material practice – An artist's practice

The continuing farce that is America prompts this post.

The duds in the Orangehouse are successful in one thing—rallying support against them.

The bully tactics are typical. But support for the victims (except American ‘victims’ that brought this on themselves) is increasing around the world. Bullies don’t win when sane and strong people stand against them.

I support our Commonwealth cousins, Canada, in this fight. They’re strong and I hope they remain strong.

There’s no point in decrying all the actions causing chaos in America and around the world without doing my bit.

So, I’m doing an audit of my material practice. A boycott is in progress.

Paints

Briefly, the oil paints that I use are from the UK (Winsor & Newton) and Australia (Art Spectrum), so I can continue to use them without concern.

The Acrylic paints I use are American. Boycott! That is, use what I have but don’t buy any more.

The Alkyd paints I use are from an Australian company that appears to source materials globally, notably China.

Yarns and other fibre materials

I have a stash that is equivalent to the size of half a shipping container, so I’m sure I can use up what I have for years to come.

If I need a yarn fix I will go to Bendigo Woollen Mills (Oz) and various favoured suppliers in Europe.

Digital

This is difficult.

I use Apple and Adobe exclusively for creating and manipulating digital works. My initial boycott will be to lavish care on my now elderly computer and downgrade my Adobe all-apps plan when it comes due. I will try to limit my Adobe fix to Photoshop.

The use of Midjourney is also deeply entrenched in my practice. But I have more than 100,000 images so am thinking about how I downgrade to a cheaper plan and maybe wean myself off in the future. I could spend an entire lifetime just working with the images I already have.

Aside from my arts practice—personal choices

I will never buy a swasticar. This choice is not an illegal boycott, buffoon.

I never eat unhappy meals.

I watch Australian television. I have no streaming subscriptions.

Already I have boycotted Twitter and closed my account, haven’t used Microsoft products for years, and limited use of Meta. We watch some Youtube to catch up with the fallout of the shitshow, only because our ABC doesn’t always cover it.

I have made a list of American exports into Australia so that I can check that I am not inadvertently buying American. Not much chance of that because we have so much good stuff here, specifically, made in Australia. I’ll be looking closely at country of origin and company ownership for toiletries, games, vinegar, fruit and nuts, paper and cardboard, books and apparel.

OK, so I’m just one boycotter but I’m looking forward to my part in his (and the knob’s) downfall.

Me in this moment: Material 1 (WIP) 2024

The Bot and I are now firm friends and close collaborators. The Bot is material to my current practice (lovely legal term). The Bot is fundamental to my material practice (lovely visual arts term).

Bot has been busy working on individualising output just for me. There is now a personalisation parameter and I have my own individual code to turn on that personalisation.

I had a bit of fun re-running images I had made previously, but this time adding my code to see if there was a difference from Bot’s point of view. The prompt was the same as originally used, the only difference between the outputs being my personalisation code.

I think there’s a clear difference. Results: on the left—basic output, on the right—personalised output: