About and Contact
My Story
I was educated as an oil painter in a traditional studio art program, but things changed for me in 2015 when Google DeepDream, the first “generative” neural network was invented.
I was already interested in generative art, op art, and the science of perception, so it's little wonder I was fascinated by its strange mindlike apophenia.
I taught myself Linux so that I could start running my own style transfer models. I integrated it into my image making process and wrote articles about neural networks aimed for an artist audience.
I started experimenting with text-to-image models in 2019/2020 but things really took off with the beta of Midjourney in 2022. In 2023 I started getting print-on-demand shirts made using patterns I had generated.
These were purely one offs, for my own use and enjoyment. I've resisted selling them because it seemed like a timesink, and maybe it will end up being one still!
One thing I've been thinking a lot about lately has been William Morris. William Morris was a textile designer in the 1800s who started the "Arts and Crafts" movement as a pro-craft, anti-capitalist critique of industrialism.
What I'm doing here in some ways feels as far as possible from what Morris wanted. I generated images using a computer and then have them printed on demand someplace in China. I can hardly lay claim to "making" very much here.
And yet Morris himself revitalized the printed fabric tradition in his bid to make beautiful household goods affordable to everyone. He even designed some machine woven textiles for the Jacquard loom, the Jacquard loom's punch-cards being the direct technological ancestry to computer memory and the first "programmable" human machine interface as we know it.
In his time-travel sci-fi book "A Dream of John Ball" Morris wrote:
"I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name."
The problems we face as a society in this age of technological disruption are not so different than the ones that faced Morris and his contemporaries. My goal is to put clothes on my back and if that's something that interests you please feel free to buy something from this website. All clothing is made by Yoycol, print on demand. I give away all images in full resolution for free. You can always cut out the middleman if you want.
