9.15.22

When Eliza said that she wanted to make paintings “in conversation with DALL-E”, I thought for a moment that she meant Dalì, like Salvador Dalì. How foolish. And then I thought, wow, I can't wait to read that essay. Dalì to DALL-E: Painting in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. I missed the second half of what she said because of that last thought. When I came to, she was showing us a picture on her phone of The Book of Miracles. A painting of a stick on fire falling to Earth while the sun watched and the moon shone in the sky above. 

“Oh yeah, we know this book.” I said, looking at Jamie.

“I don’t.” He replied. 

“Yeah you do, it’s the book Caveh is obsessed with,” I turned to Eliza, “Caveh Zahedi, this filmmaker, loves this book.”

“No,” Jamie shook his head, “That’s A Course in Miracles.” 

“Oh, my mistake, yeah I don’t know this book, what is it?” I felt slightly nauseous, in the same way that I do when I mention an article that I’ve only read the title of. Hold me back, capitan, please. 

“It’s this medieval book filled with depictions of catastrophes and miracles, kind of like an illustrated Bible, but maybe more poetic.” Eliza exed the picture of the cover and clicked on another image. A painting of hail the size of basketballs falling on a town. “I don’t know, with everything going on these days, I just wanted to revisit it, maybe make a new Book of Miracles.” 

Later on, I typed “The Book of Miracles in modern times” into DALL-E mini. Boring pictures of glowing books. I tried “The Book of Miracles 2022” and then, “The Book of Miracles in the twenty-first century,” and then “biblical events happening in the twenty first century.” Still just boring images of glowing books, Jesus, and a few biblical looking scenes. There wasn’t a trace of modernity in sight. Then I typed “modern day miracle,” and all of these slightly warped images of newborns in the arms of equally warped parents popped up. “Jesus.” I thought. 

In bed that night, Jamie showed me some posts on this instagram page called @avocado_ibuprofen. There was a picture of a mannequin’s face slightly submerged in water with algae as eyes and daisies for hair. And a picture of red rock with a face like the man on the moon carved into it, wise and solemn. And a painting of a sad clown on a subway car. We don’t even like clown art but this painting was good. He said that there’s another, way better version of DALL-E that only certain people have access to. People like @avocado_ibuprofen. 

Among the whimsical AI images was a text post that really got us talking. “…the idea of digital artists who paint on ipad pros using apple pencils positioning themselves as the local craftspeople under threat by neural networks…I love that part.” Jamie said. We admitted that drawing on an ipad pro with an apple pencil sounded really fun. 

“I feel like I haven’t really been thinking about this DALL-E stuff as a part of modernism, but now it seems so obvious. It’s like painting has been trying to save its own life, declare itself relevant, over and over, and the saga continues.” 

Jamie scrolled to the comments. @the_meme_project commented “...we might reflect on DALL-E as passing as the Ice Bucket Challenge at some point.” I felt myself become slightly defensive of the Ice Bucket Challenge. The Ice Bucket Challenge harnessed the power of technology to bring people together for a noble cause. At least @the_meme_project didn’t compare DALL-E to the Cinnamon Challenge which was harmful to its participants and didn’t raise any money. What lasts seems increasingly arbitrary. Life is like the Ice Bucket Challenge. Your parents bring you into the world, challenge you to have a go at life, a big bucket of ice water gets dumped on your head, you hope it was all for a good cause, and then if you feel like it, you have a child and nominate another being to take the challenge again.  

“How about this part: The real question is why all the automated (manual) labor wasn’t replaced by freetime but by a massive expansion of administrative labor, the service economy and whatever social media is.” 

“God, yeah,” I said, “It’s really ridiculous how we invented all this shit to supposedly make our lives easier, give ourselves more free time, and instead it’s like technology and the internet just sped time up.” 

“Yeah totally, it feels like there’s less time to go around.” 

I nodded and swiped to the last image in the text post, “What does this part mean? I’m the kind of artist who actually wants to see art end, just to find out what really was behind the curtain…” The question landed somewhere in the mountain range of our knees under the sheets. We looked at each other, sort of smiled and shrugged. “Okay, time to get back to my porn,” We giggled and turned to the pages of our respective books. I was halfway through Vox by Nicholson Baker. A quote from The New York Times on the front cover said the book was a “...technically breathtaking erotic novel.” I hadn’t really read anything that erotic except Fifty Shades of Gray or Twilight. I mostly chose this book because Jamie had been reading Nicholson Baker and enjoying it. Two strangers swapping sexual fantasies over the phone in 1993.