Snow, A.I., and art in unlikely places
It snowed here this week and, while the yo-yo-ing weather shouldn’t be something to feel too positive about, I’ll be honest it made me feel pretty good about life.
Edinburgh can feel quite magical when it snows. The city’s historic architecture, the Castle and the Old Town’s narrow cobblestone streets feel postcard perfect at the best of times, but there’s something very charming when covered by a blanket of snow. Being bundled up in warm coats and scarves, enjoying the picturesque scenery somehow feels very ‘Edinburgh’ — particularly compared to the usual way of experiencing it — through a sheet of drizzle.
A.I., A.I., Oh!
While hiding inside from the cold, I very much enjoyed reading Nick Cave’s horrified reaction to someone sending him a song in his style generated by AI writing software. It was, he said, “replication as travesty”, and was in no doubt that “this song sucks.” He admitted that AI could, perhaps, at some point in its development, “create a song that is, on the surface, indistinguishable from an original, but it will always be a replication, a kind of burlesque.” Why? Because AI can’t do what he does because true art arises “out of suffering” and as far as he knows “algorithms don’t feel.”
While my heart very much agrees with Nick, my head gives me pause.
Because there’s a deep-felt suspicion that, as writers, we don’t like to admit to ourselves: what we’ve written (be it a novel, or a poem, or a screenplay) is always already a sort of burlesque, a faint echo of the moment of its creation.
Yes, we may suffer greatly in writing it, but once the thing is written and sent out into the world, we — the human sufferer — are no longer able to stand behind it and guarantee its depth. In written form it can’t quite contain the sorrow we poured into it.
If AI, like Cave supposes, was to write a song that was “indistinguishable” from an original, then — without Cave there to stand by it and reassure us how much he suffered to create it — I don’t see how it wouldn’t be exactly the same.
What he is right about, however, is that AI writing, at least in its current form, sucks. Or, to put it a better way, AI pulls off a very lifelike impression of a bad writer. Which makes me wonder whether (at least in the short term, before AI enslaves humanity to its will) it might not be quite useful. The worst part of writing in my experience is the interminable but perhaps necessary process of churning out sludge prior to tinkering with it, incrementally improving it, making it passable. Could AI take away some of this burden? Could AI do our sucking for us?
Maud Sulter in situ
Last weekend, before the snow fell, I went to see a Maud Sulter exhibition, Maud Sulter: Memory & Identity (unfortunately now finished) — which was really fascinating, particularly in its setting of Pollok House, a mansion located in Pollok Country Park in Glasgow.
Maud Sulter was a Scottish artist, poet, and photographer. Born in Glasgow to a Scottish mother and Ghanaian father, Sulter’s work often explored themes of race, gender, and cultural identity. She was a member of the BLK Art Group, a collective of black British artists who sought to challenge the underrepresentation of black artists. She died tragically young at the age of forty-eight in 2008, soon after receiving MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list.
A lot of Sulter’s work is about re-casting the figures of black women back into the myth and history of the UK, making their presence visible and giving them a significance that, because of systematic racism, has been denied them. The photographic and collage works in the show took up four rooms of the upper floor of Pollok House, and their being hung there felt heavy with significance.
Pollok House was built in 1752, is surrounded by beautiful gardens and the estate is home to a herd of Highland cattle. The house is also home to one of the finest collections of Spanish art in the UK, including works by El Greco, Velázquez, and Murillo. The wealth of the house is — as is almost all historical wealth in the UK — highly imbricated in histories of slavery.
I thought the exhibition was exciting, heart-breaking and a really powerful intervention in a very unlikely location.
Hope you all have a fantastic weekend and more from me soon…
All my best,
James.