Episode 21: IDEAS MAN
[INTRODUCTION]
I hate this bit. I hate it more than anything else.
I’m not even listening to anyone else. I’ll have to make up names for them later. I’ll have to guess at what they do.
Yeah, you look like Gary Spanner the mechanic.
And you must be Andrew Andrewton, the guy who sands the edges off supermarket sandwiches.
I’m not good with names. I don’t really know what people do for work any more.
What am I going to say?
Certainly not the truth.
Maybe “painter”... Or “animator”... People get those, they think they are reasonable job titles to have. Painter, especially, leaves some room that it could be an actual trade, something respectable and practical. Something useful in the world.
Yes, I could even go as far as “visual artist” to keep it mysterious and vague.
It’s nearly my turn.
Maybe I should just tell the truth this time. I want to. I just wish it was a different truth.
Introduce myself...
Say what I do.
Go on. Be brave. Just say it.
“Hello everyone, I’m Adam and I’m a conceptual artist”.
[PROMPT]
Draw a picture
Draw a picture of a starry night
Draw a picture of a starry night in the style of Van Gogh
Draw a picture of a starry night in the style of Vincent Van Gogh
Draw a picture of a starry sky in the style of Vincent Van Gogh, using blue paint
Draw a picture of a starry sky in the style of Vincent Van Gogh using dark blue paint and yellow for stars
Draw a picture of a starry sky in the style of Vincent Van Gogh using dark blue paint for the sky, yellow paint for the stars, make it swirly
Draw me a picture that makes me feel something.
[IDEAS MAN]
He was called Carl.
Carl’s job title was “executive producer”, officially, but he preferred to introduce himself as “an ideas man”.
Over the years I’ve met an assortment of people who describe themselves as this. Interestingly, the term means something slightly different to each of them.
Carl was my original Ideas Man.
This was in Brighton at the turn of the Millennium. We were making video games.
Carl didn’t really play video games, but this wasn’t a problem, because he was an ideas man.
We were making a video game about a world war two pilot who had survived a crash landing behind enemy lines.
I was designing puzzle logic and Dan was designing game play mechanics. Iain was designing the environments and Martin was shepherding all of us as our lead.
There was a coding team and an art team too. They had similar structures.
And then there was Carl.
He was in charge of ideas.
Good game design is about simplicity and control. It isn’t so much about having ideas as it is about choosing which specific ideas to follow and executing them with skill.
A common amateur pitfall in game design is to throw everything into it.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could play a character that is a man or a bear, and could get up in the morning and then choose what you have for breakfast and what sort of cup you drink your coffee, or tea, out of and that you could shoot people but you could also learn magic and build your own house and then go online and challenge people to a game of go but with tanks that you can either direct from a God like perspective or you could drive them or just be a passenger that paints pictures and makes music...
The thing is, with the exception of a very small number of tightly controlled sandbox experiences, that isn’t the blueprint for a good game. Even if it is technically achievable it isn’t fun.
The fun from games is usually from the exquisite control of the mechanics that the designers allow the player.
The structure is the fun.
And that takes discipline.
Besides, complexity is too much like reality and if reality was so great why would we have such an urge to escape it through playing games?
Carl was an ideas man, not a designer.
Ideas included, “I know this is a stealth game but wouldn’t it be more fun if you could just shoot your way through it”.
If you asked him how this could be incorporated into the mechanics of the game, Carl would respond by telling you that was your job. He was the ideas man, you were the designer.
You see, this conception of the ideas man meant the responsibility started and ended with the idea. Executing it was not your problem.
Not only that but there seemed to be no way of assessing the quality of an idea. That is to say all ideas were good ideas. The only fallibility of the idea was within the execution.
This idea didn’t work because you implemented it poorly. It wasn’t because it was a poor idea in the first place.
And if you do implement it well, somehow, bending the idea and the game so that they worked together after endless meetings and creative solutions. Whiteboards of tattooed palimpsest and frayed nerves rendered sharp by coffee that you could slice, then it wasn’t because of your collective effort. The glory did not belong to you, it belonged to the ideas man.
[MODEST]
Ideas were like kittens, I was giving them away
-- Isaac Brock, Modest Mouse
[CONCEPTUAL ART]
It is often said that Marcel Duchamp is the father of conceptual art.
He exhibited a urinal in a gallery. A ready-made, with the title of “Fountain”.
He argued that art is defined by the artist’s choice, rather than the physical fabrication of the piece.
In reality, he was one of the last artists in a long chain that was building to that moment.
Art used to be concerned with depiction. A picture or sculpture could be of something. It could be a landscape, or a person, or even an event.
Slowly, artists started to enjoy playing with the materials themselves. They became less concerned about what the art was of, but what it was in itself.
The rise of more abstract art can be seen as it seeped through impressionism, which shrugged off the verisimilitude of the renaissance and replaced it with bold strokes and something that felt more than looked.
Eventually we got to the point where the feeling became entirely dominant.
Kandinsky was working at a similar time to Duchamp. His pictures were clearly saying something, although what they were saying wasn’t exactly apparent. Is this visual music? Is it pattern?
It can’t just be a picture for its own sake, surely?
If it isn’t a depiction of something, then it must be about something, right?
Duchamp provided the first thing that this new art was about. It was about the artist, and their thoughts.
It was about the concept. It was conceptual art.
[PROMPT]
Make me a sculpture
Make me a sculpture in the style of Jeff Koons
Make me a balloon sculpture in the style of Jeff Koons.
Make me an orange balloon sculpture in the style of Jeff Koons
Make me an orange balloon sculpture of a dog in the style of Jeff Koons
Make me
[THE OTHER GUY]
There’s an opposite type of ideas man.
I’m going to call him “The Other Guy”.
I think we’ve all encountered one of these.
They are the dark matter of the Ideas Man.
They seem themselves as the arbiter of ideas despite never having one themselves.
No matter what the idea, it isn’t good enough, but an alternative is never offered, just an assessment.
“Could you make that more fun?”
“I don’t think those colours work”
“Is there a different font you could use?”
“There’s just something... Off about it”
These comments, these opinions are anti-ideas. They take ideas around the back of the shed and push a shotgun against their temple.
Without providing concrete actions these statements are not about creation but control.
Antagonistic contrarianism without action is not part of the creative process, is is worthless impediment at best.
[CONCEPTUAL ART]
If conceptual art is concerned with the artist’s intent, then can anything the artist does can be art?
Well, yes and no.
Mostly no.
Yeah, no.
There are artists that have tried to define their entire lives as an artwork. Gilbert and George see themselves as permanently performing, therefore, their entire lives can be considered as this art work.
That’s the concept in this conceptual work. But it isn’t necessarily the art.
The art is in the execution.
Gilbert and George execute this concept with exceptional elan. They are witty and personable.
Furthermore, art is a conversation. It is self-referential and ongoing.
If you decided to consider your life as a work of art, you could, but people would ask what that means in reference to the fact that Gilbert and George already do that.
What are you bringing to this conversation? What are you adding?
This leads us to the idea that conceptual art is often about newness.
Bringing a new idea to the conversation is important, otherwise you are just telling the same joke that everyone else heard on TV last night.
Do you know how many artists I’ve encountered who suggest that their own conceptual art practice is stealing other people’s artwork and claiming it as their own?
The answer is more than two.
I would like to introduce them and see if they would start stealing each others stolen art, like a giant rat king of self-referential conceptual art.
An Ouroboros subsisting on its own excrement.
For some reason, I am reminded of an earlier piece I wrote about AI.
[PROMPT]
Make me a conceptual artist
Make me a conceptual artist with ideas
Make me a conceptual artist with ideas that are my own
Make me
[PIXEL FUCKING]
Related to “The Other Guy” is a process where control is exerted in a practice called pixel fucking.
This is a process by where someone without ideas or the practical ability to execute them finds a role by requesting numerous, small, and inconsequential changes so that they can claim authorship.
“Can we just see that with a slightly smaller font”
“Can we just move that a few pixels over?”
“Can we just see that but with different colours?”
There’s an easy way to spot these insertions as they almost always start with three words...
“Can we just...”
There is a rule that the closer you get to the deadline for delivery, the greater the frequency of pixels being fucked.
There’s also a type of flippancy for the artists skill too. As if the person actually making the thing hasn’t considered the size of the font or the balance of colours.
“I know you’ve said this won’t work but I’d just like to see it.”
Countless hours spent deliberately making something you know will look awful just to fluff pixels for someone else to fuck them.
Was it worth it?
I doubt it, but since you are paying a flat fee for this gig, it’s not your time you are wasting.
Besides, braver artists have explored this process, and have found that not making any changes but pretending that they have is enough to satisfy the fucker.
“Yes, that’s much better, let’s keep it like that”
Whilst pixel fucking is not an art, managing pixel fuckers is.
[ON YOUR FEET]
I’m often asked, “where do you get your ideas?”.
The question seems to suggest that there is a place that I can visit, full of ideas to be lifted from shelves, placed in a basket and bought at a check out.
Sometimes it is asked with an incredulity that suggests that ideas just strike people randomly out of nowhere.
The truth is dull. The ideas come, mostly, from reading, watching, talking and exploring. They come from thinking and being and doing.
The ideas come from immersing ourselves in the environment in which the ideas fit. They come from trial and error and reflection.
In reality, they come at the end of a process we like to call “work”.
This has sometimes been misinterpreted to mean that ideas are dependent upon any form of physical action. You see it in devised theatre.
Let’s just get on our feet... Let’s walk around the space...
Perhaps that does work for dancers, or even for physical threatre. Maybe it works for individuals.
It has never worked for me.
Action without thought isn’t conducive to ideas. It is, however, a good form of exercise.
[SIT DOWN]
In reality, the brain generates ideas through a process called “combinatorial creativity”. Different pre-existing ideas, experiences, memories and sensory inputs get mashed together and create new thoughts and ideas.
The consequence of this should be reasonably obvious. The more things you put into your brain, the more potential combinations of new ideas you get.
Ideas are not something to be mined, but something to be nurtured and fed.
The Ideas Man would like you to think that having ideas is a rare and specialised skill that only a few people have, but the truth is the opposite.
Ideas are an infinite well anyone can draw from.
You can have thousands of ideas in a day. Indeed, I’ve never met anyone that doesn’t.
Not all ideas are great ideas, however, and many of them wither in their infancy. They fail to hatch and evolve past being passing notions.
That’s a useful mechanism too. Can you imagine giving every thought you have your undivided and exhaustive attention?
It would destroy you.
The real skill, the one that you have to work at, is considering which ideas you want to spend your time on. It’s about spotting their potential and following where they lead.
It requires work. It requires reading, and talking, and looking.
Sometimes it requires experimentation.
Thought without action isn’t conducive to making good art, but it is a lovely way to pass the time.
[CONCEPTUAL ART]
It’s often said that Marcel Duchamp was the father of conceptual art.
Interestingly, it is a little known fact that he likely stole the urinal idea from a woman.
Her name was Else Plötz.
Else’s third marriage was to Leopold Karl Friedrich Baron von Freytag-Loringhoven, the impoverished son of a German aristocrat.
She had access to the New York art scene and, by all accounts, was a witty and insightful presence.
Her poems were published alongside extracts from James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Unearthed in 1983, a letter Duchamp wrote to his sister contains the following line:
one of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture
If you know the urinal in question, it is signed, “R. Mutt”, a signature Duchamp later attributed to the seller of the urinal, J. L. Mott Iron Works.
There is no record of the Iron Works ever selling that model of urinal.
Furthermore, “Armut” translates in German as “poverty”.
Sometimes that term doesn’t mean poverty as in “lack of money” but a form of intellectual poverty.
[PROMPT ENGINEER]
They call themselves “Prompt Engineers”.
That is, they “engineer” “prompts”.
Not that they are punctual engineers.
Prompt Engineers is the rather haughty term for people who use AI image generation.
It feels like they gave themselves this name. A little like that kid at school who repeatedly tried to create his own nickname — things like “Top Kevin” and “The Wizard” — but ultimately got called something like “Stank”.
So, what is this “engineering”?
It’s typing. It is text manipulation. It is telling a machine what to do.
It is an Ideas Man.
Wouldn’t it be great if…
Followed by The Other guy.
No, not that, do it a few more times. Show me some alternatives.
Followed by the Pixel Fucker
Make it a little more red, make it smaller, bigger, make it all pop.
These people are the Pixel Fucking Negative Carls of the world.
The language they use, their prompts, the ones that they are engineering, are nothing but the same tired comments artists have lived with for decades.
In their ignorance they will use a defence that equates this to conceptual art, but it displays a shocking lack of understanding.
When confronted there are always accusations that there is a gate-keeping orthodoxy of “The Art World”.
As if we all got together in our tree house and decided we didn’t want them to join our club.
But the truth is they are excluding themselves. They are refusing to take part in the conversation of art, in part by refusing to learn about the history of art.
Their only material is the pre-masticated pixel. The horrible slop made from the recycled use of other people’s ideas and work.
They are the artists that steal another artist’s work and call it their own.
This all said, I am certain that you can make art with AI image generation. It will take a wonderful idea, a concept so strong that it negates all of those other horrible underpinnings.
I suspect that idea will come from someone who has nourished it through reading and learning and experimentation. They will undoubtedly have to interact with everyone else too. They will practice their form, understand it, and contextualise it.
Or maybe not, but the one thing I feel confident in saying is that person will not be an Ideas Man.
Outstanding essay. I’ve never been able to articulate why I thought “prompt engineering” was such a low-effort and useless title, but you nailed it with the tie-back to the Ideas Guy and the Pixel Fucker.