⁰ destijlife project

Human-initiated dopamine and serotonin sources are replaceable with the analytic-driven, programmable responses that result in comparable chemical releases. Our supposition is that these means-to-an-end are qualitatively equivalent and have resulted in an unprecedented volume of visible, recorded, publicly mediated interiority. We consider digital mechanisms, algorithms and HTML 5 code, as an excellent evolution in postmodern methods of image appropriation, construction, and dissemination.

We suggest that originality in painting is unoriginal because its images are:

1. Predetermined.
1. Arrangement is numerable.
2. Arrangement is predictable.
3. Arrangement is available.
2. The new painter's role is to consume options.

We propose that:

1. Machines render all options.
2. Choice (human or human-like) replaces originality.
3. Randomness replaces originality.

To aggressively challenge unproductive and selfish visions of individualism and creativity, we propose to:

1. Seed these images back into digital culture.
2. Evolve the algorithms for survival.
3. Archive the volume for:
1. 50 years
2. 100 years
3. 500 years

In addition:

1. Image Generation
1. Images are now predetermined and their manifestation is the result of a series of diminishing choices.
1. The image is subject to Darwinian forces (initiated mostly by humans, and, by extension potentially mechanical or AI intervention) in the winnowing of production.
2. Painting, in particular, is assembled and not conceived.
2. Labor is choosing from gross possibility the survival of one image in lieu of another and engenders:
1. Ethical self-consciousness.
2. Aesthetic self-consciousness.
3. Earnestness is exposed in the choice-labor of image survival.
4. Issues of the market and economy are addressed in the kind of capital an automated image machine produces in contrast to or in addition to human capital.
1. Aesthetic composition is natural capital, a lumber more than an ore, that might be regenerated.
2. Images are now humanly grown.
2. Image Distribution
1. Push all of the images back into public circulation:
1. Greatest chance of survival based on volume.
2. A large volume of images will communicate through its scale.
2. The pusher of the images will be a program just as the maker of the image is.
3. Aggressive and evolving continued distribution of images into a public, digital space.
1. Creating social profiles for the bot artist.
2. Promoting human use of the coded image.
3. Self-sufficient bot.

The world is filled to suffocating. Man has placed his token on every stone. Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged. We know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, blend and clash. A picture is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture. Similar to those eternal copyists Bouvard and Pécuchet, we indicate the profound ridiculousness that is precisely the truth of painting. We can only imitate a gesture that is always interior, never original. Succeeding the painter, the plagiarist no longer bears within him passions, humors, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense encyclopedia from which he draws. The viewer is the tablet on which all the quotations that make up a painting are inscribed without any of them being lost. A painting’s meaning lies not in its origin, but in its destination. The birth of the viewer must be at the cost of the painter. - Sherrie Levine (1981)