race (women weren’t allowed to officially run the Boston Marathon until 1972 🙄).
I only note this because it made me wonder about lots of things. Does Midjourney understand history well enough to generate historically accurate images…or will it someday? Is inclusiveness baked into Midjourney’s programming and that’s why women were included in what I generated? Does Midjourney even know what it means when I include dates in my prompts? Will the people using Midjourney based on a set of assumptions (i.e., I type a date, Midjourney generates images, I accept those images as an accurate representation of what that date means) question the output?
And just like that Rule No. 1 of #100daysofnotoverthinking has been violated.🤦♀️🤷♀️
Anyway I had pizza for dinner the night after I ran so that’s why this exists.
Please don’t ask me to explain this next one I was pressed for time.
This next one, though, is kind of where I realized I wanted to spend more time on these collages.
Mondays amirite?
I had to have an ultrasound of my uterus to make sure my IUD was still in my cervix where it belonged and I say this here because I can’t say cervix or IUD in Midjourney which is ridiculous when I can say…
…uterus in Midjourney which leads to fun Three Faces of Eve references, and I can also say birth control and medical procedure but not surgery.
I’m not someone who pokes the AI bear to see what nonsense I can get it to do especially in Midjourney’s case because it’s become a valuable tool for me. I understand why some terms are banned but in these particular instances it shows some programming biases or lack of education or something…because why uterus but not cervix? Why medical procedure but not surgery? It feels annoyingly arbitrary.
Anyway, did you hear about the time I was cooking and a bit of dirt on the counter I was about to clean up was actually A FUCKING SPIDER WHICH RAN ACROSS THE COUNTER
What would Julia have done? I can hear her laughing as I write this.
🤷♀️
But…here’s where my brain started to try to impose rules and structure on what’s supposed to be NOT OVERTHINKING. I wanted to dig into a theme and incorporate x number of images and blah blah blah and had to push back hard against that.
Art isn’t a thing you make. It’s your unique way of showing up in whatever form that takes.
Just happens that I love working with midcentury inspired images I created in Midjourney right now. That might change over the course of the next 89 days, we’ll see.
Anyway, please know if you interact with me in any way whatsoever something you say or do will likely be immortalized in art.
Bork bork bork.
Maybe someday I’ll tell you the story about how I laughed at the idea of digital photography because who the hell would ever want to look at pictures on a computer? 🙄
If you’re into NFTs, I’ve been minting these on objkt!
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