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.
There's something I've noticed the mindset that pervades race and identity. Geographically, politically, anatomically. Colonizer math. The divisions drawn and algorithms executed that divide clean objectives between different variables. Seperations that serve to empower a society that rewards, values, and pulls out every stop to preserve whiteness as the absolute and exclusive means of worthiness, autonomy, creativity. I was not the first person to write this, nor the best to articulate it. Nonetheless, I hope I will not be the last to talk of it.
Geographically--Colonizer mathematics lies within borders. Borders enforced by barbed wires, buerecratic circus hoops, and armed soldiers. Not all that long ago, the occupiers and colonizers of the territory known as the United States of America devised calculations assigning monetary value to the stretches of land: And thereby came its borders. The country would serve these borders as complacency for individual laws, and political chairholders would rip the seams of their territories to live in one that they, continuously, would sign slavery and genocide into law. On the other half of that line, stood chairholders who remained threatened by the concept of liberation over emancipation, and would terrorize the communities therewithin it. This is a long, ongoing, bloody history. Colonizer math on a conquest of borders has pervaded time immemorial. It persists as we speak, so long as these invisible 100-mile wide lines hold political and economic value. Colonizer math suggests that its bloodshed is integral to wealth, and worth.
So what's the deal? Humanity has fought with one another over territory for longer. A statement not untrue, but the categoric metric of what that fight is really about pales in comparison to unique degree of cruelty that colonization entails. To fight for resources is a natural approach, as is trading for them and agreeing to share them. To dictate a divine right over a land in the insistence that all within it are inhuman and need of cleansing, to complain of the land being butchered as inhospitable and refusing to tend to it on its terms, to condemn generations of imprisonment and torture of melanin and origin, there is no end to describing the unnatural amount of effort it takes to colonize. Just as kindness is a continuous choice, the unique cruelty of it is a continual, daily choice of ignorance, arrogance, and complacency. A choice mostly motorized by the wealthiest descendants of its originators, though continued in every vein of society beneath them, as well. Colonizer math is the blueprints for a machine well oiled with blood. Colonizer math lies validated in the documentation of the human life, and where one may dwell. So, the world is left wounded with jagged-cut borders, hurting with infection. There is no future borders will continue forever. Earth flourished long before maps had drawn them, laws had dictated them--It will flourish long after them.
Politically--On smaller scales, in cities, and counties, this imposed occupying country finds other ways to operate its colonial mathematics. Redlining, aptly named, is one of the tools in the kit for the mathematicians of colonialism. Pushing populations where they are deemed deserved, and neglecting the futures of the families therewithin is a longtime choice. Having all the money in the world to dominate, conquer, terrorize inside and outside its occupied territory: But having nothing to spare in founding, building institutions of health, education, transportation in every stretch of its claimed cities. Because that is not, never was, the point of this carved-out-country. Colonizer math is the thorn that sticks out in the coy mask that insists that The States are built for every future, and not the one it founded itself upon: Conquest, indentured labor, monetary gains. The celebration of every progressive law in the news comes with the failure to recognize synonymously that the Territories' legal system is not in place to benefit anything other than these objectives.
Mind you, my statement isn't that these changes are unwelcome, or cynically nothing matters: My statement is the fact that in this structure, anyone has the power to deem another group unworthy of protection--And that was the complete intention under those objectives. Electorally, Gerrymandering is an embodiment of this mindset silently projected by the seats of the occupational government. That the opinion of the people within its territory is ultimately, intrinsically secondary to achieving the colonizer's mathematic scheme to cherrypick county boundaries until they solidly align with that goal. Electorally, the focus of the occupation's voting centering on whom the head of military will be speaks volumes on the priorities of this Land that is not free.
Anatomically--Colonizer math pervades in the personal identity by assigning blood in increments, be it fractions or percentages. Blood quantum is another surgical division of colonial mathematics: Only this time, it pervades much of casual society, asserting its agency of identity over individuals both mono-racial and multi-racial. It asks a cleancut, box-checkable existence for eight billion humans on this planet earth, so long as colonial math catches them within their sightlines. Racial science has long been a metric to measure the worth and intelligence of families, towns, and cities outside the States. Arguing what percentage of what and who from this and that, without thinking to ask the people living there of their self-definitions. Because the interest isn't in autonomy, as colonial math has proven, it is in the power of definitions, the power to splice and seperate whether it is the earth or the flesh. It was, and is, a metric to beat down on monoracial peoples of color without mercy. The laws of its existence passed through congress barred acceptance as human. And long after some laws had been ruled over: Their mindset lingers socially. Blood quantum is a means of exclusion from reparations, from belonging, particularly Black Natives and a refusal of recognition towards Black Native identities by both occupational and tribal governments.
Yet, its bias rears its head for the privileges it yields towards the multiracial person whom is mixed white--and fits some, or most of the categorical description of what that 'phenotype' is. Paranoia pervaded the historical cities of the States for "Hidden Slaves" i.e escapees of plantations of lighter skin and whiter features, for black people who'd pass 9-5 and come home to be their authentic selves, for the folks who'd send their wavy haired, olive-skinned child to answer for the census taker as the head of household so the rest of their not-so-passing family, multi-and-monoracial, would be left alone. It is more than abundantly clear that these fractions were divided and drawn, these features socially assigned as tokens of access to privilege. Creating arbitrary categories within categories, designating fractions to phenotypes. This society has a preference that pervades deep in colorism, and texturism, much of which multiracial persons jumped on for their own benefit and for nobody in their communities. Many multiracial persons aligned themselves with whiteness, spiting the ones that raised them and gave them everything, a behavior which pervades. Many monoracial persons of color, discriminated for their skin and features sought, blamelessly, to change in apperance and mannerisms to absolve some of the pain the world had put them through. Colonizer mathematics through blood quantum and assimilation crafts an elaborate delusion, that through crawling on the bandwagon of whiteness, that conditional privileges may become complete privilege, shielding oneself from scrutiny and danger. That it is the only power that may tell someone what and who they are, and not ask them. Because if the math cannot split them its surgical way, it cannot indenture them, it cannot profit upon them, it cannot colonize them. As long as race and race-based discrimination pervades our world, we must resist these incisions in every stroke.
In a way, this essay is for my Akhu: For all the ways you have been seperated, pushed, pulled, divided among these lines, I see you.
I am not a revolutionary for saying what already has been said: I highly reccomend reading Black Ghost of the Empire by Kris Manjapra, Those Who Saw the Sun by Jaha Nailah Avery, and Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini.