hi my name is riad. i'm 20 years old & a image and thought enthusiast. i like music. i like games. i like dragons.
the name of my website "mardykhoor" is the farsi original name of the anglicized "Manticore". it translates literally as "Man eater" and takes the shape of a human-faced beast with many different parts of other animals, primarily a lion's body and a scorpion's tail.
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3.1.2024
The reductive view on art as a whole has increased tenfold with the rabid introduction of machine learning programs: Artificial Intelligence(AI). On it's own, the notion of computers being taught the means to create something is a marvel of engineering and computation software. It's something I believe, when proper credit is given to the source of the information the computer learns from--should be included alongside the rest of art as a whole. However, every industry and corporation underneath it as of late has been attempting to replace art as a whole with machine creation. This is not the answer--It presents itself as appealing at first; a piece of art made without the process; something which all artists will inevitably have a complicated relationship with. But by removing the process, you remove the very core of what art is.
Microsoft has recently replaced their Windows10 login screen with an artificially generated image of a mountain. It advretises: Stunning views created at the click of a button! But to replace every screen and every showcase of photographical art with a generative image: It removes the process. The process of an individual acquiring the right lenses for their camera. The process of traveling, being physically present within the location. The act itself in which the end piece is a representative reminder of an existing place on Planet Earth. The emotional, memorial, cultural connections any place on Earth will have. An image generated on its own is harmless, when it seeks to stand by itself: A computer contains no morals nor intentions beyond what is intrinsically intwined from the information it is fed. I believe when honoring the teachers that taught it to make an image such as this--that it can exist. But in attempts to replace, to substitute the nature of photography; it removes everything that matters from it. It cannot substitute a real image of a real place that exists because it fails to represent its reality. It is not a place I can go to--These generated mountains. Their awe and beauty is a mimicry of the awe and beauty of Earth, sculpted by thousands of years of erosion. To see such existence, a reminder of the massive world we inhabit--and share it with the rest of the world in itself is part of the process. The process that "AI Art" inherently cannot achieve as substitution.
There are examples where generative imagery can attain meaning--When the entrepenuers of such programs and machines own the fact that no image it can create will represent an existing reality. The idea of liminal spaces starts with real-life photography; and I believe can be enhanced with the use of programming. The liminal space strikes an uncanny valley by factor that it toys with the human memory; witnessing places many commonly know to be bustling and alive as nothing more but an empty set of corridors and entrances. When this is taken to the fantastical extreme; what shouldn't be put where it is--the integration of machinery into a manufactured, false reality is an additive to the process and meaning of the genre's art. Because a contributor of the medium shares a likeness with what the piece represents; feverdream, scrambled recollections of structure itself built by equations and measurements--it could almost stand on its own. Even so, this is a genre based ultimately on the innately human perception of reality. Stretching the limits of the imagination.
But, the companies monopolizing over an industry do not want to actually explore the future of art istelf. They seek to replace it with something else; because with no process, there is no art to be made. Art is creation-additive creation, subtractive creation. The something else they seek to replace it with is fast-fed convenience, an easy product to profit. One that they can manufacture without the proclaimed 'burden' of crediting and paying the labor to the process in which the very industry is founded upon the existence of. It doesn't matter whether it means anything beyond a set of pixels or typos; the goal is not to create something--It is to sell it. Because there is no process, it will fail. Terribly. We are already seeing the results of mass law-suits of uncredited artists and the cracks of flimsy productions built on machinery. Machinery which is already capable of amazing, beautiful things; 3D modeling and rendering, computing physics, accessing a fountain of information--That is being thrown to the wayside, because that, too, requires an effort. A process. And until this world without passion stops being pursued-the failure of "AI Art" substitution will continue ad finitum.
3.8.2024
A short poem by RIAD "Belly of the Beast"
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The sad truth of it is:
That a wasted, wearied sheep
Would walk into hungry jaws
If nowhere was a place
warm and dark enough,
To fall asleep.