Thanks, but no thanks

Note: this was originally published in Weighted Tangents, my Substack newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

I’ve always admired generative art and assumed that it would be something I’d enjoy. I’ve poked around at different types of creations in both R and Processing.js but never quite gotten hooked, and so when a colleague mentioned that generative art could be done analog I thought it would be the perfect entry point for me. Like I really did think I would love this so much it would consume my every waking moment.

To get started I set up a simple rule set:

• The overall piece had to be small enough to finish in a couple of hours. No sprawling murals or complicated equations.

• I would use four four-sided dice to set up the rules used to fill in a single square, starting from the top left and working sequentially to the bottom right.

• Each square would contain a single shape — a square, triangle, or circle — based on the sum of the four dice on a given roll. Even numbers correspond to a square, odd numbers a triangle, and prime numbers a circle.

• Each overall square in the grid would be divided in half, and colored left to right based on the number on the corresponding die. This means that the left border was the first die, the left side of the shape the second die, the right side of the shape the third die, and the right border the fourth die, with the colors being:

  • 1: green
  • 2: yellow
  • 3: blue
  • 4: red

As I was setting up the sketch for painting I was really into what I was doing, completely obsessed with imagining the final product, but halfway through applying the first wash of paint I was bored and looking for distractions. All of the focus and intensity I had funneled into creating the rule set and meticulously drawing out the pattern had evaporated, and I found myself really having to push to finish painting. If I’m being completely honest, I only finished because I was in desperate need of a newsletter topic. It feels weird to share something that I haphazardly pulled together and am quite frankly a bit embarrassed of, but on the other it feels nice to say that I’ve tried something and realized that it isn’t for me. It’s a way to cross something off my list of “what ifs”, a way to stop stressing about whether or not I was on the right path.

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” — Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Along with generative art, several other hobbies have fallen by the wayside over the last few weeks, including a deep dive into the Icelandic sagas and my upcoming Cinema 4D class. The former because I’m already reading four different books and a fifth turned out to be a breaking point, and the latter because I’ve been accepted (and decided to join) the altMBA program. I’ll apologize now for everything I write in the month of May, because I can only assume that the altMBA will be the only thing I have time for outside of work.

On the other hand I’ve been keeping up with my Swedish (despite getting utterly turned around in both plural nouns and possessive pronouns) and have set a 10 year goal of moving abroad. Tonight I’m attending my first creative writing workshop and am nervous beyond all belief, and later this week I’ve set aside some time to try out embroidery, tapestry weaving, and medieval illumination. I’m most excited about the medieval illumination, and hoping it goes a smidge better than the generative art.

Until next week!

xo