It became my nightly listening for a couple of weeks in order to switch off and keep myself from doomscrolling after the absolute exhaustion of parenting three kids under 4. It knew it was inevitable, i knew the internet was in a process of becoming a pile of trash that we’d have to sort our way through to find what used to make it good - the inspiration and the connection. Despite my knowing, I hadn’t considered that we were there already, where I would have to be filtering my algorithm for music made by AI.

This revelation has fueled this feeling of a greater distrust and scepticism at everything I see on the internet (the distrust was already very strong).

In this case,  there was no obvious effort to announce it as AI music, a small disclaimer that had gone unnoticed in the info of the video states “this is produced by AI” but on a TV you don’t see this unless you go looking for it. My mind was running over this for days, how much is it AI? Is it entirely made up, some amalgamation of sounds and music that already exists or is it a playlist that has been pulled together and mixed by AI? I went down a rabbit hole and I found out that some artists who had been credited had been contacted and confirmed they had never contributed to this project and apparently comments mentioning AI were deleted. So this was certainly a case of the nature of something being obscured and hidden.

This is inherently my problem with AI (besides the data centres, knowledge theft, mass depletion of critical thinking and capacity for collective manipulation*) - there is a lack of human authenticity which is the point of art at all.

For many this might seem like a small and meaningless example, but the uncritical consumption of a large volume of anything is dangerous and at the very least we should know what we are watching and listening to, because alongside the unquestioning consumption of art/music is the unquestioning consumption of information which forms our worldview. The unconscious consumption of AI is made easy by the integration of their perfectly designed user experience that presents AI as the first thing you see on a search engine - but it’s not passive and inconsequential, it’s consumption is a vote for the tech oligarchs that are currently bypassing communities and local governments to build data centres in our backyards.

Over on Instagram it feels almost like a market place but it’s getting less and less obvious what ‘content’ is selling you things, ads between every couple of posts are less obvious than they used to be, influencer content, and all the trends that are co opted to convince you to buy something else (the latest is “5 things worth spending money on” which lists a couple branded specific items among mundane less specific items). My problem is not with influencers trying to sell things it is the ubiquity and the lack of transparency at the same time. 

I noticed this only when I step away from Instagram, I come back for a minute and it’s so obvious and uncomfortable, it is immediately apparent that Im being convinced to buy something or optimise myself every time I go on the app.

The catch is much of the optimisation then lives in our brain and becomes a sense of “we are not enough” because we’re too damn busy scrolling and trying to survive to act on all this messaging blasted at us in quick but potent doses, the only action perhaps is the purchasing of things advertised to us and of course that doesn’t fill the void, that’s the machine working exactly  as it was intended.

The things you buy that fill your home used to be your money which used to be your time and we give it away or more like we are robbed of it along with our attention and our sense of self. All to sell us things we don’t need while we listen to “music” that is appeasing but not human.

*none of these are a side note and I could write an essay on every single one of these atrocities but this piece is about art and AI.

Not only are lawns a colonial project but they’re also embedded in capatilism - the water required to maintain an appealing lawn as well as the use of chemicals, for people who bother with managing ‘weeds’ as well as the constant maintenance of mowing and specialty fertiliser. An incredibly heavy reliance on the supply chain and precious resources to simply maintain. It is an incredible effort to maintain homogeneity when all nature wants is diversity.

Today, the lawn is the default. The homogenisation of green spaces is the death of plant and insect diversity - the categorisation of free medicine and food as an unwanted weed in favour of a resource heavy lawn for the sole purpose of aesthetics is a telling summary of the state of our world. Imagine even half of all the lawns we see being native plants, herbs or edible plants, imagine the bird life and insect life we would invite back into our neighbourhoods. As a gardener it is the greatest compliment to see my garden attracting native bees (blue bees are my favourite guest), insects and new birds through the seasons. It is an acknowledgment that I’ve been able to offer something to our non-human neighbours while I build a home that grounds me.

My theory around having children is that they are amplifiers - you love harder than you’ve ever loved but you will also feel more of everything else - rage, anxiety, grief etc. The things that you aren’t the best at will become louder and louder until they are dealt with or they will become pain points of your existence as your children mirror you and trigger you. Being a parent is a process of constant expansion to hold it all in each changing moment. You will have moments of rage and overwhelm in between a moments of absolute joy and awe, it can all exist at once.

Now I’ve had twins I’m even more confident in this perspective because everything I’ve experienced from my first postpartum feels bigger this time around. Thankfully I have the wisdom and self-awareness to know that this is a season that we are all moving through but that only makes it a little easier. The isolation and loneliness of early motherhood, the overwhelm of being the primary carer, the hyper vigilance, the mental/emotional load. Everything is more. I didn’t know I could hold all of this. I crumble so often but I’m always in awe of myself because I never knew motherhood was this brutal, this transformational. It is relentless and lonely even though you are never ever alone. I used to pride myself on holding it all together, myself and for everyone else, now I fall apart often but I still get it done, I’m more resilient than I knew. The thing about holding everything together is that the invisible work (motherhood is and has always been invisible work) goes unnoticed and is simply expected - this is intentional and deeply rooted in the patriarchy and so if we are quiet and composed under all of this weight we continue as the mothers and martyrs in our individualistic society. As I’ve been more raw, more honest about my experiences I am met frequently with genuine offers of support in so many different forms (almost always from women/mothers but that’s for another day) from my community around me and I think this is my teaching from this postpartum. We are not meant to hold it all, we can’t, and when we don’t, that’s not a failing, it is authenticity and this is when people can start to help meet ours or our children’s needs and break the status quo of the lonely, composed but drowning mother.

Individually, to develop our own capacity to sit with uncertainty is a practice that requires tempering our tendency towards anxiety through imaginative and expansive practices and self-regulation, and it requires knowledge of your own agency and power, and some sense of trust in yourself. As a society, our creativity, agency and self-trust have been suppressed and we have been subdued into a sense of certainty that has created a condition of complacency, accepting what is as the only way and assuming that everything is fixed and unchangeable. The ability to be uncertain but still move with purpose and agency is essential in processes of transformation.

The speed that we operate at in our lives further fuels our inability to move into this flexible space full of possibility. For a long time, I had internalised the rigidity of society and this expectation of myself to move at the same rhythm as the world around me seemed to be moving, fast and always forward, always having answers and never being wrong. The truth is that growth and transformation take a whole lot of guessing, thinking, playing, mind-wandering and feeling. The time scale we live our lives by, the one imposed by technology has made us believe that everything must be immediate and efficient. But there are larger measures of time, the more natural rhythms - the seasons, the life of a tree, the cycles of the moon and planets. When you tune into these larger measures of time, you start to see yourself in them and how you move the same way the trees do or the planets do. There is more depth here that can’t possibly live in a rushed state of being. Wisdom emerges here through slowness where you can understand layers of information, contradictions and possibility in everything.

I am deep in the winter right now, seasonally in the Southern Hemisphere but in my body and mind too. The compost is slow to break down in the garden, the plants are slow to grow, with flowers being a rare occurrence, and it sometimes feels like I’m making no progress in my work. The only thing that reminds me of the time passing is my changing body 5 months into pregnancy. But for any lack of “progress” felt, this season has brought me a depth of knowledge that can only come from this seemingly quiet pace. More time reading books, building my skills in my creative practice, articulating my ideas so they might exist somewhere other than my journal and deeply reflecting on a past birth and how to move into this birth as an entirely different person.

For much of this wisdom I look to the compost. This is the act of using what we already have, getting comfortable with the phase that is less appealing to us, that is — the phase after something has served its purpose. But this is the conversion from what is familiar into pure nourishment. It is slow (especially in winter) and it’s a little bit gross. It has taken me a long time to build up my stomach to actually nurture and understand my compost in the way it needs to get the best results. For a long time I was off-put by the sight or the smell, the further it decayed, the less I could look at it or handle it. Composting is a simple act but for me it required an internal reframe – this is not another place for things to be simply disposed of, but a collaboration between myself and nature, between the past and the future, that will nourish whatever I choose to grow next, it requires a witnessing of decay and it requires patience – a reminder of a time scale beyond our daily rut, the mess of transformation and the natural rhythms of life and death and life again.

Creating art in any capacity is a revolutionary act. It requires us to find something inside us that wants to be expressed, it requires us to sit with ourselves for a long time without input and find information within yourself, and to physically alchemise something from nothing. It is a practice of agency, free will, as well as a practice of knowing yourself in a truly human way. Not as some data set, a list of skills or qualifications or anything else meaningless that has been assigned to us by the systems and institutions, but knowing your Self, and relating to the world, not simply absorbing it.

In a society where capitalism has colonised almost every facet of our lives and minds, stopping for long enough to find (or create) a void to create something seemingly without any external value whether it be financial or recognition, and only internal value is a deeply uncomfortable process. It is an unravelling of conditioning of self-worth, productivity and connection but ultimately, no matter the outcome, it is a small reclaiming of your Self in a world that seeks to drown it out.

Whatever you create from this void is a practice of emergence. ‘Good’ art comes from ‘bad’ art that we continue to practice until it is the expression of us we might want to share with someone outside of ourselves. On a very personal level, this process requires an acceptance of yourself in all of your expressions, which culturally, is a radical act of acknowledging your own inherent worth, no matter the form. Making art, whether for yourself or to share is an important tending to yourself, an essential balance of all the input of the external world that is trying to influence us, trigger us, isolate us or sell something to us, with something that is of you.