Manglecore and the Aesthetic of Strangeness
There’s an aesthetic that has come into vogue in AI art over the last couple years that I’m going to call “manglecore.”1 2 As the name suggests, it looks at the mangled distortions of faulty AI image generator outputs and embraces them. Anyone who has been online and involved with tech or art of late will likely know the look I’m referring to. It appears particularly among human subjects. Botched faces. Tangled limbs. Hands sprouting seven fingers, some of which appear to be melting. Unevenly...
Manglecore and the Aesthetic of Strangeness
There’s an aesthetic that has come into vogue in AI art over the last couple years that I’m going to call “manglecore.”1 2 As the name suggests, it looks at the mangled distortions of faulty AI image generator outputs and embraces them. Anyone who has been online and involved with tech or art of late will likely know the look I’m referring to. It appears particularly among human subjects. Botched faces. Tangled limbs. Hands sprouting seven fingers, some of which appear to be melting. Unevenly...
Artist Bingo: The ChatGPT Interview
My new conceptual art NFT collection, Artist Bingo, dropped today. I’ve spent the better part of the last five months working on it. Despite my efforts, I’ve had trouble getting any traditional media coverage on it. This isn’t a complaint—I don’t really blame publications for not wanting to cover early career artists. That being said, I’m still going to do my darndest to leverage their neglect for my own good. I have a lot to say about this project, and wanted a place to share long-form. I wa...
Artist Bingo: The ChatGPT Interview
My new conceptual art NFT collection, Artist Bingo, dropped today. I’ve spent the better part of the last five months working on it. Despite my efforts, I’ve had trouble getting any traditional media coverage on it. This isn’t a complaint—I don’t really blame publications for not wanting to cover early career artists. That being said, I’m still going to do my darndest to leverage their neglect for my own good. I have a lot to say about this project, and wanted a place to share long-form. I wa...
The Joys of Tragedy
This is the last essay I wrote as a philosophy major at Notre Dame. It builds on my earlier work in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and aesthetics, and draws on my background in psych. Though my thoughts in these matters have since developed, this essay should serve as useful context as I post more on these topics in the coming months.Nietzsche’s first published book, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, or The Birth of Tragedy as it is more simply known, provides a rousing justi...
The Joys of Tragedy
This is the last essay I wrote as a philosophy major at Notre Dame. It builds on my earlier work in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and aesthetics, and draws on my background in psych. Though my thoughts in these matters have since developed, this essay should serve as useful context as I post more on these topics in the coming months.Nietzsche’s first published book, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, or The Birth of Tragedy as it is more simply known, provides a rousing justi...
Material Vignette 000
Each Material piece has a story behind it. The artwork was added to the jeans by a specific person at a specific time and place for a specific reason. That person meant something to me. That moment meant something to me. Every time I mint a new piece in the series, I write the story behind it—a “vignette”—and store it in the NFT’s metadata. The artwork on the jeans and the story behind it are inseparable, and the Material NFTs are a way of etching that relationship in stone. The passage below...
Material Vignette 000
Each Material piece has a story behind it. The artwork was added to the jeans by a specific person at a specific time and place for a specific reason. That person meant something to me. That moment meant something to me. Every time I mint a new piece in the series, I write the story behind it—a “vignette”—and store it in the NFT’s metadata. The artwork on the jeans and the story behind it are inseparable, and the Material NFTs are a way of etching that relationship in stone. The passage below...
2022, 2023
One of my goals for this year is to write more. Writing feels like something I’m “called to do.” I’m not sure exactly what this means, but I know what it feels like.¹ Unfortunately, I hate writing. My saving grace is that I love it slightly more than I hate it. And so it is that I keep coming back. I’ll save the paean to my relationship with writing for another day. For today, I just want to write, to get something out there. Good writing requires getting into a habit, a groove, building up a...
2022, 2023
One of my goals for this year is to write more. Writing feels like something I’m “called to do.” I’m not sure exactly what this means, but I know what it feels like.¹ Unfortunately, I hate writing. My saving grace is that I love it slightly more than I hate it. And so it is that I keep coming back. I’ll save the paean to my relationship with writing for another day. For today, I just want to write, to get something out there. Good writing requires getting into a habit, a groove, building up a...
