Letter 31
Fashion collab; oil painting, cinema and the dissolution of vision; become a better conversationalist with thoughtful questions; UI for AI; an accidental language immersion program for python.
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(To all the new readers… here’s a quick bio on me, just in case you can’t quite remember…)
Always free. Always interesting.
STORY
Fashion Collab
Earlier this week I gave an interview about my collab with fashion designer Lan Jaenicke. You can read the whole article on her site. I talk a bit about my painting process and we go through some of my past ballet projects.
“I’m looking for ways to invite the audience to complete the work in their own minds, where the work opens a door and the viewer can walk through. Sometimes this means painting something that hints at a story that will be completed just around the corner—like depicting a path up a hill or an open door (or something that looks like a door).
Other times it means creating something evocative—like an abstract, non-figurative mark-making gesture that almost seems to move as a type of visual music in the mind of the viewer.
To get there, I’m either drawing and painting scenes you could recognize (like landscapes that feel like film stills) or creating abstract moments that hopefully send you down a path of imagining movement. I start with drawings or photographs, and then try to imagine what needs to change to create an invitation for that secret second story that only exists in the mind of the viewer.”
The story includes this moment from Sensorium at SFBallet. Here Lan and I are tracing the shadows cast by dancer Mathilde Froustey onto silk, which then Lan used to create clothes for a lucky few audience members.
And this moment from a project in Paris with Benjamin Millepied and Bryce Dessner.
Read the whole interview here…
ART
The Line Between Knowing and Not Knowing
In the studio, I’m painting a scene from a location where Antonioni filmed Blow-up. Instead of basing the painting on one of his film stills, I traveled to the actual location (a park outside of London) and shot my own reference material. The park is now overgrown; it’s shaggy. But somehow… it is still enchanted with a sense of that line between knowing and not knowing. Maybe now even more so…
Side note: painting foliage is its own special journey into madness, uncertainty, and the dissolution of vision. Here are three recent stages of the painting-in-progress. Eventually the middle bit will contain a staircase. This is oil on gessoed board. Super-flat. I’ve been experimenting with different ways to paint such dense vegetation. Layers? Or all the darks, then all the lights? The answer: a combo. The journey with this painting will be long. But interesting. Interesting.
Related: I tried out a new AI conversation app, Dot, by new.computer… and for my “get to know you” chat with the AI, I talked about working on this painting. And honestly? It was really enjoyable to talk through what I might be up to when making a painting like this… Together we connected the dots back through my own references (cinematic, literary, scientific, cultural) and personal mythology… it was an enjoyable self-reflection. The app behaved like a painting coach who only said positive things during crit and mostly just asked questions.
(screenshots from a Wired article about Dot)
Using Dot made me want to bring a slice of that joy to others in person—by asking more (and more thoughtful) questions. Honest, open, thoughtful, generous questions can be a wonderful way to make someone’s day.
DESIGN
UI and UX for AI
As a child I had an insect collection. We’d first freeze the insects to kill them (we’d never smash or poison them) and then mount them with a pin through the thorax. My step-brother’s father was an entomologist, so this felt more or less normal to us. I had sparse contact with him, but he did once bring us a freeze-dried banana slug. It appeared as if it would be slimy, but when freeze-dried it was leathery to the touch. I bring this up, because I’ve started to collect something new: Unique UI & UX patterns born from the emerging capabilities of AI.
Knobs, sliders, spider-webs, voice, full-body, infinite canvas and more. The new Ui & UX of AI is starting to find its way out of the chat box and into new forms.
See this Twitter thread to read all about it and click into the individual Tweets that offer examples.
https://twitter.com/buckhouse/status/1819053158364324259
I’m excited about this. I want the AI Era to include new approaches and new mental models of digital interaction. If you’ve seen something interesting in the wild, please let me know.
I’ve been picking up python like an enthusiastic tourist might a foreign language before a big trip. The ingenious system developed by the team at LangChain got me hooked on learning it… why? Because LangChain’s approach of connecting micro-agents together to solve larger problems matches my own mental model of the Right-Left-Right processing in the human brain. It also matches what it’s like to work as a part of a marvelous team. Or compose a sonata. Or write a three-act film.
I’ve now coded up agents that can help you name products, write TED-Talks, research topics and more… I started just blindly copying-n-pasting the python code ChatGPT or Claude or OpenInterpreter generated. But bit by bit I’ve started to actually learn the code I was copying…. a type of accidental language immersion.
Recently I decided that ambient learning wasn’t enough, so I’ve set about also learning it the old-fashioned way. It’s been an interesting journey! Many years ago, I self-identified as an artist-who-could-code… but that was a different era with different tools and programming languages. It’s quite fun to dig in and start to build in the AI Era. Many other artists and designers are opening this door as well. See this Twitter List of artists-turned-builders who are coding in the AI Era.
Thanks for reading. If any of this was enjoyable to you, or lit a spark of imagination inside your mind, please reply to this email. I very much enjoy hearing your thoughts.
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