📙 #028 - Artist's Statement
Two links, a shill and not an artist's statement, yet!
Please let me keep this one short, please let me keep this one short, no unnecessary words, I can do it!!
# LINKS
Two shout outs today. I received a delightful email from Tait and Sara for this lovely paper alignment tool for the AxiDraw that Sara designed.
Tait says: ‘Our AxiDraw SE/A3 draws up to roughly 11x17, which works really nicely on 13x19 paper for about a 1" margin. You just lay down a sheet of 13x19 paper and tape it in place, and it is in the correct spot to print an 11x17 (or 11x16.93) drawing with a 1 inch margin with a sharpie.’
The link to the STL file for 3d printing is here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6452991 - and they look great if you wanted to blast through a whole bunch of pen plots and get the positioning perfect. It looks like it should be fairly easy to make adjustments for other paper sizes. But as someone who's often taping paper down to the table and trying to get things straight these look great. Let me know how you get on with them!
The other link is to Eric's SalamiVG ("Salami Vector Graphics"), a creative coding framework for JavaScript with a single render target: SVG. As someone who also makes SVG tools for fun I love seeing things like this pop up.
# A (BIRTHDAY) SHILL
Although I guess not really a shill as this is my newsletter 😁 My upcoming drop on Alba is next Thursday, the 15th (my birthday). I made a whole ass video about it talking about the design and some other interesting (I think) things, it's pretty short, the last 5 mins or so are talking about code and you can totally skip that part.
I've tried to make the type of video I'd love to see from other artists. Actually I'd like to see even longer ones going into more depth, but YouTube is like "Nope, peoples' attention span is kinda short now" so what do I know?! Although I can totally understand why artist's don't.
Anyway, if you're the NFT kinda buying person (which is obviously why you signed up to a pen plotting newsletter, I know), it's happening over here: https://www.alba.art/projects/trance-atlantic-glide
This is probably the last project of this type I'll be making for a while, for reasons I'll vaguely get into below.
# ARTIST STATEMENT
Ugh. But also yay!
Another awesome link for you. Melissa directed me towards: "Art-Write: The Writing Guide for Visual Artists" (full disclosure, that's one of those fancy affiliate link thingys), a book that helps you with writing an artist's statement.
I bought the Kindle version, immediately stripped the DRM (sorry/not sorry Amazon) and loaded it onto my ReMarkable tablet so I could scribble all over it and make notes. Which is handy as there's lots of places in the book left blank for you to write in, so this is kinda the perfect way to do.
A mere day after Melissa posted the link I had a chat with a friend Matt, who's busy kickstarting the POEM/1 an LLM/GPT powered whimsical clock. I had many thoughts about my practice as an artist using AI and I wanted a little help putting the correct words to those thoughts. Matt helped and suggested I write an Artist Statement.
Up to this point I felt like I've been in exploring R&D mode with my art, pen plotting, running a studio and being an artist. Picking at various threads, trying out different things. But somehow, magically, it's all started to come together and feels like all the aspects; slow computing, AI, admin tools, handwriting pen plotters and so on have come together into a single almost tangible thing, although I still don't 100% know what thing that thing is, I'm close to sensing the shape of it.
Okay, I get it world, all signs point to writing an artist statement. After next week is done and out the way, that's what I'm going to spend a couple of weeks doing.
I'm not sure if two weeks is over the top, or perhaps it's not enough.
I kind of want to write it all down here, share the jumble of thoughts, but I'm going to have face-to-face chats with a couple of local artist friends to check some of my assumptions first.
Anyway, let's go with an intention instead...
After next week, I'm going to be focusing on just two things.
One, I'm going to take a step back from making Digital/NFT art projects like the one above, and instead switch to "artist curated"; which basically means; still generative art, but I get to review all the outputs and pick the best ones 🙂
Mainly because I'm switching to "Slow Computing" where the algorithms can take their sweet time making things that I hopefully just leave running in the corner of the studio. I'm also not aiming to release any projects for a year or so, but rather artefacts created from the process of running an art studio. Ugh, that sounds awful, I'll nail it in the statement I swear.
Two, finally the pen plotter tutorials for YouTube.
So I'm going to be spending half my day, every day, for the foreseeable future writing, recording, editing and publishing videos. And the other half doing the I-can't-articulate-it-yet stuff, while documenting the process of whatever it is.
Thanks to the book though it should be written up a bit better than this!
# THE END
Right, that's enough for today, feel free to wish me luck for my birthday NFT drop next week, it’ll need all the help it can get 🤘🤘 I'll see you in the next newsletter on the other side, about four days into the artist statement wrangling.
Love you all
Dan
❤️