Tips & tricks for negotiating The Metaverse with...... Pooky Amsterdam
We are on the cusp of turning over greater and greater art creation to AI: from illustration to million dollar NFT images, the latter generated using different algorithms, instead of hand skills. It's everywhere. Humans have created works of art with their hands for hundreds of thousands of years, using craft to enrich and enliven our environs with materials we choose to work with to make beautiful things. While the electronic medium is not quite paint, thread or glass beads, it is profound enough to allow all who use it a chance to hone their skills in their chosen areas of computercraft.
Q: With so much being created in The Metaverse with AI, will people still make things with their hands?
Craft is an intimate working overtime in a medium which improves on the quality of what is being made. Computercraft uses hand skills, just not the ones we know of traditionally, but it is a craft.
Craft-making has emerged and surged in the past after mechanical movements such as the machine age at the turn of the last Century, saw Gustav Stickley and the emerging of American Arts & Crafts.
And more recently there's been a wave of crafted works which loom large in their totality of environment, such as Liza Lou's Kitchen and her beaded works, Kate Jenkins knitted food and new terms like Indie Folk which describe colab crafts of art. Work done by the human hand contains the lifeblood of whose fingers gave rise to it, intricate, repetitive, exacting and overtime, with memory of its own.
We have been developing tools to create, more and more with greater and greater ability but this turns pixels into masterpieces. Though they may not exist in the physical world, a great amount of attention and handwork goes into creating not only the computer programs, but the works of art they create with Mid-Journey, DALL-E or Imagen.
Witnessing a watershed moment with the rise of AI and machine-learning we can generate multiple images which are visually impressive and emotionally convincing with increasingly fewer dollars as the machine does the work, it's just our prompts which need better crafting. We are still learning how to talk to the machine. This is such a big field for investment now that is raising billions, AI artists are a niche in VC funding.
We live in a maker economy, and creators are amongst the most important folks in The Metaverse right now, as they or we, are the ones who are bringing the virtual goods in to buy and sell. For example, with a GDP economy of $600M Second Life as a Metaverse understands how important items crafted for the end users are. And important not just as the commerce of a platform, but for reasons people want to go there and stay.
I recall doing some artwork in GIMP recently, having to erase a fairly intricate shadow, and loved the repetitive but careful way my hand needed to eliminate something on the screen. Computer work is handwork, it is just of a different nature, and perhaps the prompts it gives us also help with imagining alternatives for more traditional items in ever more fantastic ways. It can inspire us in ways we could not imagine before, just as painters and artisans have for thousands of years.
The use of the mouse or an algorithm as a tool, or a knitting needle, takes hands to create. Our digits, or vocal prompts are utilized so that over time the work we do gets better.
The computer is another tool, we humans are the ones who can choose how we spend a lifetime improving our skills in any of a variety of areas and disciplines. AI will not change that, our motivation still comes from within, and the Metaverse can inspire us by showing so many facets of this technology, from start-ups presenting in the Metaverse, to Beautiful NFT artwork being shown there, that we will be inspired by these new tools.
We are so creative and determined a species that we can even create "mind children" who can wholly function, create on their own and tell us about it, as this surprisingly intricate and articulate robot artist does named Ai-Da.
"One machine can do the work of 50 ordinary men, no machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." So said Elbert Hubbard, the renowned founder of the Roycroft Artisan Community. What would he say about the extraordinary machines of today?
If you have a question, please email info@pookystudio.com with Metaquette in the subject and it will be answered!
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