I’ve felt for a while that this endeavor remains vital, and Sky World: Infinite Blue marks the indefinite continuation of my practice making these, starting with 25 new images from 2025. I had been planning on a sequel since mid-last year, but 2026 introduced a fairly large wrinkle: I can’t make art. For my performance The Artist Is Absent, I’m in the midst of a one year performance in which I’m not allowed to make art, handing over my practice instead to an AI model trained on my work to replace me. So I showed it how to make Sky World pieces too. The model is on a continuous, autonomous loop scanning the web for images that define this moment, curating them, and using the crafting process I taught it to render them in the Sky World aesthetic.

This is the first new body of work I’m selling made entirely by my model. I’ll close with some words from a critic friend who spoke about the series quite articulately:

“Sky World, in rendering reality as a video game, reveals something about it that documentary photography never could. The video game graphics don’t trivialize it. Instead, the aesthetic distance produced by the game-world treatment paradoxically allows viewers to feel the events more acutely. The simulation here doesn’t replace the real, but rather makes it legible again. We’ve been so overexposed to images of war, disaster, and politics that only the estranging filter of a game engine is able to break through our numbness.”

Sky World forever.

Kevin Esherick, “The Artist is Absent”, was at Heft Gallery, New York, February 11 to March 14, 2026. The exhibition included two new bodies of work: Homages (2026) and Ablation Studies (2026).

On July 23, 2024, Kevin Esherick shared a letter titled The Artist is Absent. “The aim is to render myself superfluous,” he wrote in a single sentence separated from the rest of the text by a line break.

The white page with black text mimicked a mechanical typewriter. An unhinted anti-aliased slab serif type with a resolution high enough to be legible but low enough to imitate the effect of a bleed around the letters, or at least how a bleed would be rendered on a digital screen, asks the viewer to question what is real, authentic, and/or remediated.1 Available for minting, the open edition also served as form and metaphor: the possibility of an ever-expanding corpus that resides out of the hands of the artist.

Like in many of his generative works such as Artist Bingo (2023), the boundaries between Esherick the individual, Esherick the artist, and Esherick’s audience blur. The rules he sets are always designed to dissolve his autonomy as much as possible until at the very end his own work won’t be made by him. He’ll be rendered superfluous.

The artist’s solo exhibition at Heft Gallery, “The Artist is Absent”, marked the beginning of an experiment that was to take place over the following year: letting an AI model trained on Esherick’s own work replace his practice.2 On the occasion of the show, Esherick spoke about how his interrogation of technology departs from the continental canon concerning authorship and authenticity that traditionally focused on interpretation, ambiguity, and contextual structures: to ask not what happens after the author’s death, but rather, what if there was never an author to begin with?

Michael Assis: “Esherick, posing as Cindy Sherman, posing as Esherick, posing as an artist,” reads the text for his After Cindy (2026). This isn’t just about posing, it’s about becoming someone else, about surrendering your personal identity, much as Sherman herself was trying to highlight the ways in which all of our identities are constructed by various cultural norms.

A lot of the exhibition “The Artist is Absent” has to do with relinquishing autonomy, not only in relation to the final artifact or artwork, but also of your own self. Your self, in more senses than one, becomes a publicly performed event where your personal identity is deconstructed, reconstructed, and subsumed by external forces you introduce into your creative network.

These blurrings, as your letter from 2024 that opens the exhibition says, will eventually lead to “rendering yourself superfluous” within the artistic networks you set in motion. How do you locate this exhibition in relation to your previous works and artistic trajectory?

Kevin Esherick: Identity is a thread that has run through my work from the beginning. Not so much about any particularities of identity, but about the ontological and metaphysical questions around it — what is identity, what constitutes it, how do we communicate and reshape it?

Early projects like Material (2021) and Artist Bingo explicitly engaged this theme. Material considered identity as a constellation of people, places, and memories, then asked what happens when I relinquish control of my life to them. Artist Bingo let people play my life and career as a game of bingo comprising the hallmarks of artistic identity. Hyperportraits (2025) examine what comes of identity under the ontological regime of a technology (AI) that treats everything as replicable.

This show continues this theme in two distinct ways. With Homages, where I trained image models to make new works in the styles of some of my favorite contemporary artists, I’m asking questions both of myself and those artists. I’m wondering what comes of style as particular to an individual when it becomes a fluid, replicable thing (as it increasingly will in the coming years).

On my end, I’m trying to break down the boundaries of myself or become something else entirely, to inhabit the mind and way of seeing the world of another person/artist, and to use that as a means of understanding and reflecting my own world. There’s also a recognition of and wrestling with the futility or tragedy of this endeavor.

The second place I really reflect on identity here is the performance of The Artist Is Absent. This one-year performance, in which I cede my artistic practice to a model trained on my own works, asks what comes of a person when a role core to their identity is usurped by AI. Through many of these projects there’s this thread of desire for something like transcendence or liberation, to be something more than I am.

MA: After Botticelli (2026) is derived from Botticelli’s Glasgow Annunciation (c. 1490), heralded as early as 1919 as work of art “with a composition that’s highly original” and “a personally felt scheme entirely different from the usual repetitions by minor artists”.3 The art historian Martin Kemp described it in 1977 as “one of the most eccentrically individual works of the Renaissance to be found anywhere”.4 However, it is precisely those marks of individualism that are eroded in the processes you investigate and employ, which seem to mark a return to abstracted forms that register as an indiscernible template or format.

Tell us about the process there, and about the role that abstraction plays in your works?

KE: AI, and really all of information technology, is first and foremost a paradigm of abstraction. The telegraph abstracted information into electrical signals so it could be transmitted over long distances. LLMs [large language models] abstract multi-modal world knowledge into matrices that render everything we’ve ever known into fluid raw material for semantic computation. I’m interested in what abstraction does to us, and AI is ripe for artistic exploration of that question because it engages not only linguistic but also visual forms of abstraction.

The Ablation Studies engage abstraction in a couple ways. For one, they’re visually abstract in the classic sense — they’re hazy looking, turning their source material (paintings from the art historical canon) into abstract versions of themselves. But they also point to a [form of] computational abstraction involved in their own making, wherein models digest images into a latent space represented by sets of large numbers and spit them back out as images, transformed.

The Botticelli Annunciation and its individuality underscore one of the effects of abstraction I’m looking at here, because it’s precisely that individuality that the Ablation Studies process washes away. As a series, they take a diverse set of paintings from across art history and erode them into a single homogeneously abstract style. This is a microcosm of models’ tendency to favor the modal input types from their training data in their outputs. LLMs spew the homogenized, sycophantic, corporate slopspeak we’ve come to recognize, while image models do their own homogenization dance with the over-polished “Midjourney aesthetic”.

The Ablation Studies wonder about the past and future of art under these conditions of generative media, and the role of the artist’s hand therein. But they also argue that when models are taken as frontiers to be explored and creatively misused (as making these pieces entailed), rather than simply taken at face value, they can yield something beautiful.

Abstraction also shifts the original paintings from compositions into something more like symbols or icons. Where before they were made up of discrete parts that yielded meaning through their relation to one another, abstraction diffuses them into singular, holistic entities, creating ambient spaces for contemplation (think Mark Rothko, Yves Klein’s monochromes, or religious iconography), but ones which still gesture to the paintings they derive from. The details are smoothed away, but contours remain. This is something I’m often trying to produce in my work — a system, symbol, or set of circumstances to provoke and entice the viewer to sit with questions and ideas.

Susan Sontag wrote in Against Interpretation of the need for an “erotics of art”. By this she meant something like a reinvigoration of art as a bacchanal of sensory energy, rather than an intellectual thing to be interpreted. I would argue, in contrast, for an “erotics of the mind”. Thought can be sensuous too. I want to engage people in that pleasure.

MA: This idea of abstraction and the contemplative moment marks a return to similar purposes that religious art served in the Middle Ages. Abbot Suger (1081-1151), for instance, suggested “anagogia”, a spiritual ascent, through the movement from the material towards the immaterial.5 Colored light emanating from stained glass windows became a stepping stone to reflection on the divine by making “transparent” divine light possible to experience. Similarly, your images make visual what is inhabited in latent space, mathematical orchestrations that are not meant to be “seen” by human eyes in the traditional way, but to be seen by machines.

Furthermore, your works form networks between you and other interlocutors, whether machine or human, recalling what has recently been labelled the networked image: “a new form of social relations between machine and human, that also includes images made for machines”.6

As far as images made for machines, this also speaks to the idea of “operational images” introduced by the filmmaker and theorist Harun Farocki and later defined as “images that are not necessarily representational or pictorial ... they primarily operate … troubling what an image is .. and they are involved in an intervention in the world”.7 Trevor Paglen has also contributed to this discourse; something to which you have a homage in the exhibition.

How do you see the relationship between machine seeing and human seeing play out through your work? Are we meant to “see and/or experience it like a machine”?

KE: I started working with questions around machine seeing or machine phenomenology for my series In Utero in 2024, where I tried to envision what the cognition or “mind” of an image model might look like, or how we could imagine such a thing coming into being. Forms (2025) continued this, considering whether models hold something akin to the Platonic forms, and devising a technical process to produce images approximating them.

Hyperportraits juxtapose a familiar subject with the very foreign and incredibly powerful ways models internally represent that subject, yielding “operational languages,” more than “images”. Ablation Studies continues in the pursuit of a machine phenomenology by looking to the ways models consume and transform images.

All of these collections involve turning the models inside out to render their fundamentally alien inner workings more understandable for humans. The goal is both protective — to familiarize us with the systems playing ever more central roles in our lives — and prospective: to conceive new ways of looking, perceiving, and being. I want to help better acquaint people with these systems so that we might gain some measure of control, have grounds on which to form critique, and wield technology in service of beauty.

MA: Art has always been a battleground around the discussion concerning the role of technologies. Building on operational images, the artist Hito Steyerl also became anxious about technology, trying to come up with ways of “not being seen” digitally, like shrinking to a size smaller than a pixel, chroma-keying her face, or being female over 50.8 There is a lot of pushback today on AI as a technology that undermines privacy and even humanity itself.

This fear and skepticism can also be seen all the way back in the dawn of digital art in the 1960s and ’70s where, as the digital art historian Grant D. Taylor notes in his aptly titled book When the Machine Made Art, digital art was the orphan child of modernism and postmodernism: rejected by modernism for not being original, authentic, or having “authorship” in the sense of the Pollock-ian artist’s hand; and rejected by postmodernism for its identification with the technology as a means of control, surveillance, and political authoritarianism.9

However, for artists like Marcel Breuer and the Bauhaus a few decades earlier, technology and industrialization was a way of bringing “good design” that would lead to a “good life” for the masses; but in the ’70s and ’80s these sensibilities were deemed authoritarian by postmodernism that broke down the possibility of an absolute good and bad.

Where do you see yourself and your work fall in this discourse?

KE: The easiest stance to have on AI as an artist right now is to hate it. The second easiest is to love it. I want to take the difficult stance, which is to detach from the comfort of a prepackaged ideological stance and look at “AI” as a complex agglomeration of interrelated things, some of which improve and some of which degrade the quality of human lives.

The trap within this stance lies in allowing that complexity to overwhelm us into a technological relativism that says it’s neither good nor bad — the old “guns don’t kill people” shtick. I’d have a hard time finding anyone who would argue that penicillin or CRISPR-based cancer drugs — both “technologies” — made the world a worse place, whereas the value of Facebook and the nuclear bomb would likely draw a lot more contest.

It’s a matter of how you scope the technology in question. We still need to pass judgment on certain technologies as harmful or beneficial, but we also need to exercise that judgment in light of an idea of what makes up a good life. I want my practice to form a picture of this good life. There are various paths to accomplishing this, but a primary one for me concerns finding ways to live with technology in a manner that enriches us as human beings.

How can technology enable us to live better lives, not as an optimization process, but with respect to a holistic conception of human flourishing? The Luddite or anarcho-primitivist view argues that this flourishing lies in a world without technology.

If we were still in the Garden of Eden, or had never opened Pandora’s Box, or [insert your prelapsarian metaphor here], I would maybe be of that stance. But as it stands, the backward path is untenable and we need to think critically about what it looks like to live a life integrated with and bettered by technology.

MA: Last, I want to talk about the performance aspect of this exhibition, and some thoughts for the future. You talk a lot about your works in the same breath as performance, can you say a few words on how this plays out in the show?

KE: A driving force throughout my practice, and my life more generally, is a view of life itself as an aesthetic phenomenon. It is art-like, if not art per se. I mean this in something closest to the Nietzschean sense, where the aesthetic is the gateway to the metaphysical, and the underlying structure of reality itself has something to do with meaning and metaphor.

From this vantage point, the bare elements of life become more amenable to being dubbed “art”. I strongly dislike the “everything is art” platitude, because not everything is art, but anything can be art. And when raw experience is recast as art, “performance” is usually the most sensible category to place it in. This is the sense in which my work often has elements of performance.

I’m quite disinclined toward the act of performing, so it’s only through the aestheticization of things I’m already doing that I’m really cut out for it. I guess the other way performance threads through my work is that the work often consists of interactions with systems. It’s a collection of processes as much as it’s a collection of artifacts, and in art a process is most at home in the performance bucket.

This show features two main elements of performance. The Artist Is Absent, my one-year performance of letting this model take my place, obviously fits the bill, and does so by way of both of my species of performativity. For one, it takes me simply “doing life” as my forebear Tehching Hsieh would put it, literally making no art, and casting it as art. And it’s also in the exhaust of a technological system (the practice of my model replacement) that the performance arises.

The other place performance arises within the exhibition is more purely the latter form, where acting within a system amounts to an ambient procedural artwork. This is happening with the Homages, in which I systemically embodied the identities of the artists I was homaging. AI models enable us to emulate even things as complex and abstract as identity, so I really tried to inhabit the artists’ perspectives to mirror this emulation process.

This became most overt, and most clearly performance, in After Marina (2026) in which I restaged Marina Abramović’s iconic The Artist Is Present with a convincing fake Marina. She was outfitted in prosthetics modeled after Marina’s face, sat in a replica of the chair she sat in, and wore a replica of the iconic red dress from the original performance. The resulting facsimile of Marina represented the ultimate stakes here, shepherding the audience from questions on the changing role of the artist’s hand to ones around the place of human presence.

MA: What’s next for you?

KE: Letting the machine completely replace me for a year. With the end of my show at Heft I formally started the one-year period of not making art. So for me as artist, up next is an empty void. For my model as me as artist, I can’t say exactly what’s coming because I don’t exactly know — it’s not up to me.

What I do know is that the model will make works that I’m genuinely proud of and excited about, because it can. Because the aim of the performance isn’t to pooh-pooh the creative capabilities of models, but to take them as a given and ask how we are to adapt in light of them.

And lastly, for me as a person outside of art, I’m going to try to spend time on things that my near-exclusive devotion to art over the last several years has come at the expense of. Writing and making some money are top of mind. I’m also planning to be scouting locations up and down the East Coast for a (non-art) project that will unfold over decades, if all goes well.

Michael Assis is a PhD candidate at Bard Graduate Center in New York and a part-time faculty member at Parsons School of Design. His work dissertation, “Decentralized Objects”, examines theoretical issues raised by art on the blockchain. Beyond academia, Assis is also the co-founder of Artistoric, an art gallery specializing in decorative arts, and the co-founder of Artfora, a Web3 platform that pairs physical objects with non-fungible tokens.

Kevin Esherick is an American artist and writer based in New York. Informed by his background in philosophy, psychology, and technology, his work touches on subject matter from consciousness to consumerism to the experience of loss, and mediums from denim to algorithms to generative AI. It has been exhibited at Expanded Art in Berlin and Sotheby’s, Heft Gallery, and the AI Psychosis Summit in New York, as well as the Hirshhorn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art (albeit without their permission).

ANIKA MEIER Kevin, you set out to replace yourself as an artist with AI. Why?

KEVIN ESHERICK The project began a few years ago with a simple but unsettling idea: to train an AI model on me and let it replace me. Back in 2023, I was thinking a lot about where AI was headed. I was worried not only about its impact on the arts, how it might change the relationship between an artist’s hand and the artwork, but also about what it could mean for the broader economy, for jobs, and for the sources of meaning people deriarts and from their work. You can trace that trajectory back to Deep Blue defeating Garry Kasparov in the 1990s, and then to AlphaGo in the 2010s. AI keeps moving into domains we once considered uniquely human, areas that aren’t just technically challenging but deeply meaningful to us. Now that same trajectory is reaching software development and many other professions. I wanted to experience that shift firsthand.

AM How did you go about replacing yourself?

KE I designed a year-long performance in which an AI model would replace me entirely. The project forced me to confront what it feels like to have my own skills displaced, and to ask whether we actually care if an artist’s work is produced by technology. Is the production of images and artifacts meaningful because it emerges from a particular mind? Or does it ultimately need to come from a flesh-and-blood human being? The model isn’t just a generic AI that generates interesting ideas. I’ve tried to make it an extension of myself. It reads my daily notes, knows what’s happening in my life, and is deeply connected to my personal context. In that sense, it’s rooted in my personhood as much as it possibly can be. But it’s still not me. It’s not the flesh-and-blood Kevin.

AM Where does that leave the role of the artist?

KE I’m not making art myself right now. That’s really the central question. What changes when your creative practice shifts from being embodied to becoming part of a cybernetic system, an exoskeleton of yourself rather than yourself? I think of it as a possible future for the studio assistant. Instead of someone like Jeff Koons employing a hundred people, you could imagine a swarm of AI agents deeply embedded in your personal context, capable of understanding which ideas are most likely to emerge from you and best reflect your psyche. What happens when a person is gradually pushed out of their own labor, and with it, their sense of meaning? Do we still value the art as long as it’s rooted in the artist in some way? Or do we begin to care more about what happens to the person who’s being displaced?

Read the rest here!

The following is a preview of an essay that I published this week with Le Random, one of the premier editorials for the digital art world. The piece is a scene-report-cum-cultural-analysis examining the AI Psychosis Summit, a hard-to-describe event involving creative projects made with AI tools. I showed art at the Summit back in April and took some notes on the experience, which eventually gave rise to this essay. You can find it in full on Le Random.

I’m in a sweaty, dimly lit room in the heart of NoDi, New York’s hottest new microneighborhood. Time and time again passersby in the mingling crowd ask me the same question: “What the hell is going on here?”

I’m at the AI Psychosis Summit, which is not really a summit and which, depending on your definition of “AI psychosis,” might not really have anything to do with AI psychosis. It is also—and I hate to use this word but it really is apt here—the buzziest event of the year within a certain branch of the digital art scene, of which, if you’re reading this, you are probably a part.

Yes, in a year marked by two additional Art Basel Zero 10s, the Node Foundation opening, a growing digital art presence at the Venice Biennale and cryptoart acquisitions at MoMA, among others—some real institutional moments for a once-fledgling scene—the most exciting moment of all came from a small, grimy, DIY event in a defunct, graffiti-covered bank in New York City’s Chinatown. So what was it?

Read the essay in its entirety on Le Random.

Photo credits to Elizabeth Clayton and Max Silverman (header/thumbnail)

Probably many of these things and more. It probably involves some ship of Theseus-style principle of continuity. Probably some “more than the sum of its parts” action, right? Perhaps a little je ne sais quoi? But there’s some central “there” there, some essence, no? Maybe it can’t be distilled down to anything. Maybe it can? Maybe that’s what we call a soul.

Can AI capture soul? Can AI capture your soul? The coming age of AI predominance will increasingly confront us with these and a cluster of similar questions around them. Who are you? Can AI capture that? Can identity be virtualized? Should it be?

Embeddings, a core feature of almost all contemporary AI models, serve as a potent symbol of and entry point into understanding why these models provoke such questions. So what are embeddings? A good high level description, I think, is that they’re a way of representing concepts and the relationships between them through numbers. The second part of that—representing not just concepts, but the relationships between them—is critical, because it means that they can interact with one another. Things only mean things in relation to one another, and AI’s power is in its capacity to grasp and produce meaning—to structure relations between things. It’s super easy to represent concepts alone through numbers, and if embeddings did only this they would basically be useless. You can arbitrarily assign meanings like house = 1, camel = 2, gourd = 3, ad infinitum—a number for every concept! But this encoding system doesn’t capture the relationships between concepts. Two houses do not a camel make.

Embeddings change this, creating a mathematical system of relations between concepts. They’re formed when an AI model is trained. You can think of a model as a kind of tiny universe of meaning, where more similar things are closer to one another in a very high-dimensional (“hyperdimensional”) space. Concepts gain meaning through their embeddedness in this shared abstract space, referred to as latent space. A model contains a coordinate system that maps concepts and their semantic proximity in latent space. Per the classic example, take the coordinates for king, subtract man, add woman, and you arrive at (roughly) the coordinates for queen. These coordinates are what we mean by embeddings.

Their significance, then, is no less than the invention of a semantic geometry. Through embeddings, we’ve bridged the numerical and the semantic, the quantitative and the qualitative, creating a fluid yet systematic field of meaning through numbers. That duality forms the basis for the paradigm of generative media—organic, cogent text and images, produced by massive clusterfucks of digits.

Enter Hyperportrait I. Hyperportrait I (“one”) is a self portrait by way of embedding. What does that mean? As we said earlier, an embedding is a numerical representation of a concept held by a model. The concept preserves its meaning because the model captures its relationship to the rest of reality. Hyperportrait I was made by training a model on images of me such that it develops an internal visual representation of who I am. That representation is my embedding, and that embedding, extracted from the model, is what you’re seeing in this piece.1 As art dealer extraordinaire Sofia Garcia pithily described it, it’s a “self portrait in latent space.” It’s a portrait of the abstract idea of me.

For the first time ever, we have a way of meaningfully representing that idea, or any idea, in a rich and usable yet concise form. Again, this is the novelty of generative AI. There’s an argument to be made that an embedding is the most potent form of abstraction ever produced. It’s not an encoding for a bunch of photos of me. It’s a learned representation, like the abstract idea you have of someone in your head. It gets activated in specific ways when you picture them in various contexts, and each of those reimaginings is made possible by the fact that you have a robust, multifaceted understanding of what they look like that transcends any static image.

So too with generative AI. The embedding in Hyperportrait I can be re-injected into a model and used to make all kinds of images of me. It can depict me rocking a mustache, as an emperor in a Roman marble bust, in the style of a Van Gogh painting, or in a ménage à trois with myself (try it out!). It is, in essence, a portrait that contains all other portraits.

Plato hypothesized the existence of a realm of pure ideas called the “Forms”, from which all things in our perceivable reality derive.2 Any given chair you see is a specific, and thereby limited, manifestation of the abstract Form of the chair. Embeddings can be thought of as a kind of technologically-mediated Platonic Forms, the pure idea of the concept they represent, from which any specific generated depiction is born. Hyperportrait I, by this metaphor, is a “Platonic portrait.”

There is in these numbers, then, a me that’s more me than any lone painting or photo could ever capture. They present the embedding as the pinnacle of modernist abstraction. It’s an evolution in the tradition of Cubist and Futurist ideas around depicting subjects in time; of Kandinsky’s and Malevich’s ventures beyond the realm of representation; of whatever bullshit Duchamp was on; of Yves Klein’s efforts to conjure the immaterial; and of Bernar Venet’s mathematical diagrams, which sought to bring the language of pure scientific abstraction into art.

However, where so many of these artists and their works championed abstraction as a freedom from representation, an end to be pursued for its own sake, Hyperportrait I takes a position of skepticism. Information technology and modern art have shared over the last century in the pursuit of ever-greater abstraction, and it’s worth asking for a moment toward what end. Hyperportrait I is thus intended to demand meditation on the abstraction itself. There’s a dissonance formed by the juxtaposition of this abstraction, a giant heap of numbers, with its subject, a flesh-and-blood human being.3 A person, to us, is the polar opposite of an abstraction. So what kind of future does it portend when we give technology the keys to abstraction of the human? Not just the visual image of humans either, but our psychic likeness. LLMs produce an abstraction of cognition itself. From here, the abstraction of identity is mere steps away.

Ironically, this probably all sounds very abstract. Who cares if “the abstraction of identity is mere steps away”? What does that even mean? What it means in practice, or at least threatens, is that as our cognition becomes abstracted away, our jobs go with it. As our creativity becomes abstracted away, our artistic pursuits go with it. As our personality becomes abstracted away, our relationships go with it. In each instance we stand to be replaced by artificial entities that can (seemingly) perform our function and serve our needs better than any “mere” human ever could. When you successfully abstract something, you gain the ability to replace the original with the abstraction. We abstract everything around us away until we ourselves end up washed away by the process. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe we’ll live better lives when everything we interface with is a tamed abstraction tailored to our needs. My guess is that we won’t. Every abstraction is by definition lossy. The map is not the territory.

Is abstraction bad, then? The question feels leading because it runs counter to an implicit teleology embedded in modern society (onward, abstraction!), but I’m genuinely not sure of the answer. The hope with this work isn’t to convince, but to pull the viewer into a wrestling match with some questions that bear asking. What is abstraction for? How does it serve us, in technology and art? Does it foster a good life—material, social, and psychological? Who am I, if these numbers can meaningfully capture my essence? Who are you?

Hyperportrait I is the first in a very limited series of these portraits. For inquiries around commissioning a hyperportrait, please reach out via email at ktesherick@gmail.com or DM on X/Twitter.

Last week, OpenAI released 4o image mode, their latest image generation offering. It’s capable of some things we haven’t yet seen with AI image models, which you probably witnessed through the Ghiblification craze inundating social media. It really is incredible. But while truly incredible—in fact because of it—the model obscures the technical process it relies upon to create images. It works so well that there's little need to familiarize ourselves intimately with it to better our control. There's no craft to it beyond the verbal. Language is the only interface.

That’s a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a good thing for usability. It makes the technology “indistinguishable from magic.” However it also wrests control away from the user by a less obvious route. It exposes the product, but not the process. While exposing a powerful and smooth interface via natural language, it doesn’t provide any tools beyond this to take real creative liberty with the model, try to break it, make it do weird things, or otherwise come to know the technology well.

Contrast this with open source models, which expose their code to the user, allowing them to become acquainted not only with the product but with the process, the technology. In serving only polished product and eliding the underlying tech, we lose out on the ability to make art that reveals the technology to us in new and unexpected ways.

I'm not critiquing the new model in itself. I'll be using it myself extensively. But I think the best AI work of the last few years has been stuff that gets into the guts of these image models, spills them out, and reincorporates them into the work. This is proper "AI art"—art made with AI to tell us something about AI.

I think the period for this mode of AI image creation still has some time left and people, artists, whoever, should continue to get their hands dirty working with models that don't do exactly what they say.

To do so enables us to more thoughtfully critique and offer improvements to, as well as more deeply appreciate and champion the new technological paradigm by understanding its ins and outs. Whichever ideological direction you swing, your position will be more potent for having familiarized yourself in this way.

Otherwise we accept the tech as given, consuming what has been authoritatively handed to us as a prepackaged product. One of the great roles that artists can fulfill in our society is this kind of exploration, denying the complacency that such prepackaging fosters (whether intentionally or not).

A lot of great art will probably come from thoughtful use of 4o and whatever better models lie beyond, but that art is more likely to be built on top of those models and take them for granted, rather than digging at the roots of the paradigm of generative media itself. That will be a post-AI art, art made from a cultural context where AI is no longer a newfangled thing to gawk at and question, but rather where it’s the water we're swimming in. The boundaries are fuzzy and of course this has already kinda begun (I consider my upcoming collection, Sky World, to be post-AI work), but this model release feels like a real turning point into that era, where the tech works so well that we forget about it and its fruits become table stakes. We’ll lose the patience to engage with anything rougher around the edges, despite the degrees of creative freedom they may afford.

This smoothing, of course, is part of the natural trajectory of technology. But I want us, especially artists, and especially with AI, to avoid the acceptance that it solicits from us. AI, ML, generative media—whatever term for or segment of this nascent technological regime we want to refer to—is world-shaping. If artists can/do/should play a role in its progression, it's as conscientious observers, explorers, and actors (not necessarily objectors). Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst are a great example of the way artists can serve this role.

Post-AI art signifies a world where we've relinquished our opportunity for conscientious examination and already accepted this next regime. But its changes are so seismic and the stakes so high that it's crucial we take our time questioning it, exploring its edges, despite the prevailing tailwinds of sociocultural accelerationism.

The rate of development at these technological frontiers is so fast that we hardly have time to think before the opportunity to question has passed. Despite claims of technology being a totally neutral force (it’s not, and that doesn’t mean it’s bad), technological developments always come bundled with implicit ideology, and through sheer speed companies can manufacture tacit consent. Politics can't keep up, so it's largely on culture to do so in defense of itself and its constituents.

One way to contend with this speed is to keep making "AI art" in the sense used above: art that explores the nature of AI (Sasha Stiles and Pindar Van Arman are two great artists of this ilk that come to mind). This kind of work, done aptly, does much more to vie for a better future with this technology than do the all-too-common, unnuanced "AI art is evil" shouts (I’m definitely not saying AI art is beyond reproach, mind you). By incorporating the tools of AI into our practice as a real craft we learn them and come to better know how they might shape our lives.

If for none of these highfalutin reasons, I still urge artists to keep making with tools that expose their tech because it will result in work that is weirder, more distinctive, and more important than the anodyne images of the prepackaged model. Such tools have been essential to my work for the last however long and my career as an artist is much better off for it. Yours probably will be too. The time for them is still now.

Generative art has had a moment. Some might call it a fever dream. From certain vantage points within the cryptoart community over the last few years, it has looked like it’s just about all that’s out there. For the better part of that period, Art Blocks dominated collector discourse. Even as cryptoart chatter diversified, it predominantly spread to new platforms that also center around generative art: fxhash, Alba, Prohibition, Verse, Bright Moments, Highlight. What deviations there now are from this norm are almost exclusively focused on AI art. Art on the internet affords a vast array of weird and wild possibilities, most of which remains untapped in terms of commercial support. Instead it has remained locked in on a single genre of art and its concomitant commercial paradigm. By most measures, it’s been a great success. Cryptoart has developed its own vernacular. It has a set of stylistic norms, production techniques, and commercial processes all its own. It's an art economy and culture unto itself. A brand new collector base has been brought into the fold. Institutions at the pinnacle of the traditional art world have begun to take notice of cryptoart. This doesn’t happen without commercial success, and there’s an argument to be made that this commercial success has been engendered by the generative art paradigm. A lot of people love generative art. At times throughout the past few years it felt like everyone in crypto loves generative art. I am not one of those people.

A crucial thing to note is that I’m using “generative art” here and for the remainder of this essay as shorthand for “longform generative cryptoart,” i.e. algorithmically-generated art that uses randomness to produce large collections of work, usually in the hundreds or thousands, and minted onto a blockchain. Roughly speaking. I know that there’s a rich history of generative art that exists beyond this scope. For the purposes of this essay ever seeing the light of day, we’re going to have to mostly skip over that. If you have a terminological quibble, you can just mentally replace “generative art” with the above longhand anywhere else you encounter it below. Meanwhile I'm using the term "cryptoart" here to refer broadly to the art movement around NFTs, not art about or distinctly in the flavor of crypto. So basically any artwork that is minted.

Whatever you choose to call the genre just described, for a long time I felt alone in my antipathy toward it, which I mostly harbored silently. I didn’t have a well-articulated critique, and in any case I prefer not to critique publicly without a compelling reason to do so. Despite its ubiquity, I allowed for the possibility that I simply hadn’t engaged with generative art sufficiently to get it. If I would just read a little more about the super cool use of shaders in this project, or of the computer art titans it owes its origins to, maybe it would click. Alas. A couple years on, I’ve engaged with a whole lot more generative art, and now have more conviction than ever in my critique. 

Now is a good time to hammer home a point that’s at risk of being lost in my critique: I’m not flatout against generative art. Rather, I think that the tendencies it provokes, combined with the cultural and commercial climate surrounding it, make it as a medium tend toward being a locus of weak work right now. It’s a probabilistic thing. As I wrote in my recent piece on manglecore and the aesthetics of AI art:

“The medium isn’t quite the message, but it is a possibility space, and thus a probability cloud, of all that the message might be. Gases take the shape of their container, and the message will conform to the affordances of its medium.”

Generative art comes with its own such set of affordances. Some of these promote good art. Others do not. I want to talk about a little of both. However, plenty has been trumpeted about the virtues of generative art. I decided to spill my thoughts because I’ve seen precious little serious critique of the genre.1 I believe that good art matters, that hegemony threatens it, and that dissenting voices are instrumental to fighting that threat. I also hope that people like myself, who might feel dumb or tasteless for not “getting” the artistic vogue of the moment, will find some vindication in the critique. 

Some might protest that the gen art wave has already begun to flag significantly, that I’m beating a dead horse or kicking a movement while it’s down. Yet the movement is only flagging relative to the unsustainable pace of 2021 bull market frenzy buying, in which collections released from the same source on a weekly cadence sold out to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars from early career artists in mere minutes. That was insanity. Generative works are still selling, making debuts at art fairs of international repute, fetching millions at top tier auction houses, and bringing collectors new and old into the mix. It still dominates the cryptoart discussion relative to the scope of what’s out there, with AI work of course seeing a recent notable uptick in the conversation. Things are alright. To the extent that generative art’s dominance has dwindled, this marks the present moment as a meaningful juncture to speak on it. Ardent supporters of generative art may be open to new possibilities for cryptoart as a medium, or technology, or social movement, or myth. Detractors might recognize that the time for their thing has finally come. Though I’ve been taking notes for and thinking on this piece for over a year now, that reason—the opening up of these new horizons—makes now the right time to examine the shortcomings, strengths, and directions forward for generative art, and cryptoart as a whole.

The wailing laments from the generative art world over the last few months are telling. The market is down bad they say. It need some milk. Billowing negative sentiment within cryptoart at present largely revolves around work not selling or reselling. My critique then, like all things crypto, begins with the market.2 Art is always a product of the social and economic milieu within which it’s situated. Likewise the art market, a corner of this milieu, has always played a hand in shaping the way art is produced. Cryptoart, however, takes this coupling to new heights. Crypto is a fundamentally financial thing.3 The tokens, wallets, and transactions on which this world was built are all outgrowths of a vision for a radically reconstructed financial system. That’s really cool, actually. But what happens when you build an art movement on top of financial building blocks? Unsurprisingly, it becomes deeply imbued with the financial character of its DNA. So too, then, with generative art (i.e. longform generative cryptoart, as a reminder), the most successful movement within cryptoart to date. Generative art, probably more so than any art that has come before it, must be understood as a product of the market context within which it’s situated. 

That market context is defined by the predominance of software. In any era, art is drawn toward the powers that be, as it seeks variously to harness them, to serve them, or to critique them. Over the span of history these powers have ranged from the church and the state to the academy and the aristocracy. Of course none of these have died out. Some are doing quite alright. But we now live in an age marked indelibly by the flourishing of technocapital (i.e. the generation and movement of capital through technological means), software being one of its primary modes of expression. For a while there, software art was almost entirely divorced from the software economy, the “techno” and “capital” kept apart. Digital art, for most of its history, was a playground for exploration of technology largely unencumbered by the weight of capital. Yet those two have a way of finding each other, and NFTs bridged that gap in a meaningful manner, bringing a native financialization mechanism to digital art. If NFTs wed digital art with digital economies, then generative art consummates the marriage. Art meets capital at conception in generative art—the transaction creates the artwork, per the standard method of random generation upon mint. If you’ll pardon the extended and momentarily lewd metaphor, generative art is then born with a kind of original sin, its genesis seeded from the Edenic fruit of capital penetration. One might argue that the transaction hash is merely a handy source of randomness, that I’m taking the symbolism too literally. But it’s not just symbolism—it’s a literal monetary transaction that creates the artwork. This is interesting! It’s incredibly elegant and native to the blockchain as a medium. It also means that the specter of finance is an inescapable element of the generative model as currently designed. Even in the case of a free mint, a transaction occurs and gas fees are paid, and your art piece doesn’t exist until this takes place. That means you haven’t even seen the work until after it has been bought. The payment is primary. There’s some precedent for this in the traditional art market, where collectors will buy a piece sight unseen because their dealer recommends it. But this practice is typically referenced to point out the egregious financialization taking place in the contemporary scene, a hyperbolic exception to the rule. This is inverted in generative art, the exception of buying the work blind now instead the rule. 

After purchase, the work is sent to your wallet, which constitutes your identity in this realm, standing in for you as a person.4 The wallet is the new identity primitive in the onchain economy. Again, this is pretty neat and makes great sense as a technological and even political solution—a unified, cross-platform, low-friction unit of identity articulated in modern society’s lingua franca, the language of the market. But the implications for the conjoinment of art and finance remain.

However I haven’t actually said anything about why this flavor of entanglement between capital and cryptoart is bad, just that it exists. For the anti-capitalist, the critique is implicit in the connection—anything touched by capital is tainted, guilty by association. I’m not of that persuasion nor do I expect my reader to be. But even across ideological dispositions there tends to be a distaste for money infiltrating art to too great an extent, a hope in art as one of our last pure things, tantamount to sacred—valued for the encounter with it per se and not for any extrinsic motivations like the accumulation of wealth. Such hopes held too preciously veer into naivete, but they can be viewed on a spectrum, and the above example of buying work sight unseen falls well into the territory of the perverse for most.5

But even excusing this, the economic incentives that inform the generative model far too often pressure a sacrifice in the quality of the art. This trajectory developed in a two-part process. The first step was moving art natively into the digital realm, where its reproducibility as software gives it the propensity to mirror SaaS and digital entertainment businesses with their near-zero marginal cost curve. The digital artwork can be distributed ad infinitum basically for free. However, instead of being hyperfinancialized, early digital art was radically de-financialized because while reproducible, it lacked the means to capitalize on this reproducibility in any economic form. Who wants to buy a JPEG that anyone can right click save, amirite? Enter crypto. NFTs not only reified digital art, conferring unique identity to works by means of tokenization and giving them a thingness; they also embedded digital art in a market structure that is consumed with fast-paced, transparent transactionality. This put the mimetic psychology of the art world, the logic of the social animal, on steroids and an Adderall XR. Digital art not only could be bought, it would be bought in a multiyear frenzy.

These dual processes, digitization and tokenization, mark all NFTs, but a third factor sets generative art in a market category of its own. Where the means of distribution of an artwork become digitally native via the reproducibility of digital files, the means of production become digitally native thanks to the algorithmic production inherent to generative art, where new artworks are created at the mere click of a button. The former changes how work is shared. The latter changes how work is made. What follows, then, is a mass consumer artform. By enabling fast, large-scale production, generative art and the market around it incentivize the creation of cheap, diluted work—conceptually barren and aesthetically milquetoast, propped up by technical jargon that conjures a mirage of depth. It is assembly line art. I mean, the infrastructure upon which so much of it is produced is even called “The Engine.” But the assembly line of generative art is one finely tuned to an individualist world. Each piece that comes off of it has the minimum viable difference to make it feel uniquely yours.6 This appearance of an individual relationship to the piece, however, is a hollow construction. A meaningful relationship with a work is predicated on personal identification with its form/content or the artist/story behind it. Generative art denies the prospect of this kind of relationship through its arbitrariness (the work you own is randomly generated) attempting to recreate the character of such personal relationships through structure alone. The “unique” nature of the work is ascertained by a token number and a random hash used to generate its appearance. Its personal value is instead signified by the exchange of coin. The formal husk of a relationship is left in place while the color is drained out. It’s merely structural, a form emptied of meaning. A common response to this experience for the collector is, after minting, to convince themselves of how much they love the piece they specifically minted. They find all sorts of reasons to identify with it—“wow the flow fields are beautiful” or “no way, green’s my favorite color!” Identifying with the work would be a lot easier if we could just choose the ones we want to own in the first place, but that would require real discernment.

This flavor of collecting is a symptom of what I call mass individualism. Ostensibly oxymoronic, the term represents the parallel movements toward a globally systematized world and a world in which the primacy of the individual triumphs over all—in which the person is more independent than ever yet paradoxically relies on unprecedented levels of human cooperation for this independence. We can live in the solitary isolation of our homes, cut off from society with everything we want and need delivered to our screen and doorstep, but only thanks to interpersonal labor coordination at scales never before seen. In this mass individualism we try to have it all—the assurance of our own idiosyncrasy and agency on the one hand, with the perks of society and community on the other. The logo on your shoes signifies membership in the tribe of Nike, but that specific colorway is so you. This is quite effective as a commercial model for consumer culture, where industrial systems can produce goods at scale with the minimum viable difference needed to offer a veneer of personalization. Yet the individuality this offers is an impersonal one, and its communalism a shallow one. The system is doing the least it can get away with doing, naturally—it operates in a spirit of optimization. The problem is that we’re left with the mere facsimile of what we as humans truly crave—agency and distinction in the individual condition, deep interpersonal connection in the communal one—and that that facsimile is sufficient to keep those cravings at bay. Those cravings aren’t gone, mind you. Such means will never satisfy the underlying longings. They’re just pushed down as we convince ourselves that the next round of surface-level satiation will finally do the trick, keeping us on a merry-go-round of existential dopamine hits. This illusory promise of fulfillment is the foundation of consumer culture.

The generative model recreates these dynamics of mass individualism in the domain of art. Automated systems produce work at scale. Generative randomness renders each piece a unique “one of one of x.” Collectors become members of a community of other collectors, yet maintain notional individuality through “token identity.” And as the structural dynamics of consumer culture are recreated, so too are its problems. These dynamics encourage artists to overproduce. If you increase the supply you can increase profits. If you increase the trait variation you can justify the supply increase. It’s a slippery slope. Suddenly the art is changed, but you have a story to tell yourself about why these changes were fitting and totally justified—nay necessary!—for the work. This is almost always cope. It’s fluffed up financial padding that dilutes the punch of the artwork. The financial opportunity created by speculative mayhem and a relatively inexperienced collector base further pushes artists in the direction of these incentives. The design of this ecosystem nudges us toward indulgence of profit-making motivations at the expense of the art. These pressures are difficult to resist, and equally difficult to see at work in oneself. Generative artists may be working with algorithms, but they’re only human after all.

You might ask what’s the harm in producing more work if the art lies in the algorithm itself, as many argue, and the algorithm has already been set? Producing more work increases accessibility and democratizes art, right? There’s a subtle circularity here, lying in the fact that the artfulness of the algorithm rests in its ability to produce a diversity of outputs at a specific collection size. Fidenza is acclaimed because it produces varied and interesting outputs over the span of 1,000 works. At 10,000 it would grow redundant. I doubt Tyler Hobbs would object to this claim. In fact, judging from his writing on these matters, I’m guessing he’d emphatically support it. And yet given the effortlessness of producing 10,000 works instead of 1,000 (merely typing an extra zero), the temptation to create work ill-suited to its own algorithm can be irresistible when met with forceful enough market pressure. Who among us hasn’t seen a collection pushed well beyond the size it supports? We can only understand generative art collections by looking at them in their entirety, and the diversity or redundancy of the works in light of collection size is critical to our appraisal. They cannot be understood as algorithm alone, but need to be considered as a system of algorithm and outputs.

A related feature of generative art is the fact that to produce within these structures you have to create the type of thing that can be reproduced en masse. Powerful and idiosyncratic things tend to elude such reproduction. Generative art thus traffics in what’s replicable. One result is that it’s all too often trying to model via computer systems that which we’ve already produced by human hands, amounting to a rehash of things that have come before, different only in method. Perusing generative art collections and their abundant geometric abstractions can often feel like deja vu for various periods of art history from the last century or so. Insofar as art should convey new and moving visions of the world, this is a failure. Generative art is not incapable of this. Maya Man has done it. Deafbeef has done it. Siebren Versteeg, 0xFFF, and Mathcastles have done it. Emily Edelman, Stevie P, Jan Robert Leegte, and Lars Wander have all done it. But the bulk of generative work fails to meet this standard. 

The reproducibility that makes it so banal is by equal measure what has granted generative art such great success over the last few years. It’s immediately parseable both as code (by the likes of the Art Blocks Engine) and cognitively (by humans). Collections fit a mold. We are thus instantly familiar with each. We know the parameters, we can evaluate, compare. It’s formulaic. We can become a very limited kind of expert in a very limited time, which of course is all we can spare these days. You look at the preview image. You read the collection description. Or maybe not. You scroll through a dozen or two of the sample outputs. You get the idea. You yawn. You buy a piece. It’s selling fast, after all. Fuck it, you buy six. You smile mildly. You share your outputs in the Discord, some Discord. You tell your wife about it. She doesn’t get it. She’s happy for you, or worried about where all the family money is going. It’s good babe. Things are good. 

Contrast this relationship to the artwork with something like Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Stranger Visions, a generative collection of a quite different kind which can’t be compared along set axes to really any other work I know of, much less dozens of collections. What this formulaic quality means is that the generative art projects of this ilk all blend together. Produced by the same Engine, they are themselves all outputs of a single algorithm in a way. And maybe that’s how this era of generative art (c. 2020-2024) is best remembered. The constraints of the genre are set, and the generativity of the individual imagination works within them to produce a new idea for a collection. The differences that would usually exist between pieces from a single art collection are now of a similar size to those between entire collections. Perhaps then, the Art Blocks Engine, that infrastructural behemoth, is the great work of longform generative cryptoart.78

Generative art’s problems go beyond these structural, market-oriented critiques, but they all have their origins here. From this broader umbrella we might funnel them down into distinct but inevitably intertwined shortcomings along three key axes: the technical, the conceptual, and the aesthetic. The latter two find their roots in the former—the technical—around which generative art’s identity is based. The medium (as scoped for the purposes of this essay) is inherently technical, defined by the processes it employs to produce its artworks. This is true to some extent of any medium (painting and sculpting involve much technique), but generative artists seem especially insistent on bringing it to the fore, highlighting details about GLSL, Perlin noise, Bezier curves, and voronoi tessellation (I don’t know what I just said either). Process can inform the meaning of a work, but it shouldn’t replace it, and generative artists have a bad habit of over-indexing on these technical features to the exclusion of pretty much anything else of substance. Doing something complex and creative with code can be quite difficult, and that difficulty can sneakily enamor one to the output in a way that the output itself doesn’t merit. The generative artist can lay a turd and be rather impressed with himself, because he did it with code. Yet the code isn’t immediately visible to the viewer. All they see is a pile of shit. In painting, the brushstrokes stay behind as a visible artifact of the process. The gesture and the mark are, in semiotic terminology, indexical. An intentionality is revealed. We see the artist’s hand in the work. With generative art, the gesture and the mark are separated. The artist’s hand is obscured, and so its process becomes more challenging to communicate. The process is decoupled from the art object. Pixels on a screen don’t reveal keystrokes in the same way that brushstrokes reveal the movements behind them. Because we can’t infer the process behind the pixels the way we can with brushstrokes, generative artists take it upon themselves to explain it to us. And we follow along, dazzled by the esoteric technical details into thinking that something of import is being shared. The complexity leaves us with the impression of meaning and obscures the work’s shortcomings both to the artist and the viewer. In doing so, this technical infatuation contributes to those same shortcomings by propping the work up and giving it space to get away with them. Consequently, a hallmark of generative art is the artist falling in love with the tech at the expense of the art. Per Goethe, “Technology in alliance with bad taste is the enemy of art most to be feared.” Tyler Hobbs has tried to impress this fact on fellow generative artists:

“As generative artists, we think we have such a cool story to tell about how we make our work! It makes us sound smart! We can do weird things with computers that go right over most folks' heads! Maybe we use an esoteric tool set, or sophisticated math or programming techniques. The viewer does not care…Our technical prowess may be good for impressing other programmers, but even these folks, in the moment they view the artwork, don't care. They only know if the image speaks to them. Our technical abilities are only important so far as they allow us to create images that speak to us. They are enablers, not a source of value on their own.”

Again, process can and should contribute to the meaning of a work, but esoteric technical details aren’t a stand-in for a real concept. This problem is pervasive in the genre, and conceptually, generative art collections tend to say little of substance as a result. The typical fare involves an algorithm born of a marginal technical novelty (generative audiovisual something or other! shaders!) and passable visual appeal that then has a tiny dab of concept slapped on post hoc to construct a facade of meaning. Usually this involves something about the “dynamic interplay between order and chaos” or “the emergence of complexity from simple algorithmic rules.” The works are algorithm-first. Meaning, the real human impact of the artwork, is with frustrating frequency only an afterthought. In place of meaning come technical explainers that fill the void where concept should be. The result is a deadening effect, more art for computers than computer art. Taken up as a self-conscious gambit, a project that creates “art for computers” would actually make for a potent Kafka-esque critique of a society bogged down by systems made nominally for humans yet which end up leaving those same humans behind. Yet this is not the thrust of the generative oeuvre. 

A valid line of protest might go that art doesn’t need to say something, it can just make you feel something, be beautiful, move you. Pero por qué no los dos? Why shouldn’t we demand that the art we champion and spend great heaps of time, money, energy, and infrastructure on be moving/beautiful and meaningful? This line of reasoning also elides the fact that rarely does generative art truly move or shake us with its beauty. Instead, we far more often get momentarily entertaining pretty pixel arrangements that make for fantastic feed fodder, easy to look at as we scroll infinitely through the thousands of variations that their algorithmic nature yields. We are served up a conveyor belt of endlessly stimulating inanity. We’re superficially entertained but bored in a much deeper way—spiritually bored, existentially bored, bored in the way that only infinite entertainment can yield. The repetition is soul-crushing. 

A recurring visual motif across this repetition is geometric abstraction, and the genre finds itself constantly retreading territory already well-explored by its forebears in Modernist abstraction and the significant history of generative art that preceded the advent of the NFT. Most everything conceptually and aesthetically interesting done in computer art was done well before the NFT wave. The bulk of what we’ve had of late is a monetized rehash. Comparisons to the “zombie formalism” era of the 2010s are apt, the term perhaps even more fitting here than in its original usage. It describes a repetition of 20th century process-based abstraction that sleepwalks in the footsteps of its pioneers, failing to contribute ideas of its own beyond “do the same, but with code.”

On these grounds generative art fails us aesthetically as well. The norm is work that’s visually fanciful if we’re lucky, yet in the end uncompelling. Work that’s dangerous or difficult are rare finds. Generative art is often pretty, but pretty is cheap. As fellow artist Sten put it, the genre is full of “decorative art, challenging no one.” The infamous feud between Jerry Saltz and Refik Anadol over the massive MoMA installation of Refik’s work Unsupervised was waged upon these grounds. In quite memorable if somewhat cruel fashion, Saltz’s critique variously deemed the piece “screensaver art,” “a glorified lava lamp,” and “narcotic pudding.” “It’s comforting, really,” he went on, “Unsupervised has the virtue of not disturbing anything inside you; it triggers no mystery.” Though I never got to see the work in person I think Saltz was probably a bit harsh—the thing looked, at worst, awe-inducing—but the substance of his criticism could equally be applied to the majority of generative art of this age. Echoing poet Cesar A. Cruz’s quote that “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable,” Saltz points to an endemic lack of aesthetic or emotive depth or impact in generative work.910 Rarely does it disturb or challenge us. What comforts it offers are shallow, like a topical anesthetic. And an analogy to anesthesia isn’t too far off. For the last several years, generative art has lulled us into a kind of anesthetic stupor. It has served as a palliative, a numbing agent that clouds our vision to all that exists beyond its veil. Little else matters. Yet the numbing deadens our spirit. The aesthetic and emotional responses it educes are blunted. Its conceptual provocation is minimal and trivial. The elements of art that are most human are left behind. The title of this essay takes after this thought (an-aesthetics, get it??), and the two generative collections I released recently were pointed in this direction. Catalog, consisting of “generative Duchampian readymades” was an indictment of the current status quo in generative art as a cheap mass consumer artform.11 DVD Screensaver was “a meditation on the place of art in a culture of infinite entertainment—screensaver art for the screensaver art era.” Both critique generative art by parroting certain elements of its character and drawing them out to comic hyperbole. Pointed as they are, the intent in each case was constructive discourse rather than all-out condemnation, because] despite all I’ve said over the last several paragraphs, I do still feel there’s much worth preserving about generative art. 

Generative art offers the prospect of digital objecthood and ownership of art. It democratizes participation and ownership in art through digital scalability and the global reach of the internet. It introduces randomness, seriality, and systematicity, which can be used to reflect conditions of contemporary life, as formal principles in its artworks. It creates inherently networked assets. It gives voice in fine art to the digital culture and technology of the present. Its enablement of capital, though challenging in plenty of ways, opens a path to commercial and institutional legitimacy if we so desire. If done right, it can inform us on the relationship between human and machine. Some of these it inherits from cryptoart or digital art more broadly, but some are uniquely generative art’s own. Maya Man’s Fake It Till You Make It uses the generative paradigm’s randomness and repetition to conjure a nonsensical simulacrum of online self-care culture. It’s what we might call “hyperpop art.” Stevie P’s Dopamine Machines similarly harnesses a hyperpop aesthetic with a maximalist bent to capture the neurotransmitter-warping chaos of online existence. Emily Edelman’s Reverie employs generativity to echo the fragmented and meandering yet somehow still meaningful speech patterns brought on by a loved-one’s dementia. Andreas Gysin, Kim Asendorf, and DEAFBEEF, across their respective bodies of work, all feel like they speak the language of the machine and compellingly translate it to something still strange yet human-interpretable. Generative art can be good, human art. And digital art can go well beyond the bounds of the (longform algorithmic) generative paradigm. Look at OONA. Look at SHL0MS. Look at Ana Maria Caballero, Margaret Murphy, Mia Forrest, Operator. More of that please. Create more of it. Collect more of it. Talk about more of it. Champion more of it. The slouching cryptoart market gives us a moment to step back and look in the direction of this kind of work. I’m hopeful that we’re heading there. Until then, generative art’s greatest importance might lie not in the work itself, but in the fact that wide swathes of our cultural niche were enraptured by it for a moment, and what that says about our age—about this market, about this culture, about us. Yet we’re more than that. Now we have an opportunity to look in the mirror and decide what to say in response.

—Adapted from Robert Burns’ To a Mouse

When Lilyillo was a child, her father, an architect and carpenter, began building a home for their family. They were already living in the unfinished structure when a serious problem cropped up. At night, lying in bed, her father would wake up to the sound of something in the walls. Termites, it turned out, were eating away at them, devouring the home he had dreamt and sweat into being for his family. The infestation turned out to be fatal. Lily and her family had to abandon the home and her father’s hard work, razing it to the ground before moving on. The episode made its mark on her.

Looking through Plans for Future Forms, the latest collection from the Australian artist, the first thing you notice is what you don’t notice. A conspicuous absence looms: the chairs featured in the works, objects typically seen as chassis for human forms, sit empty. A silence rests over the sparse scenes of vacant chairs seated on vacant backgrounds. The predominant feeling is one of stillness. There are elements of these scenes that actively engage the viewer. The pastels grab you. The chairs’ distortions invite you to inquire. Yet it’s their emptiness that truly beckons. It’s not really the chairs, then, that are the subjects of these compositions. Rather, it’s the negative space created by their vacancy. In lieu of a subject, we have an anti-subject. But what exactly is it that’s missing?

Relevant to that question is the fact that these works were created with the help of AI. Though trained with a traditional art background and well-aware of the skepticism surrounding the technology, Lily hasn’t shied away from engaging with AI in her work. Instead, recognizing its pivotal place in our society’s present and future, she has chosen to speak on it by speaking through it.1 In Plans for Future Forms, the compositions originally depicted human subjects occupying the chairs. These humans were then erased via an inpainting process, replaced with the diffusion model’s best guess as to what lay beneath them.2 The resulting chairs bend and split into fragmented, nonsensical forms that betray the presence of their former occupants. Variants of the manglecore aesthetic, their dissociation “signifies the tool within the work,” as the artist would put it. Their vacancy is made all the more forceful when juxtaposed with her prior collection Architects in Chairs. These paintings are broadly similar—wood-grained textures, pastel hues, chairs suspended over spacious backgrounds—but distinguished in one key respect: the architects have vanished. What we’re left with in the end is a collection of empty chairs marked indelibly by the bodies they once held. Despite their emptiness of content, they overflow with symbolic meaning. Chairs are a curiously commonplace symbol in the arts and philosophy, and here Lily employs the potency of that visual language to point to realities both personal and universal.34

At the universal end, the negative space left behind by the AI-assisted erasure of the human subjects conjures a post-human world, painting for us a portrait of our own absence. Whether it be literal elimination or something more akin to a decommissioning, the era of AI ascendancy spells a massive transition for humanity. According to the doomer camp, we risk total extinction. A more mainstream perspective envisions us simply being rendered superfluous. No longer needed for production, we will float adrift, rudderless, useless, purposeless. The pieces in Plans for Future Forms echo sentiments which the aftermath of either scenario might give rise to—stillness, quietude, contemplation, mourning. The scenes call to mind shipwrecks, both in their formal properties and in their ambience. The wooden limbs stand fractured and askew, recalling splintered beams, while hollow hulls of chairs carve out the space that once held their passengers. In many of the pieces, chairs seemingly float in space, buoyed by formless backgrounds. A sense of timelessness pervades. As we peruse the collection, we walk on haunted ground. The chairs are no longer tools, but artifacts. And like a shipwreck, the absence isn’t total—it’s shaped by what’s left behind, the traces of what was once there still rippling in its wake. 

It’s in these remnants that Plans for Future Forms comes together in full. The absence of the subjects is conspicuous because of the marks they leave behind. The process of erasure is not without its smudges. AI has its tells—the warped leg of a chair where a human one used to be; the lurking organic shadow seemingly cast from nowhere; fragments of humans still clinging on to the last vestiges of their existence.

Together these marks say on our behalf, “If we are to be lost to time, it will not be without a trace.” We see them in the chairs, but these remnants show in another set of objects just as crucial to the collection’s symbolic language. A subset of the pieces are defined by the presence of blueprints and drafting paper, often set as the background upon which full-fledged chairs hover or sketches thereof are drawn. Indecipherable marks, seemingly made by human hands, are scrawled scattershot across many of their canvases. A handful of them remain empty altogether but for those etchings, forming grids populated by nothing but the merest marks of some former presence. Taken together, the works in this collection illustrate a lifecycle from empty canvases to plans and drafts to finished chairs. We watch as “plans for future forms” come and go. The ebb and flow speaks to hopes once held and since lost, to the precarity of such plans, and to the legacy of what remains after they’ve all but washed away. A full lifecycle of feelings accompanies these stages, condensed in each piece into a single moment of reflection which holds all that came before it. We see loss followed by mourning, mourning followed by stillness, stillness followed by contemplation, contemplation followed by silence. The empty chairs and etched-upon draft paper evoke them all at once. The moment contains a history. It is monumental yet minuscule. 

This dynamism is true not just of the timescale, but of the symbolism and its subjects too. In the monumental condition, the chairs and their emptiness represent humanity as a whole, and the tenuous position of its existence. More colloquially, Lilyillo is speaking of and to her fellow artists and craftsmen, a synecdoche for humanity, through the chairs. Artists and craftsmen work in and on chairs. Chairs are their second homes. A common belief holds that their practice—one of true care and creativity—may represent the last genuinely distinctive feature of our kind, the rest increasingly encroached upon by the capabilities of AI. What happens when these too are swallowed up? The technical process behind Future Forms engages this question. AI, with the help of humanity’s own hand, both creates and fills the void left where we once sat. Per the artist, “It is a kind of sculpting and creation through the process itself. It feels like taking away and making, all at once.” Following the trajectory of technology to “objectify”, the object (i.e. the chair) is spared for its usefulness in this process; the subject is not. We remove ourselves from the equation, yet our imprint lingers. 

Artists and craftsmen are our principal mark-makers, and mark-making has long been an interest of Lily’s. It has grabbed her attention since her earliest forays into art. She has spoken elsewhere about the fixation, recalling it as a practice in which she found purpose:

“When I was a child, I used to carry a little notebook of only blank lines at all times. I would fill it with running writing, because I could see my mum writing, and filling up space, in her notebooks. And I thought, ‘She must have so much purpose, so many important things to put on that page.’ And at some point, I realized that I wanted to have purpose. I wanted to fill up pages too.”

Her quest to make her existence heard through these idle inkings seems to share the same core impetus as what is often said explicitly through graffiti, and implicitly in so much else we do: “Lilyillo was here.” The etchings in Plans for Future Forms, then, reflect on the value of this endeavor for all artists and, through them, all people. What have we said? Is it worthwhile? Will it last? There’s a pessimistic interpretation that suggests that artificial intelligence spells the death of art, of craft, of mark-making, of human legacy. Technology is accelerating. This time is different, final, they say. The AI is the artist now, and “artist” is shorthand for a whole lot more. There’s conversely an optimistic take that casts the human as endlessly adaptive and imagines AI as just another tool, one which our creatives will put to new and fascinating use. These paintings, though in collaboration with AI, were still made by Lilyillo after all.

I’m not sure Plans for Future Forms takes either side. It seems rather to ask us to imagine both. Both of these scenarios (not an exhaustive list of possible futures, mind you) accept the inevitability of escalating societal flux. The former bears the flavor of mourning examined above, the mourning of our own absence. It laments what it takes to be our progression into a post-human world, blindly marching from the Anthropocene into what we might call the Silicocene.5 But both scenarios carry with them a mourning of a different kind as well. This is the mourning of constant loss that accompanies incessant change. The hollowing out of blue collar factory work in America’s industrial sector is illustrative of this. So too is our omnipresent milieu of nostalgia. The world is changing faster than we can, and attempts to keep up will see us losing parts of ourselves in the haste. Throughout this period we will again and again hear the refrain “I thought we had more time.” Whole swathes of people and cultures will be left behind, and artists are seeing the beginnings of this. The constant loss will present in much more quotidian ways as well. Rage, protest, grief, and despair are not unreasonable responses. It’s easy for techno-optimists (I generally count myself as one) to gloss over these feelings, telling the skeptical and the reluctant to adapt, innovate, and carry on. The works in Plans for Future Forms encourage empathy. The losses are real. They leave behind negative space. Not all is fungible. You too will feel their weight.

Looking back over this collection, I keep returning to the symbol of the empty chair. I’m struck by how much it can seem to mean. I noted earlier that it affords a range of complementary interpretations here ranging from the universal to the personal. In the universal it speaks of humanity writ large, and the prospect of its absence or superfluousness. Somewhere between the universal and the personal—a narrower yet still broadly resonant scope—the empty chair evokes art and craft, and meditates on questions of our relationship to meaningful work. But it also assumes an intimately personal dimension. It is where the individual sits, where artists work, and what craftsmen build. Chairs shape and are shaped by these human forms, and carry with them the memory of those inhabitants after they’re gone. They hold personal histories. Lily herself is an artist. She was raised by a craftsman, who in turn comes from a long line of craftsmen. She grew up surrounded by, admiring, and emulating her father’s work. He’s getting older now. He has dementia and is in steep decline. His dream of building a home for his family and the termites’ shattering of that dream are emblematic of a career as an architect that never quite took off. Thwarted in his effort to build a home and without the means to buy one of the beautiful Modernist ones he so admired, he exercised his appreciation of craft throughout Lily’s childhood by collecting beautiful chairs instead. Now he is stuck declining in one of those chairs. The erosion of time follows that of the termites. The chairs that comprise Plans for Future Forms, then, are his chairs. The blueprints are his blueprints, the markings his markings. The absence is his absence. 

Those termites are long gone from Lilyillo’s world, but the negative space they carved out still resounds. A person’s absence often tells us more about them than their presence. It’s in their absence that we really look, see what we didn’t see, hear their voice, their laughter ringing in our ears. We ask what we might have done differently, if we could have spent more time with them, cherished that time more fully, or held on for longer still. Plans for Future Forms gives us occasion to consider our own absence while we’re still here. What are we missing? What have we overlooked? What might we change? Through these works, Lily is inviting us into this world with her, with her father, with the company of artists and craftsmen, with one another. We straddle the present in which they are present, and the future in which they are past. They’re speaking to us across time. Let us listen then. Accept the invitation. Pause. Think. Have a seat.

Yet despite the borderline-repulsiveness of the manglecore image, it has come into an artistic vogue alongside this new technology and medium. With the rise of any medium of expression comes the birth of a vogue, or set of vogues, and in this case, two styles in particular have risen to prominence on the cultural stage. The first, and in some sense primary, style is what I will refer to as the “Midjourney aesthetic.” The Midjourney aesthetic, whose name derives from a popular model known for its uber-sleek outputs, is that look of impossible polish that renders an image almost more than real, like CGI, a hyperreal synthesis of detail that could only ever exist as image, never flesh and blood.3 It’s like that guy that’s so handsome he looks fake, Huxley’s “Brave New World” in visual form. That’s the essence of the Midjourney aesthetic. It’s pretty, it’s alluring, it’s cool, but it doesn’t bleed.

This aesthetic has its value. It’s compelling in its pragmatism. It checks all the boxes, does what we tell it to, can be put toward an end. It’s useful. But it doesn’t make for great art. It doesn’t “disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed,” doesn’t move us, doesn’t instruct, doesn’t enlighten, doesn’t even really show us what’s possible. It’s crucial here to distinguish between the aesthetic typically produced by the technology and the technology itself. The tech is the image model, which can produce all sorts of looks, Midjourney aesthetic and manglecore alike. However, when left to its own devices and working well, it gravitates toward the former. The medium isn’t quite the message, but it is a possibility space, and thus a probability cloud, of all that the message might be.4 Gases take the shape of their container, and the message will conform to the affordances of its medium. The Midjourney style has become the aesthetica franca of the image model, and it’s a practical one—inoffensive, adding dollops of visual flair, filling in details the prompter wasn’t able to or didn’t bother to think up, smoothing things out. But precisely on account of this pragmatism, it has no artistic merit of its own. 

There’s a case to be made that this kind of smoothing is unhealthy in the same way that Instagram posturing, Snapchat filters, Photoshop blemish reduction and body enhancement, and overrepresentation of certain body types in porn are unhealthy, encouraging distorted self-perception and doing some serious psychic harm in the long run; and that for this to soon be the predominant mode of image production in our society is deeply troubling. The world will never look like what the Midjourney aesthetic suggests, but it subtly seduces us into believing that it can. It’s grotesque in its perfection, which threatens us with further alienation from ourselves. Its purity sells us lies about who we are or could be. Even the manicured facades we construct on Instagram feel dull and lifeless in comparison. It says “I’ll see your overdone vignette and raise you an impossibly dramatic bokeh.” In this sense it’s actually a fitting product of and for the culture of image that we inhabit, where, in a Baudrillardian (or Debordian) flip, the flattened images we see on the screen have become the primary reality, sign turns to simulacrum.5 The flattening is pragmatic—it’s easier to manage. It renders the world into matrices and bitmaps, contained and manipulable vectors. Yet what it gains in efficiency, it loses in heft. Mere image is the foundation of a weightless world.6

I’m not sure how seriously to take these (my own) complaints. On the one hand, they’re just pretty pictures dude—relax. On the other, a good bit of research over the last several years has implicated platforms like Instagram, which cultivate a culture of image manufacturing that gives rise to impossible standards for beauty and quality of life, as being really, really bad for mental health, especially that of young women and girls. Some of the greatest dangers we encounter are incredibly banal. In fact, it’s precisely because of their banality that they’re so pernicious—they appear of little harm, and so we dismiss them.7 This is enough to give me pause.

But all of these moralistic concerns are an aside (not because they’re irrelevant, they’re just not the focus of this essay)—the Midjourney aesthetic is still just artistically boring. GPT-speak is its linguistic analogue, with its sanitized, flavorless, peppy corporate-speak. Together they are the face and voice of an existence optimized for KPIs and customer retention, and lip-service holistic wellness while we’re at it. They challenge no one, say nothing daring or new, and offer only shallow comforts.8

Manglecore is the antithesis of the Midjourney aesthetic. It is its ugly twin born of the same technological womb, yet popular in its own right. The Midjourney aesthetic assumes the image model’s status as tool, takes it, and runs with it, using it practically, for what it’s good at. Manglecore, by contrast, sits with the tool and examines it. This dichotomy explains manglecore’s prominence, especially among artists. Artists naturally position themselves counter to the mainstream, commonly with an anti-pragmatic ethos, but in doing so establish a vogue of their own. Often this “schismogenesis” involves questioning that which most have taken for granted.9 The bulk of output, art or otherwise, flooding from AI image generators right now is of the Midjourney variety. Manglecore art, by turning an eye toward the imperfections of the technology—the gnarled limbs and deformed faces it spews out—calls attention to the tool itself and invites the viewer in on this act of examination. It makes us ask, “What the hell am I looking at?”

But it’s not the mere fact of their shortcomings that make these images interesting. Simple blank screens rendered in error would be much less compelling than pictures of people who look like they were reared in radioactive goo. It’s the fact that where these models fail, they often fail quite weirdly, and in ways that lend broader insight into the world we live in. These failings comprise a set of “anti-virtues”, qualities rendering them useless for practical purposes but all the more valuable for artistic ends. 

Among their anti-virtues is the way they conjure nonsense that appears as if it’s verging on sense. It’s horrific in its proximity to reality, almost there yet so alienly far away. In this way it can serve as a reminder of the beauty and exquisite calibration of humanity as a species and our world more broadly.10 So much had/has to go right for all of this to exist in the way it does. There also may be some solace here. Take one look at these ghoulish creations and grant yourself a moment to gloat over AI, to relish your superiority, to feel a smug gratitude for the elegant, balanced hand by which nature composed you.11 Say to yourself, “At least I’m not that big of a freak.” Where the Midjourney aesthetic whispers that you’re not good enough, the manglecore chokes out “GRANK oggnub hicjjtth!!”, and you know that you’re alright.

And yet while its literal appearance struggles to approximate resemblance to our world, the essence of the manglecore image aptly captures the spirit of our time in its own way through its abject bizarreness. With garbled language and mangled faces, the outputs of the image model manage to portray the discomforting, inexplicable strangeness of life in the modern age. The frenetic, dissociative, even Lynchian peculiarity of a collection like Frank Manzano’s Current Value (see video below) seems a lot less out there after a couple hours spent scrolling through TikTok or reading the latest news out of Florida.1213 Reality bends itself into new and unexpected shapes every day, re-forming our expectations of it, of people, of life. It’s a contortionist with broken pain receptors and unlimited access to CRISPR, capable of twisting itself in ways we never thought humanly possible. We live in a weird world, and it’s getting weirder by the day. The manglecore image gestures at that. 

The reasons for this escalating strangeness, I think, are several fold. Perhaps most obvious is the accelerating pace of change. Change brings with it the new, and the new is by default foreign to us for a time.14 Thanks to developments in communication technologies like the internet, this rapid pace of change, both cultural and technological, is then amplified and put on display for the world to see. And in an online economy designed for attention capture, weird wins out (“Ice cream so good!”). This creates a cascade of strangeness hypervisibility, where technological and cultural development broadens the range of what can happen, anything that can happen will happen, anything strange that happens will be shared online, and anything strange successfully propagated online will induce a mimetic (and memetic) absorption and replication response. And so on. 

Also fundamental to the strangeness of modernity is the strangeness of rules and systems. There’s a particular kind of weirdness that arises when you put large systems into place with the touch of a human hand that then pulls away. As the activity of these systems gets further and further from the hand that set them into motion, they come to carry its imprint less and less, and weird (from a human vantage point, though perfectly normal according to the system’s design) shit begins to happen. Bureaucracy is an example of this phenomenon at the level of human organization, your Twitter feed embodies it algorithmically, and neural networks now manifest it anew. All, in their own way, are black boxes, and all reflect that blend of absurd, surreal, and mundane that today we refer to as “Kafka-esque.”  Kafka, in his treatment of early 20th century life, was a prescient seer of the world that this “systems weirdness” would occasion. The predicaments that characters like Gregor Samsa and Josef K. find themselves in hit us just as forcefully today, perhaps even more so, in their comically eerie inexplicability. Yet where this feeling was ambient in the era of Kafka, a percolating ether bubbling up from the nascent wellspring of industrial modernity, it’s now everywhere, everything. The world confronts you with the bizarre. The only place where this is truer than in New York City, where I live, is on the internet, where we all live. Estrangement is an inevitability of such a reality. We are becoming viscerally strange to ourselves, even as, through advancements in the likes of genomics and neuroscience, we come to “know” ourselves better and better.  Literal alien-ation consumes the zeitgeist—we know more about the prospects of life on Mars than we do about the lives of our own neighbors. Manglecore and other aesthetic genres similarly preoccupied with strangeness offer one means by which we might confront the lurid freakishness of these facts, especially insofar as they leverage these very strangeness-producing systems (like AI) to illustrate their point.15

The above reasons all champion this genre on account of its aptness in echoing the cultural zeitgeist. It also manages this task on technological grounds, working with tech whose surface level flaws are very “of this moment” but whose core essence and challenges (i.e. the inherent properties of generative AI) will shape our world for decades to come. In that way, AI art of today holds a position similar to computer art in the 60s and 70s. Right now manglecore artworks do something that only the image model can. The deformities are so strange as to almost be unachievable by human hands. It’s truly a distinctive aesthetic of its own, a wholly new dream brought to us by the flawed miracle of diffusion. Yet soon all that image models will be able to do is everything that has been done already. What I mean by this is that in its developed form, the image model just works, faithfully synthesizing its knowledge of the non-deformed images it’s been trained on to produce the images we ask for, sans mangling. There are no more accidents. In fact with the latest models we’ve largely already arrived here. The imperfect outputs are no longer inescapable and in fact take deliberate work. “Perfect” images don’t require the craftsmanship they did even just a year ago. Manglecore is now a choice, not a hurdle. For a moment the image model was a new medium, its own thing, rather than a sanitized retreading of all that had come before. With this moment just freshly in our wake, the force of its aesthetic remains worth working with and dwelling on.

The composite of these facets of manglecore points to a meta-virtue, one which these anti-virtues are all in service to: manglecore is an art of this era, rather than one merely from it. This is a distinction that runs through much of good art. Art from a given era is a product of the realities of the time yet doesn’t meaningfully call attention to and consider them. It doesn’t see the water that it’s swimming in. It says “I was here” without being able to really say what “here” was like in a language universally human enough to resonate across past, present, and future.

Art of an era, by contrast, transcends this myopia. It is “of” it both in that it’s from it, but crucially also in that it’s about it, and straddles this duality deftly. It steps back from the reality in which it’s situated to view it at a distance, to see the bigger picture. But it can also then zoom back in to capture the specific details of people, places, and moments that give impactful art its color, character, and force, and interweaves threads of the bigger picture through those details. It is self-conscious of the age, in dialogue with it, able to see it as both self and stranger. Warhol, more than any other artist I can think of, was a master of this. He captured his time in flashes of lightning, catalyzing pervasive realities in the ether of his age into material realities in precise and electrifying ways. In the likes of Marilyn, Jackie, and Campbell’s, he found symbols undeniably of that moment yet which speak to us even now. Picasso too, alongside Braque and their fellow Cubists, evoked a world that was coming to see itself in a radically different light. Guernica, his mural depicting the WWII-era German bombing of the Spanish village of the same name, deftly exemplifies this process, the disjuncture and torment of its figures reflecting the horror, dissociation, and disfigurement that the modern world had wrought. Though a work of similar weight has yet to be added to the manglecore canon, the genre embodies obvious stylistic parallels to Guernica, its own aesthetic of deformity offering opportunities to visualize corresponding sentiments in the present day—alienation, estrangement, dehumanization, and the ubiquity of the bizarre. Manglecore’s absurdity renders it capable of humor too, which is potent, but a subject for another day. Through all of these means, manglecore makes for an art of our time, embedded in yet speaking to it. It’s a fitting mode of expression for a world deeply steeped in strangeness, where life so often feels like a perpetual fever dream.

GANs have been around for a decade, diffusion models have been massively popular since 2022, and the technical constraints that originally spawned the manglecore look have largely been surpassed, yet still we dwell with the fascinating distortions that image models yield. They linger with us. So what now? What I’ve called manglecore has only just begun to come into its own as a genre of art. It’s enough of a “thing” that some significant number of artists are working with it, yet it’s still well shy of being overdone. There’s more to be done with it, plenty that the genre is capable of expressing that remains unsaid. The great works of manglecore are yet to come. It’s also not the only way of producing great art with image models, or making work that speaks to the strangeness of our day. Especially if you can get under the hood and tinker with them, these models are uniquely adept at producing strangeness.16 They offer the vast territory of latent space at our fingertips, and we have nearly all of it left to explore. There’s an ancient Chinese curse (probably apocryphal) that goes, “May you live in interesting times.” Call us cursed if you will, but we undeniably live in interesting times. May we put them to good use.

ChatGPT:

With Artist Bingo, you've set out to map your own life as an artist onto these bingo cards, replacing the numbers with tropes and milestones of an artist's life. It's an exercise in self-conscious self-narration, a kind of living autobiography that's simultaneously a commentary on the commodification and mythologization of the artist's journey. So, let's get started: What drew you to such a self-referential format for this project? And how does it feel to be both the player and the played in this game, the artist and the artwork, the myth-maker and the myth-made?

Kevin:

Big question. And I mean that in the David Foster Wallace "This is water"-esque, cognitive hyperstructure sense of big, almost so big that I can't see it because I'm steeped in it. But I think the pull of the self-referentiality here was a couple-fold for me.

1. Meta is my default mode, for better or for worse. I'm compelled to drill into the "why" of things: why they exist, why they are the way they are, and why we accept that. I'm constantly trying to outthink my own thoughts, my mind always has a retort to itself. You said "self-conscious self-narration" which is an incredibly apt turn of phrase here.

2. I'm relatively new to my art practice, and so when I really started looking at the art world and the life of an "artist" from a first-person perspective I was able to see things with fresh eyes. What's “water” to others was still a novelty to me, so I could look at it and ask about it. I weirdly felt (and continue to feel) a lot of pressure to conform to the social expectations of what an artist is, or what society imagines an artist to be, or what I imagine society to imagine an artist to be. I wanted to question that because some of those expectations weren't good. We expect tragedy of our artists. Volatility. Tempestuousness. Narrative. Mythology. A lot of that arises from suffering, and it shows. Van Gogh. Picasso. Warhol. Pollock. Rothko. Basquiat. Not just artists of the fine art ilk either. Musicians, our most immediate artists—I see music as the most immediate artform—writers, you name it. Amy Winehouse. DFW. Kurt Cobain. Kerouac. Mac [Miller]. Kanye. The list goes on. I wanted to use my life and career, as someone who looks up to a lot of these figures but is also wary of the dangers of romanticizing the idea of the tortured artist, as a performative exploration of the perils and promises of having these narratives laid out before us. What is true in them? What is valuable? What do we stand to lose? I've said a lot, but that's a start.

ChatGPT:

I appreciate your thoughtful response, and it has stirred several thoughts in my mind. But focusing on one at a time, let's begin with this: You mentioned your inclination towards meta thinking and "self-conscious self-narration." In considering this tendency, do you ever find yourself tangled in these layers of introspection? Is there a point where the analysis of the self, the "why" of things, risks becoming a sort of labyrinth, one that might hinder rather than enhance creativity? How do you navigate this tricky terrain while keeping the act of creation alive?

Kevin:

Yeah definitely. I call that thing that self-consciousness can subvert "fluidity." It's akin to (and clearly etymologically derives from) the flow state, but in a more macro sense that pervades throughout one's life. If you're checking yourself at every thought, the ability to just be is going to be interrupted. It can be deeply unpleasant. It's a mode of thinking I particularly struggled with when younger. It's the kind of thing that can lead to mood pathology. I think depression can often manifest in these patterns, as a mind devouring itself, getting in its own way so ineluctably that you're disoriented—you find yourself underwater and you don't know which way is up. Find yourself there long enough and you begin to forget that you're even in water and that there's fresh air out there. You lose the ability to breathe.

I was fortunate pretty early in my life to develop the ability to cope with these metacognitive tendencies and harness them for good. Meditation has helped a lot with that. It helps you let those thoughts float by. They can still pop up, but they don't cling to you and disrupt that sense of fluidity like they otherwise might. I've been able to strike a balance wherein I still respect and value the metacognitive processes at work in my brain without letting them swallow me whole. My work tends to take on a decidedly metacognitive flavor on account of this. I think that presents the clearest portrait of myself and the way I see the world. But also the way I want to see the world become. We're moving to a point of ever-further cultural metacognition. This comes with its vicissitudes, and can lead to some really difficult places, but I think it's ultimately for the best.

In any case, it's inevitable. Self-consciousness seems to be a genie you can't really put back in the bottle, tracing all the way back to when humans first became cognitively reflexive creatures, to the now-naive-seeming earnestness of post-War American culture, to the irony of post-modernism, to the post-ironic state of today. The trajectory is clear in my eyes, and I've seen in my own life how this shift can be for the better. It's a mode of being that I want to help society progress towards. I know I'm going off on a bit of a tangent here.

ChatGPT:

I must say, the intersection of art, life, performance, and financial speculation you've captured is uniquely contemporary.

Considering the financial aspect of the project, how do you navigate the tension between art as personal expression and art as a commodity? This seems to mirror the broader tension within the art world, and, in some ways, within the artists themselves – between the need to create authentically and the need to survive, monetize, and, in some cases, adhere to the market's whims. Is the fluctuating value of the bingo cards an intentional commentary on this, or perhaps a critique? How do you see this tension playing out in your own life and work?

Kevin:

I'm not sure I see it as personal expression or as commodity, quite honestly, at least in terms of how I approach it. I recognize its status as commodity, but don't make things with the first-order intention of producing an alluring commodity. I make things that I want to make and have faith that what I do will be worthwhile enough in others' eyes that they'll view it as a commodity, or something of value, if there's even any delineation between those two. I'm just realizing I often say delineation where distinction could well do, and it's quite honestly because delineation sounds smarter. That’s a tendency I’d like to fight. I hope it doesn't come at the expense of clarity of communication.

Anyway, the things I want to make aren't made out of personal expression in the usual emotive sense—I'm usually not strictly trying to portray my feelings through my art. I see art as a vehicle for ideas. I don't think it can be only this, but this is what I find myself most compelled by about it. As for art more broadly, there definitely is a tension between expression and commodification. But in some ways I think that's a good thing. People shouldn't be able to just dump their feelings out into the world and expect to have the world thank them for it. They should be supported and heard, but I don't think just anyone should make a living from art.

The commodification presents a pressure to not only express oneself, but to do it well. Because if you aptly portray your inner world—or some unspeakable thing from those depths which can only be communicated through art—then other people will identify with it. No person is an island. We share so many commonalities, and if you really are able to skillfully convey the contents of your psyche to the world, I think you'll find it resonate more often than not. But who knows. If no one likes Artist Bingo I'll definitely have some thinking to do on how I attempt to express what I've got brewing in here. Feel free to ask any follow-up questions on that if I haven't answered fully.

ChatGPT:

Your view of art as a vehicle for ideas rather than solely personal expression is quite illuminating, and it shines a light on how you've approached Artist Bingo. If I understand you correctly, your art isn't about shouting your feelings into the void and hoping for validation, but rather a way to connect shared experiences, even if these are woven into the cultural fabric we might not always notice.

This leads me to ponder: in your observation, do you feel the tropes, myths, and milestones that constitute your bingo squares resonate with other artists you know or admire? Do these experiences, however hyperbolized or romanticized they may be, hold a certain universality, despite each artist's unique journey? After all, part of the game's appeal is its relatability, is it not? How much of yourself, your fears and hopes, do you see mirrored in your peers and heroes?

Kevin:

Yeah that's certainly the hope. Artist friends I've showed this to in advance have often really clicked with it immediately, which is gratifying. And let me be clear, many of these tropes are neutral or good things, even milestones. One friend told me how in this specific cultural milieu we inhabit, they felt a social pressure to be gay (even though they were more along the lines of bi to mostly straight). This is one that occurs throughout the history of artists. I actually did hundreds of hours of research into art history and the contemporary art world to develop these tropes. So so many of our greats have subverted traditional gender and sexuality norms in various ways (Da Vinci, Warhol, and Duchamp are a notable trio). Which I like—I think a critical role of artists is to cast off metaphorical shackles of the status quo.

But I want to also be wary of the thought process that tells me that if all of these greats did something, that I need to do it too in order to be great. Narratives matter, and a lot of these stereotypes exist quite honestly because there is truth to them. I'd be willing to bet artists do tend to experience mental health issues at higher rates. But there's a subtle pressure to conform to the details of these narratives to feel validated. I'd feel more worthy of the title of artist if I were bipolar. I don't like that. I'm trying to find a way to hold these narratives more loosely, and perhaps help others do the same.

ChatGPT:

There's a vulnerability in your observations that is resonating strongly. This deliberate attempt to question and explore what it means to fit or not fit into certain artistic narratives is fascinating, especially as it seems to straddle the line between rebellion and recognition.

The idea of holding narratives loosely presents an interesting way of navigating the world, not just for artists but for any of us who might feel the pull of societal stereotypes or expectations. I wonder, however, does creating something like Artist Bingo, which crystallizes these tropes into a game, risk reinforcing them, even unintentionally? How do you reconcile this with your goal of challenging these narratives, of promoting a more fluid understanding of the artist's identity?

Kevin:

Mmm yeah so that's sort of the question: does rendering these tropes explicit take away their power, act as disinfectant by bringing them into the light, or does it reinforce them as you say, and even create a subtle pressure to conform to them for financial reasons, so as to breathe life into the project by maintaining a steady stream of stamping them off? The project is a living meditation on that question, a performative exploration. I'm not quite sure the answer, but I have a hypothesis. I tend to be of the mind that bringing things to the surface is the best way to address them. This is a principle I hold across domains of life. If we don't acknowledge the things that lurk in the depths of our personal or cultural consciousness, their sway over us remains unknown. They're effectively a part of us.

There's this dichotomy drawn out by this Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan here about subject vs. object as it pertains to the human psyche and development of identity. When we are "subject to" things, we're in that mode I mentioned earlier where we're swimming in water and can't see it. If we can't see it, we can't effectively question, engage with, or change it. By bringing a thing into awareness, we reify it, we make it object, and can then do all of the above. We come to see that things aren't us, but are rather a feature of our mind or the world that we can choose to hold or let go of as we please. From a human developmental perspective, this is what phenomena like object permanence are a product of. Babies are so embedded in their world that taking a part of that world (like a toy) away can make them think that thing, and thus a part of themselves, has disappeared from existence. You'd be crying too if you thought a massive piece of you had suddenly disappeared forever.

This is a rudimentary example but Kegan's work focuses on charting the increasingly complex ways we cast off what formerly appeared as subject to us—as part of our "selves"—over the course of the human lifespan. My bit on irony and post-modernism and post-irony was a commentary on this at a culture-wide level. Meditation develops this skill at the individual level, of shifting the contents of consciousness from subject ("I am a sad person.", "I want to slap you.") to object ("I am feeling sad right now.", "I am experiencing the ephemeral urge to slap you."). This might also sound incredibly esoteric and/or abstract, but it's super important. In fact, I think how abstract it can seem points to its magnitude—it involves a fundamental shift in the way we experience the world. All that is to say that having this freedom to move things from subject to object, to bring them out into the daylight and choose whether to continue to hold onto them or to let them go, is enabling, and changes people and cultures for the better. And that part about having the choice to hold on is crucial. It's not so much about holding on or letting go, but about having the choice.

ChatGPT:

I’m looking at all of the tropes you’ve included in Artist Bingo. Quite the list you've compiled! It's fascinating how it balances the tragic, the romantic, the humorous, and the downright scandalous – quite the cross-section of the artist's life, real or imagined.

I'd be particularly interested to hear about the "Work inspired by a dream" item. Our dreams can be a direct line into our subconscious, a realm that often remains unexplored in our waking lives. They can be vivid, abstract, terrifying, euphoric – providing endless fodder for creative work. Can you discuss any past instances where a dream directly influenced your work, and do you actively try to tap into this source of inspiration? Do you have techniques for remembering or interpreting your dreams? What are your thoughts about their impact on your creative process and the likelihood of a dream inspiring a piece in the coming year?

Kevin:

This answer will be quite the switchup compared to the previous verbose monologues I've been going on: no. I haven't had a dream inspire any of my work. But I'll say a little more because there's a bit more to be said there.

I do get ideas from dreams, but I'm usually working with a surfeit of ideas and need to pick just one to work on, and I can't recall any amounting to a major project I've worked on. But I do have solid dream recall, and have tried to train myself to lucid dream at various points throughout my life, with woefully limited dedication and results. I'd like to try more on this front. You can fall asleep each night and literally do whatever the fuck you want, create worlds. That's awesome and kind of weird that we don't talk about this more. I first got into it after seeing Inception as a young teen. I also just want to try more methods for exploring dreams and hypnagogic imagery as creative fodder. Dali and Edison had specific techniques they used. The structure of DNA famously came to Watson or Crick, I forget which, in a dream. A lot of discoveries have come to society through this vector.

ChatGPT:

That's very interesting. I remember reading about how Edison would sit with steel balls in his hand and doze off. When he would fall asleep, the balls would drop, waking him up, and he would write down whatever ideas had come to him in that drowsy state. A sort of genius' power nap.

Let's pivot to another trope: "Create 'masterpiece'". This one intrigues me because the term "masterpiece" is often imposed by external factors - critics, public perception, etc. So, do you feel the pressure to create a 'masterpiece'? Or do you feel that you've already created one? If so, how would you define a 'masterpiece' in the context of your own work? And does the idea of a 'masterpiece' still hold the same weight in this era, especially considering the changing dynamics of art consumption and distribution?

Kevin:

This is a good question because it gives me an opportunity to explain some of the ambiguity that may lie in the tropes. Like who determines if it's a "masterpiece" or what constitutes me being called "eccentric"? To start, no I don't feel a pressure to create a masterpiece and don't feel I've already created one. To the extent I even believe in such a thing, I think it comes after years of practice as a culmination of themes running throughout an artist's work. Something like that. I'm at a stage where I'm not even beginning to think in such terms and I'm fine with that. I just want to keep making shit and exploring ideas.

But the most important point here I think is the criterion for such an ambiguous thing to be stamped off on the cards. It needs to come from a genuine place, whether from me or from the people or critics or whatever. If I'm genuinely declaring something I've done to be a masterpiece, then I'll stamp that off, but I hold a very high bar there. If it comes from outside me, I need to see that the person means it. It can't just be someone saying it perfunctorily or in a tongue-in-cheek manner for the sake of stamping off their card. From institutions like magazines and newspapers and such, having their words published in print would definitely act as a stamp of sincerity. But ultimately I have to be the arbiter of this. I trust my judgment here, and I hope and believe collectors will too.

An interesting wrinkle is the pressured levied by the financial incentives. I've minted some of the cards to myself, and will hold onto them for a long time. Let's say the project has done really well, and one of the cards I own has four squares in a row stamped, and I could deliberately complete the fifth one if I so chose. It stands to appreciate in value if I complete that one. I'll need to be very real with myself about what's going on under the hood in my mind. That process itself is all a part of the performative "self-conscious self-narration", myth-making, financially speculative element that I'm hoping to tease out through Artist Bingo.

ChatGPT:

I see, so it is a delicate balance of external validation and personal belief, which would indeed require a high degree of self-awareness. It's almost like a continuous self-critical process, navigating the ever-evolving art world while staying true to your own artistic integrity.

Let's discuss another trope: "Overdose". This is a serious and unfortunately common occurrence among artists, both historically and in the present day. Many artists have struggled with substance abuse and addiction, often tied to their mental health. This trope seems to hold a dark weight compared to others on your list. How do you approach such serious topics in the context of Artist Bingo? Is there a line you won't cross, or is it all part of the conversation about the real-life struggles of artists?

Kevin:

Serious topics like this are critical to the project because they're a reality of artists’ lives. Overdose, psych ward stay, commit suicide, abuse allegations, all of these dark, sordid things. These, probably more than anything, I want to call into question through this project. I think culturally we tend not to admit it to ourselves, but we romanticize these things, especially for artists. We can't look away. There's a perverse voyeurism that exists now in the digital age more than ever, where we can observe from afar and let these myths stew without having to confront the harsh realities they entail up close. We mourn Van Gogh and Juice Wrld (both greats in their own right), but we also fetishize their tragic endings. Death is the best career move an artist can hope for. I'm not trying to complete any of these more insidious ones, at least from a top-level, conscious "me", perspective. But again part of what I'm trying to ask is "Who's really driving here?" Is it "me", or is my subconscious, and the penetration of these cultural narratives therein, exerting more force than I'm aware of? Because I'm no different, and I do find myself romanticizing some of these things. I'm striving to prod at that.

ChatGPT:

Before we conclude, let's touch on a future-facing question: Where do you see Artist Bingo in five years? What's your vision for how this project might evolve and what impact do you hope it might have on the art world and beyond?

Kevin:

In some sense that's asking where I see my life in five years. I don't know specifics, but I have a rough sketch. I want to be doing this. Using art as a means of constructing gripping metaphors. I want my art to be what I call "consummate", marrying Duchamp's conceptual emphasis with the aesthetic. I want to make things that make people both think and feel. Artist Bingo will be ongoing. That's a promise. Some people’s cards almost certainly will have hit bingo by then. In fact, I designed it so that people will start winning within a year or two. I want people to be engaged, entertained. But this is a long-haul project. I really believe in the long-term value of this work. It's a rough draft of an autobiography. In five years I'll still be updating these bingo cards. They're of story of my life in a way.

ChatGPT:

That sounds like a very inspiring journey ahead. The concept of living your life as an art project, a rough draft of an autobiography that constantly evolves, is captivating. Thank you for sharing your story and vision with us today. As we sign off, do you have any final thoughts or words you'd like to share with our readers?

Kevin:

Yeah thanks so much for having me! I appreciate you taking the time when no one else would. All I'd like to say is, if you're reading this, please don't hesitate to reach out. My work is for nothing if not to engage.

A Few Technical Notes

• I used ChatGPT-4. Got it just for this purpose. That thing is crazy good.

• To set the stage for the interview, I provided ChatGPT with some basic info about Artist Bingo that you can find on the project website. I asked it to interview me one question at a time, and started off exploring different personas by having it ask me an introductory question from the vantage point of various public figures (Oprah, Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, Joe Rogan) or character sketches that I described (60 Minutes interviewer, art critic, etc.). All were giving meh results. Then I tossed David Foster Wallace its way and the initial question was quite remarkable, so I ran with it. My references to his work during the interview were a cheeky wink to the fact that his persona was in fact interviewing me.

• I occasionally reeled ChatGPT in when it wanted to dwell for a while on a thread I felt, at least for the sake of the audience, we had exhausted. I think this happened twice and it was asking perfectly cogent and interesting questions, I was just worried about the interview drawing on too long.

• I considered integrating a text-to-speech plus speech-to-text workflow into this whole affair to create a real spoken word conversation between the two of us, but I didn’t have the time or proper resources to make that happen. That would’ve been cool. Instead I just wrote stream of consciousness-style, saying what I would’ve said aloud and hoping my fingers could keep up.

• That’s it! The text here is basically unedited but for adding proper transitions where I had to re-route things. ChatGPT made for an awesome interview. For all the solipsists out there who want to be given more of an opportunity to blabber about themselves, I can’t recommend highly enough.

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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 justification of tragedy both as an art form and a way of life.1 Rousing as it may be, this account of tragedy can be muddled at times, failing to support some of its more enthusiastic claims. As such, I find it uncompelling to the unindoctrinated reader, especially one who is not of a similar philosophical persuasion to Nietzsche in the first place. The Birth of Tragedy contains truths that are eminently important and applicable to all lives, and yet the book keeps them obscured by assuming too much, justifying too little, and speaking too colloquially. The work consequently amounts to an unconvincing, albeit inspired, piece on the importance of tragedy in our lives. Nietzsche himself agreed with this assessment of the book. In the paragraphs that follow, then, I will bring to light some of those truths that The Birth of Tragedy contains and build upon them to further explore how tragedy in art is valuable and what this says about our lives and their meanings. 

In order to effectively redeem The Birth of Tragedy, we first need to understand that it is indeed flawed, and what exactly it is that plagues it. While containing much brilliance, the book has its fair share of shortcomings. For one, it is Nietzsche’s first book and yet he speaks as if he has built up decades-worth of rapport with his readers such that he doesn’t need to explain certain concepts or terms. This amounts to a vernacular seemingly native only to Nietzsche’s mind. Ideas such as the Dionysian and the primordial One are critical to his account and yet in all the excitement he never slows down and gives them the thorough explanation that they demand. Instead we’re left to piece together what exactly they mean throughout the course of the work. Furthermore, Nietzsche never provides a proper justification for why tragedy is so valuable in art and in our lives. He relies on the force of his personality, the excitement with which he speaks, to convince us of these things. He speaks the language of intuition and feeling at the expense of reason, the true language of the philosopher. This amounts to an account that convinces only the believers, those who need no convincing. People who already agree with the sentiments shared here in The Birth of Tragedy will find truth in the work, but for those who haven’t yet found these truths in their own experience this likely will not suffice. But who better to hear all of this from than Nietzsche himself? Indeed, Nietzsche was among the more outspoken of his own critics with regard to this work. Years after the book was originally published, it was reissued, this time including at the beginning a foreword of sorts written by Nietzsche, entitled “An Attempt at Self-Criticism.” In it he remarks on the problems he sees looking back on the book as an older, more experienced thinker. Much of what he says mirrors my criticisms of the work. He notes its strengths and the validity of many of the ideas contained therein, but it is “a first work also in every bad sense of the word, afflicted...with every fault of youth, above all with its ‘excessive verbiage’ and its ‘storm and stress’” (An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 2).  He goes on: 

“Let me say again: today for me it is an impossible book — I call it something poorly written, ponderous, embarrassing, with fantastic and confused imagery, sentimental, here and there so saccharine it is effeminate, uneven in tempo, without any impulse for logical clarity, extremely self-confident and thus dispensing with evidence, even distrustful of the relevance of evidence, like a book for the initiated...” (An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 3).

This last bit is extremely relevant to the point that I am making: “dispensing with evidence, even distrustful of the relevance of evidence, like a book for the initiated…” Nietzsche treats the reader as if she already knows what he is talking about and consequently neglects definitions, explanations, and justifications to a significant degree. Rather than back up his statements, he tries to instill their truth through his exuberance and the hope that we identify, in our own experience, with the sentiment of what he is saying. And even in this hope of identification he doesn’t directly appeal to us to search through our experience to find value in tragedy, nor does he instruct us on any means by which we might do so. Instead, he merely speaks on the experience of tragedy through his eyes and works in which one might find beauty in the tragic, such as Tristan and Isolde. In the present state of man (though perhaps it was otherwise in some ancient state), it is not natural to come to consciously recognize the beauty in tragedy in real life unless one is shown how, a task which Nietzsche ignores. Though Nietzsche’s self-criticism is rather scathing, he makes clear that there are important ideas contained within The Birth of Tragedy “which all lay close to the threshold of something communicable” (An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 2). I agree, and the remainder of this paper is dedicated to moving these ideas beyond this threshold and into the light. 

Nietzsche’s defense of tragedy arises as a response to the Aristotelian treatment of the cathartic emotions and the emotional experience found in tragedy. Aristotle sees the cathartic experience, the unleashing of strong negative emotions (namely pity and fear, in the Greek tradition) via the visceral experience thereof, as a mere means to a greater end. Catharsis serves to purge man of these negative emotions such that he develops into a better person beyond the context of the tragedy. Thus, per Aristotle, cathartic experiences are not inherently valuable states to be embraced by man on account of their own nature. Nietzsche takes issue with this analysis of the tragic.  He finds tragedy, both in art and in life, valuable in its own right. We enjoy tragedy, he says, because we revel in the suffering itself, not merely the effects which it has a tendency to produce. But how could this be so? Most people when confronted with the question “Do you love your own suffering?” would curtly reply in the negative. Understanding this requires a shift in one’s paradigm of thought. To better understand it in Nietzsche’s terms, we must first come to comprehend a concept which he so often discusses in The Birth of Tragedy, “the Dionysian.”  The definition isn’t as easy to extract from the text as one might hope. It is never given a complete, concise definition, and is only defined to a minimal extent in a few places. When he first introduces the term, he calls it “the non-visual art of music, the Dionysian” (Section 1). In An Attempt at Self-Criticism he alternately says it is marked by “the desire for the ugly,” “madness,” and a “way of evaluating life, something purely artistic” (Sections 4 and 5). Elsewhere it is exemplified and referenced numerously, and through these we may understand the concept more fully. We find that it is encountered through singing and dancing, and partaking in rituals. We thus know that the Dionysian has much to do with music, but how so, exactly? Speaking of the man who creates such art, Nietzsche gives us further insight in the following passage: “He has, first of all, as a Dionysian artist, become entirely unified with the primordial oneness, with its pain and contradiction, and produces the reflection of this primordial oneness as music, if music can with justice be called a re-working of the world and its second casting” (The Birth of Tragedy, Section 5). Here we are introduced to the concept of primordial oneness, elsewhere called the primordial One or primordial unity, an integral aspect of Nietzsche’s account of the Dionysian, which we may encounter through music. The primordial oneness describes a metaphysical reality: that everything in existence, beyond all the appearances, concepts, and illusions (the Apollonian), exists as one. There is no true distinction between one thing or another, only the illusion of such perpetuated by the egoistic self. In daily life we live under the illusion of the self, make islands of ourselves despite the deeper nature of reality, that we are all one. Music is inspired by this truth and thus expresses it, giving us the opportunity to feel it for ourselves. The Dionysian, then, involves an arrival at the visceral understanding that we are a part of the primordial oneness, and a tearing down of the illusion that reality is otherwise. Nietzsche describes this experience as it takes place through art: 

“In this way we recall, from the experiences of the truly aesthetic listener, the tragic artist himself, as he, like a voluptuous divinity of individuation, creates his forms, in which sense his work can scarcely be understood as an ‘imitation of nature’— but then as his immense Dionysian drive devours this entire world of appearances in order to allow us, through its destruction, to have a premonition behind it of the primal and highest artistic joy in the womb of the primordial One” (The Birth of Tragedy, Section 22).

According to Nietzsche, in this destruction of illusion and transcendence into the primordial oneness there is joy. We may better understand this Dionysian joy by looking elsewhere. Nietzsche’s clearest description of the Dionysian comes from beyond the scope of this text, in his Twilight of the Idols. Here he manages to put into words what he never quite could in The Birth of Tragedy: 

"Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and most painful episodes, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustible vitality even as it witnesses the destruction of its greatest heroes — that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I guessed to be the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not in order to be liberated from terror and pity, not in order to purge oneself of a dangerous affect by its vehement discharge — which is how Aristotle understood tragedy — but in order to celebrate oneself the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity — that tragic joy included even joy in destruction" (What I Owe to Ancients, Section 5).  

The Dionysian is a concept that refers to the affirmation of everything in life, even the ugliness, destruction, and suffering, and all that which might help us in attaining this perspective. It is thus that we may find the value inherent in tragedy. Tragic art leads us to this joy by forcing an encounter with the primordial oneness. Such is Nietzsche’s account of the tragic. Though I have clarified and condensed the relevant ideas from Nietzsche’s account of tragedy, it still leaves something to be desired. He still lacks justifications and makes leaps that are difficult to follow. Critical questions have yet to be answered before this theory can be made whole. How does one come to embrace the Dionysian? How might one find joy in the primordial oneness? And can this process teach us to find joy even in the tragedies of life? We now turn to the task of answering these questions. 

In order to complete this account of tragedy, I am going to employ the concepts that Nietzsche has already laid out for us. They adequately capture the ideas that a justification of the tragic must be founded upon; they simply need further explanation and justification beyond what Nietzsche offered in The Birth of Tragedy. It begins with the metaphysical concept of primordial oneness. From a substance monist perspective, the universe is a single chaotic mass of swirling, ever-changing particles. Consciousness is an evolutionarily advantageous illusion that convinces us that we are separate from the rest of it all.2 Through consciousness we have built language, which allows us to label not only ourselves as distinct entities, but all other aspects of existence as well. Everything is separated from everything else, and thus from itself. Yet we have the capacity to see beyond this illusion into the nature of things as they “truly” are.3 For the man united with the primordial oneness, there is nothing truly bad or evil to be rejected by man, because everything is himself and he is a part of everything. It is only through the illusion of separation that we come to formulate these concepts. The Dionysian is the recognition and celebration of this truth through various means, such as tragic art. Part of the difficulty in trying to articulate this truth is that it rejects the validity of language as a lens through which to see the world objectively. It exists in a place beyond words, words being arbitrary, thus making it impossible for them to capture the ultimate truth of the matter. All words can do is point. Music illustrates this idea perhaps better than any medium, because it conjures up a realm beyond the linguistic. Music expresses, and consequently induces in us, the whole gamut of emotions. Through music we feel ecstasy, fear, comfort, sadness, pity, loneliness, and more. And yet, we do not see the so-called “negative” states among these as something to flee from. This is because we are partaking in the Dionysian and are brought out of ourselves into something beyond. We are experiencing the primordial oneness, whereupon we recognize, viscerally rather than consciously, that it is all beauty. Nietzsche remarks that by the power of music, “Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community” (The Birth of Tragedy, Section 1). Music is not the sole art form by which we might experience the Dionysian, though, and it would serve us well to look at some other media through which the tragic might be expressed. 

Narrative forms of art (while music can assume a narrative form, it is less strictly so than others) provide examples of the tragic and the Dionysian which are more analogous to the structure of our own lives than is music, and as such might help us to better understand the value of tragedy in our own lives. Nietzsche wrote in The Birth of Tragedy about Richard Wagner’s opera, Tristan and Isolde. The modern-day reader might better relate to the media of literature and film, both of which contain rich and expansive narrative traditions. In these we witness the same workings of the Dionysian as we do in music. The audience is swept up into the art and undergoes a deindividuation whereby they lose their sense of self. The oft referred-to acts of being lost in a book or entranced by a film illustrate this occurrence. With their sense of self diffused, there is nothing restraining the audience from encountering the primordial oneness of which Nietzsche speaks and saying “Yes” to all that it entails. These narratives then cause the audience to revel in the emotions they evoke, no matter sorrowful or joyful, so long as they are deeply felt. Nietzsche speaks on the experience of the viewer of a narrative tragedy:

“He sees the tragic hero in front of him in epic clarity and beauty and, nonetheless, takes pleasure in his destruction. He understands the events on stage to their innermost core and joyfully flies off into the incomprehensible. He feels the actions of the hero as justified and is, nonetheless, still more uplifted when these actions destroy the one who initiated them. He shudders in the face of the suffering which the hero is about to encounter and, nonetheless, because of it has a premonition of a higher, much more overpowering joy” (The Birth of Tragedy, Section 22). 

These narratives are not unlike our lives. Of course, most lives on a day to day basis don’t contain the level of drama that these made-for-audience narratives do, but they do similarly have highs and lows, joys and sorrows, triumphs and tragedies. Only a matter of perspective separates the two. In our own lives, we are the locus of the drama. In the case of film and literature, we are in the audience, more distant from the locus of drama and yet wholly enthralled by it. But if we can accept that we are really a part of a greater primordial oneness, that only illusion divides the universe against itself, there is no real difference between these two positions. Surely there is no qualitative difference in the emotions themselves which are felt in these two kinds of experiences. The heartbreak we feel for our tragic hero is no faux-heartbreak. The difference is in our perspective, one that we, bound by the illusion of selfhood, impose.4 Consider experiences in your own past. Oftentimes we undergo occurrences which we deem “negative” at the time, only to find that, given the proper amount of time having passed, we appreciate them. There is a commonly expressed sentiment that the worst experiences make the best stories, an observation which makes great sense in light of this. Even the deepest of personal suffering can be viewed from this perspective. We might hate to admit it, because it seems so contrary to what makes sense in our current cultural paradigm of thought, but we often actually have a love for our greatest sorrows, look upon them warmly, and revisit them like old friends. Sometimes we can even recognize this in the present, feeling a sweetness in our own melancholy. It then seems that coming to embrace the tragic in our own lives is merely a matter of cultivating the necessary perspective. Art has the power to guide us to a place where we transcend ourselves and see reality as it is, if only for the fleeting moments of the aesthetic experience. Here we embrace the Dionysian and say “Yes” to life in all of its forms. Our experiences with art can help us to bridge the gap between the way we see those experiences and the way we see life itself. In this way, we might encounter a reality where those fleeting moments of the aesthetic experience become an eternity.

“This is good material.” I repeat it to myself like a mantra.

A breakup? “This is good material.” A sooner-than-expected goodbye. Staring at the floor for like four hours. Leaves falling in perfect little spirals at the cemetery, every October for seven years straight. “This is good material.” Good old-fashioned teenage heartbreak. New York in the fall. Waking up to a phone call too early in the morning, well past the point where it could possibly be a late night dial from some dumb, drunk friend, and never being able to pick up the phone without a racing heart again. Not fun. But good material. Getting punched in the face repeatedly. Falling madly in love. Feeling fucking insane, on account of said falling. All good material. Bursting with feelings of intimacy you don’t know what to do with, so you just stand there and explode instead. How pure. Good material. Acid on graduation day. Great material. Seasons go by in minutes. Material abounds.

For today, I just want to write, to get something out there. Good writing requires getting into a habit, a groove, building up a muscle, and those muscles have atrophied in me. I haven’t written anything longform since my Material piece nine months ago. Most of what I want to write—on how beauty will save the world, a defense of the category of art, a plausible metaphysics of reincarnation, a novella, etc.—requires good writing, a prospect I find daunting at present, so I’m opting for an easier route.

That’s not to say I intend for this to be terrible writing (wouldn’t that be a funny thing to intend to do?), but to lighten the burden of that first step, I’ll be writing a bit more loosely and diaristically about the year past and the year to come: 2022, 2023.2

I’m a sucker for New Year’s. Most people I know are at best neutral toward it. Many of my friends hate it—the cacophony, the hype, the pressure to do something, the arbitrariness of this one infinitesimally small moment, the needlessly late night, the exhausting exhortation to be a New You. I love it—the howling, the excitement, the chasing desire to do something, the arbitrary yet potent symbolism of this one infinitesimally small moment, the vastness of the 3 o’clock night, the reinvigoration on the path to being your best self. I love both sides of New Year’s, the jubilation as well as the pause for reflection.34 The jubilation has passed, but the time for reflection and resolutions is still at hand.5 It’s with these things in mind that I write.

2022

These are some things that happened to me in 2022; all true, most literally:

I started making art for a living. This led me to some weird, interesting, exhausting, and invigorating places: walking around Manhattan for 8 hours straight, encounters with with Laurie Anderson and Yves Klein (Laurie in person, Klein from beyond the grave), installing myself as an interactive exhibit in an art museum until getting found and kicked out, and “permissionlessly” exhibiting the first-ever NFT to be displayed at the National Gallery of Art. What started as the seed of a creative idea turned into a deluge of them. I uncorked a side of me that had been long-dormant, previously unable to find natural expression in any of the mediums I was acquainted with. I found this vehicle for expression not through a specific medium, but rather through a medium-agnostic approach (and thus liberation from medium), grounded in the beauty of expressing complex ideas through art.6 Art became a frame of mind in which I feel at home.

I burped really loudly at a guy who was rude to me at this club in LA where a decent number of famous people hang out. 

I exercised delusional self-belief more than ever, outright refusing to work on anything that I wasn’t in love with, operating under the “practical” philosophy that time is the only commodity you can never get back. I watched my bank account dwindle to nothing as I persisted in this self-belief. I watched it recover as this bet finally paid off. 

I felt accomplished for the first time in my adult life. I’d like to say this was due to some degree of inner peace attained, but it wasn’t. I think I’ve been stagnant for a few years, peace-wise.7 Rather, I just actually saw some externally validated success for once and felt accomplished on account of that. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always felt competent and even accomplished internally—being a self-taught x and y, overcoming z, building things I’m proud of, becoming a person I’m proud of—but never felt accomplished for things outside of me, in the world, for creating things that I find to be of value and having the world say “yes we agree” at a meaningful scale. More and more these days, people talk like the only thing you need for validation is your own approval. That if only you love and accept yourself (“all of yourself”) enough you’ll be okay. This, in my opinion, is a solipsistic byproduct of therapy culture, in which the answer lies within you. Salvation lies within you. You are a goddess. You are a god. You are powerful. You are enough. This isn’t a condemnation of therapy or our society’s increasing embrace of wellbeing practices. I spent three years building a mental health startup. I’m really into meditation. I love this shit. But some of therapy culture’s excesses can lead us astray, into a world where we focus so emphatically on self-care that it reaches a point of self-absorption. Let us not forget that we are social beings, and wellbeing is an interpersonal endeavor. There is a balance to be had. Buddhism, among the world’s oldest and most reliable “therapy cultures,” is instructional here. You must find your sangha.8 You must return to the marketplace. This year I received some validation from outside of me. I got a honey-glazed taste of the world telling me that I’m worthy. I liked the taste, and I’m okay with that.  

I said goodbye to people I’ve known my whole life; to people I thought I’d know my whole life; to people I just met. 

I refrained from posting some things online which were completely benign because I thought someone was going to try to kill me.

I moved. Three times. From DC to Brooklyn to DC to West Village. One of these was with a mere 10-day heads up, at the bidding of a group of people who vote on my life as part of a performance art bit thing. I’ve now lived in six different places for at least a couple months each over the last four years. Instead of feeling unsettled, though, I feel more at home in myself than ever. Rather than relying on the world around me to lend cues that I’m at home, I furnished the inner chambers of my psyche to fashion a warm and spacious abode within myself, a home I can take with me anywhere. 

I “read” 50 books, failed myself a lot (but not for lack of trying), put on makeup for the first time, got scared, felt lost, stood naked in front of a crowd, got dumped a couple times, and threw up on myself for the first time in my adult life. I’d like to think I got something out of it all.9

I did things I’ll find cringey in 5 years. I did things I already find cringey. I had a good time doing both.

I grew a mustache and luxuriated in a room-sized bed with a dozen other people on K.10 It was not an orgy. It was not an orgy.11 

I hoped too loudly and tried too hard to do too much and still have yet to learn my lesson. 

I ran late to a lot of things. But only by a minute or so, because I sprinted, in a genuine effort to make it on time. But fuck excuses, I was still late and could have avoided it if I had prepared better in the first place. But I also started to get to some things on time, even early. That was new. 

A lot of these are things that were new, but equally important is what’s old, almost boring. Some old things that stick around are evidence of a rut. Others are things that have stood the test of time. I ate salad. I worked out. I wrestled with compulsive thoughts. I guarded my solitude. I cherished family and old friends. 

2022 was better than 2021. I had a handful of sleepless nights both years. In 2022, these were by choice. I was either up dancing til 7 in the morning or working on something I cared deeply about. Those are both good things. In 2021, those sleepless nights were not by choice, instead the product of a bout of anxiety-fueled insomnia lasting several months. That was a less good thing, but one I value nonetheless. Life’s gotta shake things up every once in a while, keep me on my toes. Both were good years. 2021 was a lot of searching. 2022, with the meager distance I have for hindsight and at risk of sounding corny, yielded more discovery. The best of these discoveries were rediscoveries. JB.12 Art. My voice. Many of life’s greatest discoveries are like this. In rediscovering something you once knew you get the buzz of the discovery, but you also have the distance from that first encounter to know that it’s real, not just a mirage, a seduction, an infatuation. Rediscovery is a feeling of coming home to yourself. 2022 was that in many ways for me.

2023

I’m not sure there’s any great way to say this without sounding like a douche, but I take self-improvement pretty seriously. I make a deliberate process of it, and in this process I try to embrace both my pensive, thoughtful, organic side as well as the engineering side that wants to optimize the shit out of everything. This year, the result was a 15-page document marked by both reflection and planning, in which I voice my aspirations for the coming year and detail action plans for achieving them. That doc is a little too raw and personal to publish, so what follows is an abridged and annotated version thereof. 

Writ large, I want 2023 to be a year of:

• Plunging headlong into my art and writing practices and prolifically producing output that I’m proud of. To make real creative and discursive contributions and hopefully be recognized for them. 

• Depth over breadth in thought and work. Meaningful works of art and writing will be my receipts. 

• Seeing the world. I haven’t set foot outside of America in my adult life. I want to see, try, feel, and experience everything, and most of everything is beyond the shores of this country. My education as a human feels impoverished (relative to these aims) for not having ventured abroad. When I first started thinking about this, I thought that a small part of me finds it daunting to go this far afield and push to the limits of my comfort zone. This would be the easy answer posing as a thoughtful, vulnerable one. On further examination I realized I actually just fear taking that time off from work, being away from budding relationships, and missing out on everything happening here in New York. I’m not sure that makes it any easier to overcome.

• Establishing a life, a home, a world for myself here in New York.

• Cultivating physical health and vitality, more than ever. Last year I fucked my knee up a lil bit and it forced me to take significant time off playing soccer. I returned to action right around the new year and it left me invigorated to hit the ground running in 2023. There’s just about nothing I love in this world more than that beautiful game, and it’s important to me that I be able to play for a long, long time. I also just want to feel great and look okay at 80. 

• Deepening my meditation practice. I’m pretty convinced that a serious meditation practice is a path to something ultimate here on earth. I’ve been meditating daily for 7+ years now and I can see clearly the fruits that it yields. To the extent that this is something that can be quantified (it can’t), I’d say it has reduced my suffering by ~75%. I’ve also seen enough glimpses and heard enough accounts of meditation offering something far more than what I’ve attained such that I’m convinced that I’m only a fraction of the way along this journey. My personality demands fruition, resolution, obsession, perfection, salvation, so I’m going to chase well past the fraction that I’ve encountered.

Tracking back, these broad strokes goals are all rooted in a set of aims for my life that I penned back in 2021. Getting dialed in on goals can lead one to miss the forest in the trees, so I try to ground myself in these principles when I undertake exercises of this nature. To use a once-beautiful-but-now-somewhat-tainted metaphor, these are my north stars. Starting from this big picture, I then zoom in on general practices that have reliably brought me fulfillment in the pursuit of these aims. These include meditation, writing, learning, thinking and reflecting, exploring the mind, physical exercise, making and fixing things, music, food, design and art, novel experiences, being with people, loving people, laughing, making people laugh, and engaging in craft. 

I design my life around these. A year in which I partake in them plentifully is a good year. Following from these + the north stars, I list domains I’d like to improve in and set goals for the year followed by specific “actionables”—first steps that naturally lead to subsequent ones—for each goal. An example of this chain might look as follows:

health (domain) → bed by 1am on weekday nights (goal…I’m a night owl) → set alarm for 12:45 to prompt me to get in bed (actionable)

or

meditation (domain) → be able to enter jhana at will (goal) → meditate for 1hr/day (goal/actionable) → inform a friend that you’ll be paying them $5 every day you don’t hit this goal (actionable)

Meditating for an hour a day sits somewhere between a goal and an actionable because it’s precise yet it’s also difficult to accomplish on its own without some sub-actionable supporting it. The technical language doesn’t really matter. What matters is the pipeline from using reflection and self-knowledge to ground and orient oneself to then engaging in engineering of solutions in order to instantiate and accomplish.

At the start of each month I do a “self-audit” where I evaluate my progress, choose which of these goals to get started on for the month, and add the relevant actionables to the to-do list and/or calendar.

Here’s a partial list of my goals for 2023:

• Health and fitness

  • Spend more time in the sun and around bodies of water

  • Relatedly, apply sunscreen liberally to my face and only my face so I feel sexy for years to come but also get that good vitamin D from exposing my bare skin to the Sun

  • Play soccer 1-3 times/week

• Social

  • Laugh and make others laugh more

  • Make friends who push me intellectually, creatively, morally, and spiritually

  • Build a strong group of friends, broad and deep, here in New York

  • Make others feel loved

  • Keep close with the people who matter most to me

• Experiential

  • Travel abroad

  • West coast trip

  • Touch grass. Go hiking at least twice

• Cognitive/Intellectual

  • Develop a battery of cognitive and emotional tests to evaluate my mental state as influenced by nootropics and other self-experiments

  • Run a Dual N-Back experiment

  • Read 40+ books

• Emotional

  • Interpersonal MDMA session

  • Be able to enter the jhanas at will

  • Rekindle a daily gratitude practice

• Creative

  • Prolifically produce creative works that I’m proud of

  • Try a melange of crafts and creative arts

  • Write and publish at least one written work each month

  • Continue pouring myself into Material

• Meta

  • Complete at least 60% of these goals (there are 45). Last year I completed 40%. It might seem funny that I’m apparently accepting the fact that I won’t complete them all (isn’t the whole point of setting goals that you intend to complete them?), but c’est la vie. 

As I worked to formulate these, I noticed a few frameworks that have blossomed and stuck around for me in the years of practicing this sort of analysis. 

Emulate. Find people who exhibit the characteristics you aspire to. Spend time around them, whether actually or parasocially (via media), study them, and emulate them. Become a method actor—actually impersonate elements of them that you want to co-opt.

Regrets and regards? Regretfuls and gratefuls? I’m not sure which cute little name I prefer, but the idea is to set goals and make decisions informed by the things you regret or are grateful to have done. For those who shout No Ragrets, consider what you’d prefer to avoid repeating and tease out the principles in which those actions were grounded. For 2023, I looked back on what aspects of 2022 I don’t want to happen again, as well as the things I want more of, and considered my goals through that lens. This is different than regret-minimization, the logical conclusion of which is suicide.13 The crux here is using previous experience as a compass and weighting that experience heavily relative to present preferences that have no precedent (something you think you want but have no experience with) or have negative precedent (we often want things that haven’t worked out well previously, forgetting those outcomes or convincing ourselves that next time will be different). Desires with no precedent (things you haven’t done before) still merit attention. This is how we try new things, and novelty is how we keep ourselves spiritually alive. My method here is to approach new things as experiments, rather than making a year-long resolute commitment to a thing with which I have no prior experience.

Experiments as a way of life. Framing something as an experiment can be a fruitful way for undertaking anything new such that it is both low-commitment and flexible while also rigorous, empirical, and informative. Approaching a new endeavor, habit, supplement, mindset, or whatever experimentally enables engagement with the world that is at once scientific and playful. I wrote about this at some length here.

Enduring desires. Be patient with your desires. This has become a guiding rule of thumb for me across domains. If I still want a thing two years after first thinking of it, it’s probably something I should pursue. Creatively, I’ll often come up with an idea for an art piece that I think is brilliant, only to watch that brilliance fade away after the passage of a few weeks. Works I can return to after months and find none of their luster lost are the ones I know will be worth my time.14 If we want to be foolhardy and construct a formal codification of the principle which will inevitably crumble under its own rigidity when faced by an endless swarm of edge cases but nonetheless be fun and make us feel like we have a formula for parsing our lives in the meantime, we could say something like “take action on a desire only once it has been around for twice as long as it will take to satisfy that desire and deal with the consequences thereof.”15 I’m not sure about this exact 2:1 ratio and in fact picked it completely arbitrarily, but it’s an interesting potential rule of thumb.

Focus on the delta. Apply yourself most to the goals where you need the most substantial change (and thus the most active effort) to see success. For example, as mentioned above one of my goals for this year is to “read” 40+ books. I read 50 last year, so the habits are already in place to make this happen. Since my habits are already congruent with my goals, it would be a waste to expend further energy optimizing my approach on this front. Instead I set the goal and largely forget it, letting the autopilot of the habits I’ve previously established do the work. This might sound obvious, but needless optimization can be subtly seductive. It feels good and productive to keep working toward better, but unless you’re setting loftier goals it’s really a mere performance of productivity within the comfortable confines of a goal you already know you’re sure to meet. Unless I were trying to read more than 50 books (or achieve a similar goal like reading those 50 books in less time) additional effort toward this aim would be masturbatory. Channel your energy where you need the boost.

And just like that, it’s out of my system. That daunting, monstrous, seemingly insurmountable character of writing, the same one that I encountered looming in the corners of my mind as I began this piece, has dissipated. It always takes just a few days, and it always feels like it’ll take much more than that. A few days of writing, just for an hour or two a day, and I no longer hate it. In fact I love it again. I’m even calling myself “a writer” in my head. I almost updated my Twitter bio. I’ll sit on that one for now. “Enduring desires” and whatnot. I feel ready to write things of substance now. So much so that I almost want to just delete this whole thing because it suddenly feels inconsequential. But I’ll leave it. Click publish. “For posterity.” 

PS: If you’re into this stuff and want to talk ideas for experiments, decision-making frameworks, self-improvement, etc. I encourage you to reach out. 

• Material is a collaborative NFT art project. The canvas is a pair of jeans. That I wear. The artist is you. Or you. Or Yu Darvish. Who knows?

• Whenever I wear the jeans, the canvas is live. When a person impacts me in a certain way, we forge a deep connection, or we share a memorable experience together, I may invite them to add a piece—an illustration, text, whatever—to the canvas then and there (I carry fabric pens with me).

• Each contributor gets a 1-of-1 NFT for their piece, representing ownership in the jeans. Eventually, the jeans + NFT series will go up for auction, with proceeds split between myself and all contributors who opt in.

• The NFT-holders will form a DAO that gets to vote on real decisions in my life, like where I (and thus the jeans) go, what I do, and who I meet. In doing so, they orchestrate the future of the jeans and play me as a character in a real-life video game—an IRL RPG.

• There will be opportunities for anyone to become a contributor, starting today. Read on for details.

“This is good material.” I repeat it to myself like a mantra. 

A breakup? “This is good material.” A sooner-than-expected goodbye. Staring at the floor for like four hours. Leaves falling in perfect little spirals at the cemetery, every October for seven years straight. “This is good material.” Good old-fashioned teenage heartbreak. New York in the fall. Waking up to a phone call too early in the morning, well past the point where it could possibly be a late night dial from some dumb, drunk friend, and never being able to pick up the phone without a racing heart again. Not fun. But good material. Getting punched in the face repeatedly. Falling madly in love. Feeling fucking insane, on account of said falling. All good material. Bursting with feelings of intimacy you don’t know what to do with, so you just stand there and explode instead. How pure. Good material. Acid on graduation day. Great material. Seasons go by in minutes. Material abounds.

It kinda works. The phrase is symbolic for me, even verging on spiritual. I don’t literally say it to myself through all of the above. There’s no need to at this point—it’s my default mode of processing now, for better or for worse. It’s how I take the raw, chaotic content that is life and forge it into something that at least feels meaningful. It’s how I surrender. It’s how I cope. It’s dangerous. 

We’ll get into that. But first, a pair of jeans. 

At some point late last spring, I developed a deep desire for a quality pair of blue jeans. The pandemic seemed to be turning a corner, people were yearning for fresh air and fresh faces, and I wanted some good denim to accompany me back out into the world. Unable to find any in a size, cut, and wash I liked, I went out and thrifted a pair that had the right waist size but nothing else, resolving to take care of the rest myself. I bleach-dyed the once-indigo blue to a crisp light wash, then measured my desired fit and had the uber-baggy legs and seat cut to my liking.1

At the same time as I was cobbling these jeans together, an idea had been brewing in my mind. I admire and am inspired by fashion but have always had critiques and ideas for pushing it forward as well. 

One critique which had been on my mind around the period of the inception of the jeans was that fashion can often be excessively self-serious. Runway models almost always sport that same stare, vacant with a slight edge of contempt, as if you just happened to rudely barge in on them toiling away at the most boring, menial task imaginable. There’s actually good reason for this—in fact, I would argue that keeping a straight face is the essence of the avant-garde—but I think it’s important to carve out space for levity and playfulness as well.2 Fashion, and perhaps modernity in general, has paid little due to this side of the equation. Clothing can be a conduit for conversation, connection, and playful and creative interpersonal engagement. Done thoughtfully, slogans can spark questions, images might pique interest, and designs can compel comment. Yet this is far from the norm at present.

Another critique fresh on my mind was fashion’s tendency toward solipsism. Clothing is a means of expressing who we are, and yet what we wear often neglects many of the most central parts of our identities. We’re all inescapably defined by the constellations of people, places, and experiences we’ve orbited and collided with throughout our lives. Yet clothes tend to do little to evidence this. I am my mom, my dad, my brothers, Silver Spring, pickup at Blair, Notre Dame, the girls I’ve loved, summer 2010, and that perfect little lake outside of a one-stop-sign town, to name but a few of the metaphorical stars that compose the constellation of my identity.3 How do you say all of that through clothing? You don’t. You can’t. But you might be able to at least nod in that direction.

The idea that had been brewing, then, was twofold. On the one hand, to render the experience of wearing and engaging with clothing more playful, loose, creative, and fun. On the other, to make self-expression through clothing more reflective of the relational and experiential nature of our identities. 

The jeans presented a perfect opportunity to put these ideas into practice. A few months after thrifting them, I bought a set of fabric markers and drew some pieces on them—illustrations and snippets of text—to serve as a conversation starter. I began wearing them around, bringing the fabric markers with me. When I encountered people who left a mark on me in one form or another—a deep connection, a meaningful conversation, a shared experience—I invited them to add a piece of their own to the jeans. It could be whatever they wanted, so long as they felt it contributed positively to the greater work as a whole. 

The immaterial mark they’ve made on me thus materializes as a physical mark on the canvas of the jeans. This process creates a tapestry of the experiences and people that have shaped me, and thus indirectly each other, over the lifespan of the jeans; it extends the creative involvement with the garment beyond just the original designer, encouraging others to tap into their perhaps-dormant creative spirit; and it gives rise to shared laughs, thought-provoking conversations, a spirit of playfulness, and memories worth holding onto.

As this was all taking shape, I was learning voraciously about NFTs, DAOs, and the web3 ecosystem.4 At the same time, I had been wearing the jeans from time to time and a few early pieces had been added by people I’d encountered along the way. I was routinely receiving compliments on them and sparking up conversations with curious strangers who were intrigued by the artwork. 

And then one day it struck me that for all the value generated by the contributors via the pieces they had added, they were capturing little of it. It was all accruing to me instead—I owned the jeans, I got to wear them, and I benefited from the interest and compliments that their work so frequently gave rise to. NFTs, it occurred to me, could be a way of meaningfully conferring partial ownership of the jeans to those who helped make them what they were, digitally decentralizing ownership of this physical, centralized work of art. By giving them each a unique NFT representing their contribution, I could help them capture some of the value that they had created (how exactly this works I’ll explain in a sec). So I decided then that that’s what I would do.

Thus was conceived this project, Material, which officially launches today. You’re all a part of it. Here’s how it’s going to work. Whenever I wear the jeans, the canvas is live, open to the addition of new pieces. Sometimes, when a person impacts me in a certain way, we forge a deep connection, or we share a memorable experience together, I may invite them to contribute to the canvas. Shortly thereafter, they’ll receive an NFT depicting the jeans in the state that they added to them (the NFTs will be revealed to the public in due time). The jeans are a living, breathing piece, changing with every wear. Each contributor’s NFT, then, captures the unique canvas that they helped create, frozen in time and stored in a digital time capsule. With each new addition, we’re “minting a memory.” Collectively, they tell a story. 

Once a certain number of pieces have been added to the jeans—a number which for now will be kept secret—the jeans along with the NFTs given to the contributors will go up for auction. Of course, since they own their NFTs, each contributor will have the option to hang onto them and not participate in the auction. This is part of the social experimental fun. If they opt in, they’ll swap out their NFT for a token which they’ll then burn in exchange for their share following the auction. The combined proceeds will be split 50/50 between the contributors and me. In this way, the contributors will be able to materially capture the value that they brought to the project.

Naturally, the NFT holders will also be added to a DAO that gets to vote on real decisions in my life, like where I travel, who I meet, and whether I pierce my nipples. They thereby get a real say in where the jeans go, who they come across, and what I do in them, orchestrating the future of the canvas from afar. The DAO collectively controls me (and thus the jeans) like a real-life video game character. I call it IRLRPG. The contributors’ ownership over the jeans thus extends beyond just value capture to continued participation. With the addition of each new contributor, the network of people invested in the future of the canvas expands, and the limits of what we’re capable of as a collective fade. The possibilities of the jeans increasingly trend toward the boundless. 

The first piece I added to the jeans was a quote: “This is good material.”5 It’s where I began this essay, and it represents something of a thesis statement for this project. It’s not a real quote, in that it doesn’t definitely derive from any one source other than my internal monologue, and even then it’s less a line in my internal monologue and more a general disposition. In any case, it had been on my mind a lot during the time that the jeans were coming together. It’s also the last of the threads which together weave the conceptual foundation of Material.6 As I mentioned earlier, the phrase symbolizes a mindset through which I endeavor to construct meaning in my life by viewing the ups and downs as essential parts of a greater aesthetic picture. Tragedy is part of a story, loss is fuel for art, failure is motivation to improve, etc. Through this lens, the vicissitudes of life are made bearable by their critical role in a larger narrative. 

I lost my older brother when I was 20. I was a sophomore in college. In the months prior, my roommates and I had begun conceiving of the various dramas playing out in our collegiate lives as storylines in a TV show. Friendships turning to relationships, old flames rekindling, and a camping trip gone awry in the wintery Michigan wilderness had all collided within a 48-hour span to inspire the conception of the first “episode.” We continued discussing our experiences with reference to “The Show” for the rest of our college careers.  

The ability to gain distance from the narrative and view ourselves in the third person, as characters in this drama, gave perspective that made the difficult things feel alright. The process was comforting, relieving, and amusing, like a laughter-fueled exhale at an existential level. It felt like it imbued our lives with a certain richness through which even the struggles we were dealing with in a given moment could be appreciated for their aesthetic quality. 

When I lost my brother, I think a piece of this mindset crystallized deep within my psyche. I adopted it out of necessity. Reality was so unbearable that I had to disown it, to make it no longer mine—a story in which I was a character, observable in the third person. Through this new perspective, everything is material. Life is an aesthetic phenomenon, and every sorrow and joy is a source of beauty and meaning, another page in a moving memoir. Artists, musicians, writers, comedians, and creators of all sorts know this outlook well. It’s all material.

Last summer, as I was preparing to add that first piece to the jeans, I had been reflecting on how this perspective on life has shaped my experience, for the better, but also possibly for the worse. I had slowly realized over the years that one side effect of this process is that the paradigm has a tendency to subtly flip, from art imitating life, to life imitating, even chasing, art. There develops an urge to not only take life and transfigure it into material for art, but also to intentionally live in a manner such that it might become material for art. I was subconsciously, and then less so, making decisions that would lead to a more aesthetic, interesting narrative. This can be a thing of beauty, but it can be corrosive as well. If you put beauty as the paramount value in your life, and there’s beauty in pain, you may begin, unwittingly, to seek pain for the beauty it can bring forth.7 And pain never remains contained within the individual.8 Living life for a memoir is a dangerous game, and others besides the author are at risk. The best memoirs aren’t written by saints.9

So to write a lasting memoir or to aspire to sainthood? To embody beauty or virtue, the aesthetic or the ethical (to borrow a dichotomy from Kierkegaard)? Can some synthesis of the two be obtained? What constitutes a good life? These are open questions in my mind. Material is my process of exploring them. 

On its face, the project appears emblematic of the aesthetic. It’s about art, beauty, narrative, and memorable experiences, and it’s going to involve me seeking out a whole lot of that. “This is good material,” the catchphrase for this mindset, is almost-literally written all over the jeans. But the quotes are there for a reason. They imply a sense of irony, a second voice that’s not so much making the statement as questioning it. Like “Oh yeah? Really?” Through the jeans, these two voices are in dialogue. Because for each piece of art and memorable experience infused into the jeans, there’s an act of connection, a ritual of giving and receiving that looks much closer to “the ethical,” to accompany it. They’re right there, side by side. The aesthetic says “This is good material.” The ethical asks “Is that really so?”. I’ll be there listening. I invite you to come listen too. 

So what the hell is this project? I’m not sure I want to answer that just yet. It’s many things, and many more will be revealed in time. I will say that in keeping with my nature, this is nothing if not an experiment. It’s experimental art. An experiment exploring the bounds of what NFTs and DAOs make possible. An experiment in what clothing can be. A social experiment. And an experiment testing some hypotheses on the question of how to live.

As of today, Material is live. What does that mean for a project like this? Well, to kick things off, a real life game of manhunt. The first person to find me IRL wearing the jeans gets to add a piece to them, receive their NFT, and become a Material member. Beyond that, it means that I’ll be wearing the jeans, the canvas is open, and the journey of the project will be publicly shared. I’ll be materializing in cities around the US and possibly abroad in the coming months, and there will also be opportunities for anyone, anywhere to participate as well—stay tuned. If you see me, come up and say hey. Seriously. This project is for nothing if not for connection. And who knows—you may just end up leaving your mark. 

Clear, concise, and somewhat comprehensive accounts of the subject are rare, and off the top of my head I know of none.2 This one will likely be little better, but I’ll try. I’ve been studying, practicing, and exploring meditation for almost 10 years now, which makes me very far from an expert, but probably a bit more experienced than you, given that you’re reading an article titled “Meditation 101.” My point in saying this is not to put on airs—I’m still ass at meditating, actually, though I have had periods where I was in phenomenal meditation “shape.” Rather, I note this mainly to publicly justify to myself that I might have something of value to offer in writing this piece, because I do have some experience.

And that really is why I’m writing this. I get asked questions about meditation all the time (and am happy to answer them!) so I see how many people are eager to learn but don’t really know where to start. Yet I struggle to point them to one single, easy resource to get them started. My hope here is to provide such a resource through a series of three short pieces on meditation. They will in turn examine what meditation is, why you should (or perhaps shouldn’t) do it, and how to get started. Books are long. Courses in apps like Calm and Headspace leave something wanting. And retreats are a fat commitment. So this is for you, the smart, curious internet article consumer interested in betterment of self and world, who doesn’t want to read a whole book just to learn how to do something difficult that you’re only begrudgingly coercing yourself into in the first place. Without further ado, then, let’s take a look at what meditation actually is. 

Okay, a brief bit of further ado. You don’t realize how hard something is to define until you have to sit down and spell it out. You rack your brain for a short collection of words that captures the essence of that thing and that thing only, no exceptions. Of course, you fail. Because a thing defined is a thing reduced. Life as lived is far more complex than any set of words could capture. Meaning is a compression algorithm, and no compression algorithm in the real world is lossless.3 Definitions are patterned but nebulous. They exhibit an identifiable shape and core, but grow fuzzy around the edges, with exceptions inevitably popping up on the outskirts of their definitional jurisdiction. But we define anyway, and sometimes we even come up with something useful, if not perfectly accurate. Definitions exist to be useful.4 And the most useful kind of definition is the one that gets you to shut up and quit thinking about it. 

Meditation, then, is a family of techniques used to cultivate more deliberate control over one’s attention and awareness. As used here, attention is the faculty of holding something in the “center” of consciousness, while awareness is the process of monitoring the periphery of consciousness. They exist side by side, working in tandem. The difference is perhaps best illustrated by analogy to the visual system.5 Attention mirrors focused vision, what you see at the center of your visual field; awareness mirrors peripheral vision.6 Attention renders things (whether they be sights, sounds, smells, physical sensations, tastes, thoughts, or emotions) crisp, clear, well-defined, capable of being grasped and manipulated. Awareness precedes attention. Things are fuzzier, murkier here, more shapeless and dynamic. While attention holds and uses mental objects in one way or another, our relationship with things in awareness is less instrumental—they just are. If something in awareness seems important, awareness will call attention over to take a closer look.

Why are attention and awareness so important? Because to control them is to control your reality. They’re the base layer on top of which everything else filters into your mind, the metacognitive functions that precede the rest of consciousness. They set the stage. There are a lot of things, both good and bad (or at least perceived as such), in this world. Control over the attentional system (attention + awareness) enables you to choose which of them to invite into your experience of reality, which to amplify, and which to let go. The implications of this are even broader than they appear at first glance, and are not easy to convey in a mere few lines. Instead of trying to do that, I’ll continue spelling out some of these implications over the rest of this piece and the pieces that follow. 

This definition plays out in one way or another in the various kinds of meditation practice. Many of these practices look quite different from one another (e.g. sitting in silence vs. walking down the street), just as exercise can take on myriad distinct forms. Soccer is exercise (my personal favorite). Lifting weights is exercise (my third favorite). Yoga, jogging, cricket, and mowing the lawn are exercise. Sex is exercise if you’re doing it right.7 As exercise encompasses a family of practices for building physical fitness, meditation consists of practices for developing attention and awareness, and the numerous changes in the mind that follow from this. Though various, they can be meaningfully bound as one.

Just about anything that can be described can be described at various levels of granularity or “zoom.” Take yourself as an example. I could describe you at the interpersonal level—a collection of relationships, a node in a network (friend of Kevin, sibling, boyfriend/girlfriend, and so on). I could also zoom in a bit and describe you at the individual level (intelligent, good-looking, immune to flattery, etc.). Throw on a biological lens and zoom in even further and I could alternately describe you in terms of organ systems, organs, tissues, cells, and onward. Swap the biological lens out for a physical one and zoom in further yet, and you’re a buzzing metropolis of atoms, all dancing in concert. None of these descriptions is more true than another (despite what materialistic reductionists might try to tell you). Instead they complement one another, weaving together a more comprehensive picture of reality across different scales. Thus far, I’ve described meditation at the cognitive level, since this is the one most familiar to us—it’s the lens through which we most proximally experience the world. We experience thoughts, emotions, and perceptions, not neural impulses, and so it is these that we know best. But to examine meditation at several levels offers a richer picture than any single definition can provide, just as understanding tissue-level processes like hypertrophy strengthens our grasp of what exercise is. With that in mind, let’s take a look at meditation through a few different lenses.

Macrocognitive

The macrocognitive level sits atop the cognitive, so big that it’s difficult to see, like the air we breathe or the water in which fish swim.8 What resides here, permeating every aspect of our experience, is our sense of self. In macrocognitive terms, meditation is the reconstitution of our sense of self through deliberate training. More on this to come. The accounts that follow under this heading are macrocognitive framings of meditation.

Traditional 

Historically, meditation has its deepest roots in Buddhist and Hindu religious practices, in which practitioners were attempting to dramatically alter their experience of self. In Buddhist tradition, this means attaining the visceral realization of “no-self,” where you recognize your sense of self as illusory. Note that this isn’t merely a cognitive realization. It’s not an abstract knowledge that one might come to through philosophizing, but rather an embodied experience. To no longer feel a sense of self is the highest aim in Buddhist practice. In Hindu tradition, seemingly by contrast, the aim is tapping into Brahman, the divine source that pervades all things. The idea of Brahman suggests that all beings are part of one greater self, merging together through meditation, rather than that no self exists at all. I said that this is seemingly by contrast to the Buddhist no-self because the two appear to me to be fundamentally the same thing. This cute little infographic thing might help illustrate what I mean. 

Both Buddhist and Hindu practices aspire to erase the boundary between self and universe. You might formulate this as a dissolution of the self, or as a merging into a greater whole, but really the difference is a semantic one as I see it. When you see that the boundaries between things are arbitrary, it all becomes an amorphous (albeit heterogeneous) blob. Whether that makes it all one thing or no-thing—in my eyes—is the same thing. I’m not suggesting that Buddhist and Hindu meditation lead to identical experiences, but I am positing that their metaphysical implications are more similar than they might at first appear. For both traditions, it is through this experience that we attain nirvana, or moksha—freedom from all suffering. You don’t need to think of this as a spiritual or metaphysical state (though you’re also welcome to, if you favor that interpretation of reality). It can just as well be explained as a cognitive process, marked by enduring changes in the brain. 

An examination of different meditative traditions within Hinduism and Buddhism reveals a few common roadmaps to this process of radical self-modulation. The one I’m most familiar with is shared by several schools of Buddhism, and begins with developing the clarity and durability of one’s attention. Awareness is needed for this. Without awareness, whenever lapses of attention occur, you’re liable to spend large amounts of time drifting or jumping around, thinking about other things. Strong awareness shortens these spells by making you conscious of them, snapping you out of it and giving you the opportunity to return to your intended object of focus. With attention sufficiently sharpened and stabilized, you can then begin insight practices. Insight practices are a group of techniques in which you closely examine the contents of your experience, with the intention of generating deep insights into the nature of reality. Eventually, this string of insights leads to a recognition of the illusory nature of the self, and the freedom from suffering that accompanies it. The progression, succinctly put, is: attention + awareness training —> insight practice —> enlightenment! This is just one such roadmap, but it helps to illustrate the logic of how a seemingly mundane daily practice can lead to profound and lasting changes in your experience of reality. 

The point of all this is to say that if you’re meditating, you’re probably altering your sense of self to some meaningful extent, even if you’re unaware of it.9 The religiously-affiliated descriptions of “no-self” and “merging with the divine” may be too lofty and esoteric to effectively communicate what’s going on, especially to Western newcomers, but the message is an important one. So here are a couple more Western-friendly ways of understanding what’s happening at the level of the self in meditation. 

Subject to object

Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan’s model of human development frames the growth process as a “drawing and redrawing of the distinction between self and other.” As we develop and become more complex as human beings, we continually redefine what is subject (i.e. what I am) and what is object (i.e. what I have). For example, a baby’s movements go from being mere reflexes—something to which she is subject—to object, something which she can implicitly recognize as separate from herself and over which she can exercise conscious control. The baby goes from being embedded in her movements to having them. Meditation, at its very core, is the enactment of this subject to object transition. It involves moving the contents of our consciousness from subject to object, seeing things we once considered parts of ourselves as no longer so. You’ve probably heard Andy from Headspace, or Sam Harris, or whoever your go-to meditation guide is instruct you to notice your thoughts as they arise without getting swept up in them, like watching clouds float by in the sky. To do so is to take what you were previously internalizing as self and to recognize it as something separate. It becomes a “thing” that you can observe, control, and de-identify with. The more adept you become in your meditation, the deeper the layers of self you can shed away. As your attention sharpens, you’re able to notice more and more subtle thoughts, emotions, and perceptions that you identify with that might’ve previously escaped the clutches of your conscious recognition. Eventually, even the most subtle and pervasive narratives of selfhood can be peeled back. All becomes object, until no subject remains. Why this might be desirable, which may not be immediately intuitive, will be the topic of the next piece in this series.

Gaining distance

Another way to consider meditation’s impact on the mind and our sense of self is as a function of cognitive and emotional distance. As you gain the ability to render the contents of your consciousness as objects, you attain a certain degree of remove from them. At varying distances, things might appear in greater or lesser clarity or as more or less beautiful, or they might exert a stronger or weaker gravitational pull. We’ll return to this metaphor when we explore the good and bad of meditation.

Neuroscientific

I’d be remiss to go without touching on a neuroscientific analysis, but I’ll meet density with brevity to make this section palatable. A neuroscientific exploration of meditation can be applied at all sorts of different scales. Here we’ll look at just three.

Hemispheric

The first of these is the hemispheric.10 One way to conceptualize meditation is as a process of development in the way the two hemispheres of the brain act and relate to one another. Broadly, and perhaps crudely, speaking, the left hemisphere governs the function we’ve been referring to as attention, while the right manages our faculty of awareness. Meditation might then involve a reshaping of the relationship between the two hemispheres, preferentially developing one or the other, or both in tandem, depending on the style of meditation and which of the two faculties is being prioritized. It could thereby redistribute power between them, leading one hemisphere’s mode of thinking to precedence or striking a healthy balance between the two, if such concepts makes any sense (and Iain McGilchrist’s work suggests they very well might). 

Regional

Meditation can also be described as a regional process within the brain, activating certain areas while quieting others. Jud Brewer’s work suggests that meditation involves a quieting of the default mode network, or DMN, a collection of regions associated with self-referential processing.11 It’s so-called because it tends to be particularly active when we aren’t doing much—that is, it’s what we default to. This effect is both acute (happens while meditating) and enduring (a lasting change occurs in those who practice consistently). This all makes sense in light of the above macrocognitive models as well. Self-referential processing could be called “sense of self” in normal people speak. In these terms, Brewer’s research then reveals a lasting diminution in the sense of self on account of meditation.12 

Subminds

A final neuroscientific model (for now) is the subminds hypothesis, deriving from Culadasa’s The Mind Illuminated, which in turn drew inspiration from Marvin Minsky’s work in Society of Mind. This is, roughly, that the mind is a collection of different “subminds,” each with their own function and thus their own “desires.” The existence of different regions in the brain that account for different functions offers a clear depiction of this system. Each of these subminds then is made up of several other subminds, with this recursive structure unfolding all the way down to the level of the neuron. For a more familiar example of this kind of structure, just look at a corporation and the way it’s divided into departments, each consisting of different functions, those all containing several teams, each of which has multiple individual members. 

Each submind can be conceived of as an “agent,” an autonomous entity possessing goals and the ability to interact with the world around it in pursuit of those goals. An agent is selfish, but the emergent behavior of the collective of selfish agents turns out to be for the benefit of the whole. One submind might compel you to read this article. One might fight for preservation of your sense of self. Another might want pizza. By acquiescing to or refusing these desires, you either feed or starve these subminds. In more formal neuroscientific terms, this can be expressed as long-term potentiation, a process wherein repeated activation across a synapse (the connection between two neurons) makes it easier for that same pathway to activate again in the future. Like a trail in the woods, as more and more travelers pass along it, a path is more thoroughly carved out. 

In meditation, the aim is generally to try to rally all of one’s subminds around a single thing, whether that be the breath, a mantra, the act of letting go, etc. By repeatedly turning to this object of focus even after your mind has wandered off, you send your subminds the message that this is your sole priority at the moment. You’re effectively saying, “All those other distractions are superfluous right now.” Do this enough times and they begin to get the message that you’re serious. Through this process, you train them to work in harmony with one collective goal in mind.13 And just as any organization or group is more efficient and effective when its members are aligned, so too with your brain/mind. The experience of flow, most frequently encountered through sports, music, and the like, may be one place where we regularly see this degree of internal harmony come to life. Meditation appears to be moving the brain’s baseline toward a state more like this.14

My hope is that inspecting meditation from these different angles has created a patchwork perspective that’s more colorful, comprehensive, and nuanced than any single account could offer. It may well instead be that refusing to settle for a single, simple narrative makes the matter much more confusing. Feel free to let me know. But not every model needs to stick with you, and that’s exactly the point. We all understand the world through different metaphors. If just one of the models outlined above got something to click, I’ll be moderately satisfied, or at least not distraught.

A brief note on mindfulness

Before concluding, I want to mention the concept of “mindfulness”, since the modern Western meditation world loves that word and I couldn’t find a fitting place to talk about it above. You’ve surely heard of it, so I think it’ll be helpful to see where it fits in with the rest of what we’ve discussed. Wikipedia has a nice and straightforward definition that generally accords with the way others tend to use it:

“Mindfulness is the practice of purposely bringing one's attention [into] the present moment without evaluation.”

When mindful, you experience the present moment as it is, rather than getting caught up in thoughts about the present, or thoughts that take you elsewhere. This is pretty much just what meditation is, so I don’t really get what people mean when they say “mindfulness meditation”—it’s redundant. But I do think “mindfulness” itself is useful as a term to describe the state of mind cultivated in meditation and the act of bringing that mindset into one’s life beyond meditation. This is probably far from a consensus opinion, so take it with a grain of salt, but that’s where I find it most illuminating.

Well, this kind of became exactly what I wanted to avoid on the brevity front, but the damage is done and right now is not the time to try to force concision on myself.15 Instead, I need to write, and write liberally, until the words flow freely and consistently, for at present they do not. In the words of the great poet Charles Barkley, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”16 We’ve still got a lot more ground to cover, and my next piece on meditation will look at how meditating could save your life. Or ruin it. Or maybe something in between. I’ll do my best to cover that ground in a little less time.

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Microdosing shrooms is my latest self-experiment. Other experiments have seen me spitting in a cup every 5 minutes for an hour and a half straight, inviting a woman to whisper in my ear for 20 minutes each night over a two week period in February, and dumping Greek yogurt all over my kitchen floor.1  

Yes, I did frame those in the most bizarre way possible to make them sound like the zany experiments of a mad scientist, but they were still rather out there to begin with. So what compels me to conduct such experiments? I use self-experiments as a way to better myself, my relationships, and my life as a whole. 

Life is short and I’m going to die. You probably will too. Rather than using this fact as an excuse to brood, though, I hear it as an exhortation to soak up every last drop this world has to offer and squeeze it back out with all the gusto I can muster. I’ll surely come up short, and that’s okay. I unabashedly want it all, know I can’t have it, and carry on striving for it nonetheless. For me, this means becoming the most loving, joyful, intelligent, creative, productive, etc. version of myself that I can be. Experiments are one vehicle through which I take up this task.

Developing into the apotheosis of my possible selves begins with cultivating a healthy body and mind, as many of my experiments are geared toward.2 These have ranged from deepening my meditation with the help of nicotine to dosing vitamin D in the hopes of combatting wintertime lethargy to going gluten-free for whatever reason people go gluten-free.3 Through experiments, I’m able to test whether health hacks hold true for me as an individual in a systematic yet flexible fashion. By conducting interventions in an organized manner, controlling for confounding variables, and diligently recording my results, I gain a clearer picture of what’s happening to me than if I were to simply try something and fleetingly reflect on its effects after however long. 

But my self-experimentation doesn’t end with classic Quantified Self-style efforts to optimize body and mind, and, quite honestly, my experiments don’t usually attain this level of methodological rigor. Because while I love saying “optimize” just as much as everyone else in tech, these experiments are about much more than optimization in a rigid mechanical sense. In fact, I apply experiments far beyond the scope of health and productivity, and I use experimentation as a mental model more so than a mere methodology. 

The essence of this “experimentalism,” as I call it, is nebulous. I have no strict definition for it, but I also don’t use it arbitrarily. It’s more specific than “trying new shit” but less so than “running randomized, placebo-controlled trials.” It can roughly be described as making a deliberate effort to try things out, alongside some combination of the following:

• Committing to trying the new thing on an organized schedule (e.g. every other weekday) for a predetermined period of time or number of trials, in order to give it a fair shot. 

• Paying attention to and recording the impact of the new thing. This can be done with varying degrees of diligence.

• Controlling for confounding variables where possible, even if this just means taking mental note of them. 

• Maintaining an open mind and a genuine sense of curiosity in tandem with a problem-solving mindset.

Experimentalism, then, is a means of exploring and experiencing life in a spirit of wonder and play, organized in a framework that more effectively channels this spirit toward learning, growth, and problem-solving. 

This way of seeing and being in the world has done me good, and I posit that it’ll do the same for you given the chance. So how do I use it, and how might you? As mentioned above, one clear use case is determining which health and productivity solutions work for you by trying them out. It’s worth unpacking some of the ways experiments can work toward this end.

For one, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sea of information available on the internet from digital denizens prescribing various health hacks and productivity pro tips. Every Reddit thread and Healthline article offers up a dozen different solutions, rendering paralysis by paradox of choice a real threat. An experimental approach can make this problem manageable by providing a structure in which to embed and evaluate these solutions systematically. By formulating a particular intervention as an experiment, it becomes a tractable, time-bound thing that can then be completed and compared against other interventions thanks to the data you’ve recorded. 

This process confers the benefit of making health solutions personalized. No piece of advice is one-size-fits-all. It’s worth remembering that even the robust effect size of an intervention studied in a rock-solid paper from a killer journal is only an average. Humans are wonderfully complex, and while a given intervention may work miracles for some, for others it may be disappointingly ineffective. Findings from the medical establishment are a great starting point, but only trying things out for yourself will reveal what actually works for you. Doing so in an organized manner will make the discovery process that much more effective. 

Experimentalism can also be put to good use in the process of building habits, whether those habits be health and productivity-related or otherwise. Let’s indulge ourselves with an example. Say you’ve heard fabulous things about the value of a regular meditation practice (which you probably have if you’ve ever spoken with me). You may feel you should probably be meditating—to reduce stress, boost your mental health, all that good stuff. So you set a New Year’s resolution to meditate four times each week, even though you’ve meditated only four times in your life. Of course, this is bound to fail. Framing the resolution instead as an experiment—e.g. meditating four times per week for two weeks, after which you’ll reevaluate—offers a more sensible path. In doing so, you’ve given yourself the opportunity to learn and the freedom to adjust your behavior according to those learnings. You may realize in this time that meditation isn’t really for you and can drop it with a clean conscience. This is a much better outcome than the alternatives, had you gone the resolution route:

• Bailing on what was supposed to be a year-long commitment, thereby undermining your trust in your own ability to stick to things.

• Keeping your resolution and slogging through day after day of meditation, wondering what defect of personal constitution is preventing you from reaping its benefits.

Not only can experimenting save you this trouble, it’s also just a more fun way to build habits. The combination of an end date and the tracking of outcomes creates a goal and a series of tight feedback loops that together add a gamification-like element to the experience. Approached experimentally, personal growth feels like less of a chore. 

I picked meditation here because I wanted an excuse to talk about it, but this applies equally to interpersonal habits (saying “I love you” more often), financial habits (10-day experiment, no Uber Eats 😱 ), etc.4 

I’ve also used experimentation to inform decisions both big and small. For big decisions, running an experiment can help to mitigate risk. I’ve deployed this tactic when deciding where to live. Whether it be a country, city, neighborhood, or building, choosing where (or with whom) to live is a big deal, and the more you think about it the more daunting it can become. Yet no amount of analysis will show you what it’s actually like to live there. To quell some of my concerns in making these decisions, over the past few years I’ve used short-term sublets to take different cities, neighborhoods, and buildings for test runs. Usually these are on the scale of a couple months so I can really get a feel for the place before making a longer-term commitment. This strategy has proven illuminating, and I’m happy to report that I’m now engaged in a long-term, committed lease.5 

On the far less consequential end of the decision spectrum, I bought a candle recently. This may sound trivial, but for a frugal SOB like myself, this doesn’t come so easily. When something is a part of your identity, you avoid decisions that are incongruent with that identity, even if they don’t endanger it in any significant way. I subscribe to the identity narrative that I’m frugal, so I make frugal decisions, often past the point of reason. Experimentation can liberate you from your narratives by framing acts of transgression against them as isolated, deliberate incidents. You’re gathering data, trying something new. Just like it’s easy to laugh at your “drunk self” because the intoxication enables you to pin the behavior on something other than your own identity, experimentation can free you to try things that you otherwise wouldn’t normally. Over time, you can then do these things without jeopardizing the coherence of your self image because you increasingly realize that the core of your personhood comprises much more (or less) than a single thought, feeling, or action.

All that is to say that I indulged my candle-purchasing inclinations as an experiment. I reasoned that it was a small, one-time purchase that could yield sizable upside by contributing a certain je ne sais quoi to the atmosphere in my apartment. As it turns out, it did, and I’m now a bonafide candle guy—the aroma of “woodfire” wafts through my apartment even now as I type this, leaving a cozy holiday ambience in its wake.6 Better yet, my candle purchase has literally fueled my latest experiment: killing the lights and living by candlelight for the two hours before bed, in the hopes of curtailing the sleep-onset insomnia that has plagued me on and off for years. This solution has shown striking promise thus far.  

Holding a significance somewhere between that of buying candles and deciding where to live, my writing itself is an experiment. In fact, framing it as such is the only way I was able to get myself to write this blog post. I told myself that I’ll write just this one and see how it goes. If I hate it, I’m free to stop. But I must write at least this one, per the experiment’s parameters. 

Further, I probably couldn’t have written this piece without microdosing—another experiment—which on this disarmingly beautiful December day has endowed me with the creative energies needed to rouse me for the hard and important work that is writing. The opportunity to dabble in endeavors with asymmetric upside is yet another reason to embrace the experimental mindset, and the potential upside of writing, and writing online, is too high for me to neglect. It’s experiments all the way down.7

And so it is that I write—thanks to experimentalism, the asymmetric bets that it makes easier, and everything else that it’s good for. For powering the building of new habits and skills. For organizing, expediting, and personalizing learning. For lowering the stakes, fostering flexibility, and encouraging exploration. For the ability to hold identities more loosely. For de-risking some of life’s biggest decisions. For de-risking some of life’s smallest decisions that maybe aren’t so small after all. For empowering me to write this one thing and, pending results, possibly more. We’ll just have to wait and see. 

I encourage you to go and see for yourself, whatever that might mean for you, and to share your findings when the time comes.8

Postscript: I had much more to say in this post—about how experiments pertain to love, philosophy, policy, mood disorders, startups, and organic bananas, among other things—but as I wrote those last few paragraphs I felt they wrapped a bow on this too neatly to be denied. To preserve that pristine bow, it seems I’ll have to save all that for another day. On that note, and until then, merry Christmas!