Author: WOODCOCK

Reading a 1967 “draw cartoons” book by Jack Hamm. In it he says, “Mankind has passed through many ages and stages, and these changes have made some professions and lines of work obsolete. However, it is fairly safe to say we will remain forever in the ‘Picture Age.’ Our accelerated pace of living finds us seizing on pictures which can be grasped in a flash. An, in a world overrun by peril and tragedy, humorous pictures are wanted. the relief-bringing cartoon gives us a all a much needed lift.”

The point here is of course to assure us that learning the cartooning skill will pay off because the need for human generated humorous images will never go away.

Uh huh.

He’s mostly right. We will always need humor, or at least want it as a release. But his implication that cartooning will be the source of this didn’t anticipate all the crazy AI imagery out there. I don’t have any taste for much of it floating around, but despite the downsides, like most technology, there have been some good results. I’m not saying the good outweighs the bad, and I’m not going to stand here and defend AI generated images in the least. I am just going to say that some of that stuff is so bizarre and random and humorous that it has become, in the right hands, an interesting new way to express oneself. Of course the hand of the artist is lost but the mind of the comedian can be seen in the use of interesting and well crafted prompts. Crap prompts will result in crap images, but coming at it with compelling and interesting prompts can be combined with unexpected processing by the computers that result in something completely unexpected. Never mind that to me that some of the most ridiculous, surreal, compellingly odd images AI makes come from its limitations and mistakes. As it gets “smarter” these are happening less and less and that’s a shame. I kind of loved seeing the AI fuck up. Reveling in its failures with a kind of schadenfreude and laughing at how ridiculous it all was. But anyway.

We are far from computers actually being funny at all. But they are already starting to murder the cartoonists. Yet, here I am. A desk jokey designer who put down his pencil years ago, in favor for the mouse that was already in my hand 8 hour per day, illustrating digitally. I have long wanted to focus on drawing again, and actually trying to master the craft of cartooning rather than relying on what I just picked up naturally as a younger person copying Garfield cartoons. As I’m getting started on what I hope is a new morning ritual, I stumble up on the above quote and had to pause and reflect through the lens of today’s AI reality and the clash of technology and human artistry. And thus…I asked AI to generate a cartoon about that quote. LOL. Fuck it. And fuck you. If my using AI in ironic ways to make myself laugh, hastens our doom, then darn. Sooner better than later.

ME: make a classic 1950s style editorial cartoon panel that highlights the irony of this quote in a time when AI can generate any kind of imagery with a few well chosen word prompts and put to rest any need for the human hand.

“Mankind has passed through many ages and stages, and these changes have made some professions and lines of work obsolete. However, it is fairly safe to say we will remain forever in the ‘Picture Age.’ Our accelerated pace of living finds us seizing on pictures which can be grasped in a flash. An, in a world overrun by peril and tragedy, humorous pictures are wanted. the relief-bringing cartoon gives us a all a much needed lift.”

ChatGTP:

Okay. So let’s critique. It’s very literal and not particularly funny. I tried to get it to highlight the irony in hopes it could come up with something there, but it didn’t. The cartoon in the image is pretty weird. The deformities and extra appendages and smiling people exploding aand flying around. The rest is pretty well done which tells me that a more precise prompt with an actual human generated specific humorous idea in mind could be illustrated fairly well and quickly. Leaving the concept still with the human.

I actually feels this is just one more technology that makes what is actually made by the human hand more precious and valuable, not less. AI will be a cheap knock off like so many commercial printing methods. What struck me most was the stack of books on the bottom left. Those are all professions (except cartoonists and illustrators, so far) that have been relegated to the past by technologies predating AI by decades and centuries. What’s two more? I don’t know. How much is too much? I don’t know. All I know is that it’s been happening to all forms of image making, technology making things easier faster and cheaper to make with machines, rather than humans. AI design and illustration is just one more. We may be correct in acting like it is a signal of the end days, or we may just be the next group of dinosaurs on the edge of the evolutionary cliff, and all of our protests will be irrelevant and forgotten the same as all the John Henrys and their sledge hammers.

Keep digging, WOODCOCK 🪏

Today I heard it expressed that something interesting is happening in the midwest, post industrial, agro-industrial cities like chicago, st louis, indianapolis. For decades, contemporary American art has largely been driven by New York, Los Angeles, and increasingly online/global discourse. Much of it revolves around identity, theory, institutional critique, or highly polished market-friendly objects.

The Midwest seems to be moving in another direction.

That is being seen in What I’m see in Chicago especially, but also St. Louis, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and smaller university cities—is a renewed interest in making work that is:

• materially grounded!
• handmade!
• humorous!
• philosophically curious!
• suspicious of certainty!
• regional without being nostalgic!
• intellectually ambitious without academic jargon!

A recent Chicago exhibition even framed this as a distinctly *”Midwestern” conceptualism*: artists embracing slowness, studied nonchalance, and resisting the pressure to constantly produce or optimize. The curators described it as a “Midwestern alternative to the demands of artistic production as a rat race.”

An anthropologist at MIT recently proposed the term “paraindustrial.”

Instead of industry disappearing, industry and its ruins now coexist:

• abandoned grain elevators
• active rail lines
• logistics warehouses
• Amazon fulfillment centers
• old brick factories
• data centers
• soybean fields
• biotech labs

None of these erased the others.

They all exist simultaneously. The Midwest has become a landscape where every historical layer remains visible.

Things I need to think about and learn about next:

• the way Chicago Imagists used humor rather than irony.
• using humor as a philosophical tool rather than just a visual style.
• how the Imagists believed high culture and low culture were artificial distinctions and could co-exist.
• what their on going influence and legacy is today.

What I learned already is that my brand of pop art aligns with them more than any other. Rather than being cool, detached, emotionally flat, they focus on handmade, funny, awkward, persona, mystical, psychological. Not just observing culture, but inhabiting it.

Like a joke makes you briefly hold two contradictory ideas at once, that is what my work does. Not making visual jokes though, but rather using humor to destabilize certainty.

I certainly don’t look at their work and find imagery that is similar to mine, but the philosophy is spot on. LOL.

Keep digging, WOODCOCK 🪏

If things we don’t need but really like are going to be more expensive, tough shit.

Y’all have to know the pressure America has always put on brown people around the world to provide us with this unsustainable standard of living.

I’m not in favor of how Trump is handling this shit nor his motivations in doing so, I’m just saying. We aren’t owed all this relative luxury our country is flooded with and while we may enjoy it, it comes at a cost.

Maybe just consume less, live simple and fucking vote next time.

Photo Credit: https://easy-peasy.ai/ai-image-generator/images/unsustainable-cityscape-environmental-destruction-overdevelopment

Keep digging, WOODCOCK 🪏