This blog will not answer questions. Nor will it explain what my work is about.
My latest project (like many before, and me, for that matter – which you will see further down is an unintended pun) is frequently met with polar opposite reactions. Some value the material that springs from my meanderings; while others seem appalled, brimming with enmity even. I once received, unbidden, a three-page screed about why my work is so shit. Thankfully, I also have positive conversations with many. I have accepted that my work prompts both admiration and vitriol, and quite consciously put my head down to get on with it regardless. I do this because I enjoy it. I love reading and then tinkering, before reading some more, and then tinkering again. Maybe something interesting emerges, maybe it doesn’t. If others – friends, family, interested parties – come along on this journey, even for a short time, it can be a super feeling. We all love a bit of validation, don’t we?
Sometimes people want to come along, but the work doesn’t mean anything to them. I don’t understand it, they might say. I often reply, neither do I! And that’s OK. I’m influenced in this way by the artist Joan Jonas, who said in an interview in 2018 with The Tate, “… I would only ask that people take the time to experience it and not try to understand it.”
I do not set out to change other people’s minds or tell them how to live, think or be. Of course, it would be disingenuous to suggest I don’t long for a kinder, fairer, less hierarchical society. I absolutely do, and I hope my work, even if indirectly, explores such a possibility, or else picks away at some possible reasons we don’t live in such a world. But I don’t make work that aims to impose that desire on others – although I do use social media as a forum for sharing my experiments. I’m aware there is conflict in those two statements and, for anyone engaged with my current project, that conflict might be relevant to keep in mind. Rather than beginning with a subject and perhaps a didactic aim to expose some wrong in the world, I create doodles, which sometimes develop further, to try and understand the world we live in. My art (for want of a less-loaded term) is a space for thinking.
Iterations of visual language that have emerged within the Lamella universe, which I have been exploring using a custom AI image generator (2022-23).
I have been thinking a lot about the word lamella which comes from a branch of psychotherapy to describe our early relationship with another term, the death-drive or – from an alternative perspective – generation and regeneration. Which is perhaps, understandably, alien and seemingly irrelevant for anyone not steeped in psychoanalysis or critical theory.
By why? At which point, I should repeat the above – I don’t always understand why I’m doing something. I think that’s OK. But I do know it has to do with language. And the moments in my life when language failed me. Or I failed it.
When I produced my previous body of work, why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers/, I might have answered, when asked that inevitable question, what is it about/, “Well, it’s not really about anything.” However, if I had to pinpoint a subject, I would suggest language was at its core.
“But”, the inquirer would respond, “what’s all this AI stuff got to do with it? Surely your work is about AI!”
And the answer, then and now in relation to the Lamella journey, would be that language is in the process of recalibrating – in part due to our relationship with AI, along with all the other extremely sophisticated technology we produce. And which in turn produces us.
Language matters. By that I don’t just mean it’s important. It is, of course. It’s important in the world because we are conceived, born, live, meet, work, shop, get sick and die with language at the centre of who and what we are. But it matters; it materialises – it becomes the world. Language materialises as hard stuff which you might hold (and if you’re that way inclined, even throw at people). We’re given feedback, positive or not; it affects our production. We sign a contract; it locks or protects us into a home or job for a time. We say ‘I do’; and enter into a legal partnership, which has an impact on the rest of our lives, even if we eventually change our minds and say ‘I don’t’. We say ‘It’s a boy!’; and a person lives with that announcement all their lives, either in acceptance, in conflict, or rejection. Language matters. It generates or is part of material objects, structures and realities. It contributes to material edifices that last centuries upon, around, beneath and within which we all exist. Language, some might argue, therefore IS matter. It’s not this flimsy, ephemeral thing over there that is separate from the body or object. It is not detachable. If we insist on continued separation, perhaps it is helpful to envisage a kind of promiscuous agriculture. This is the practice of growing different crops and woodland plants together. Eventually vines and branches might become fused, and after a while it can be hard to tell one species from the other. Before I opted for why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers/ as the title of my earlier body of work, I was playing with the idea of promiscuous fusion – you can read more in this blog about its choosing. The project was almost called The promiscuity of meaning and matter. (Thank you again to Catherine Banks for pointing me in the direction of the eventual phrase I used, which came from conversations with an AI bot.) But I have begun to question even that level of separation.
Whatever level of intra-activeness and intra-being we accept, the re-calibration of language must be explored. Whether directly, or indirectly, in academic texts or easily accessible articles, strange doodles that only a few people engage with, or long meandering narratives. All of it is necessary and vital. A paradigm is being birthed. None of us know what the new world will be, no matter how much anyone insists they do. It’s not formed yet, how can we know? Even if we can never fully understand it, failure to engage with this emerging reality is fraught with violence, misunderstandings and unhelpful calcified dogmatic responses from various forms of left, right, centre, or any other configurations you want to apply, delivers us nowhere good.
What though, a frustrated person might ask, has any of this to do with Lamella? And what on earth are all these pregnant pink things about that are made by AI which I keep posting on Instagram? I met this level of frustration, rage even, during a series of recent conversations, as polarised as ever; one in which someone reacted positively not only to the manifestations but also the meandering process that may never result in anything ‘finished’, or produced; and another where the person speaking with me seemed utterly contemptuous of everything they imagined my work was trying to do. “It’s all so aesthetic”, they said. “Have you received anything at all positive about it?” “How do you even expect your audience to react?” “It’s just seems all about you.”(Yikes – perhaps my next blog might be about an imaginary video game where a player has to navigate a barrage of vitriol thrown in their direction, which unfortunately also contains tiny nuggets of useful material, so the player can’t avoid it. But, along the way, they can collect tiny vials of a potion called Moxy which gives them the balls to say ‘back the fuck off!” without getting embroiled in the weird countertransference that transforms one into a lamella-like screeching spectre of awkwardness and unconstructed stuff.) Had language not failed me entirely in that moment, I might have tried to try to spell something out: language, which includes code, seems to appropriate the process of feminine reproduction, or else is reproduction, and nowhere is this more evident than in the structures out of which artificial intelligence emerges. This is most evident in the term the world has chosen for the people who write the prompts that generate AI images: prompt-engineer. Engineer sounds technical and removed from the flesh. But the etymology for the word engineer leads back to “that which is inborn,” from in- “in” (root *en “in”) + gignere, from gen(e)-yo-, suffixed form of root *gene- “give birth, beget.”
Sadly, language once again failed me, as it so often does, when people, groups, or countries can’t connect.
Anyway, I have decided to release the online version of this project, the Lamella website, not as a finished product, but rather as it grows. Any external desire for aboutness may therefore be hard to latch on to, as it is likely to evolve and change. I already use Instagram as a sketchbook, meaning images and developing thoughts are shared there. And then there is this blog too. Perhaps I can borrow Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of plateaus when thinking about how these different spaces relate to each other. The website will probably contain something more settled than Instagram, although it will still be a thing that is emerging – until, that is, it isn’t anymore. At which point, do I kill it? Does it die (apparently not, I’m told), does it become something else? In Lamella terms (death-drive/regeneration), has it, at its core, a desire to be? If so, what happens to that desire once the project seems done and dusted, or if I, the driving force that produces it, dies? Importantly, the website will be less impacted by the more superficial aspects of social media. I hope the collection of various plateaus will encourage interactions with other artists, thinkers, performers – perhaps even some genuine discussion. Soon I will add more pages to the site, maybe with contributions from those other people. I hope it will be a living, growing, intra-active, lively piece of work where thinking and language manifest. As always, I’ll be delighted if some people join the journey, slow-paced and omni-directional as it is.
Lamellae.org – just a few pages, but more will be added and subtracted, adjusted, trimmed and expanded in the days and weeks to come.