American Fez

For Whom The Fax Machine Screeches

In a touch screen world, I'm still finger-clicking on this peripheral device: my hand shunting the beige, hump-backed 'mouse' through an invisible maze so it reciprocally guides a tiny arrow on my monitor two centimeters over to the required desktop folder. Find me on the Evolution of the Workplace timeline, I'm closer to Bob Cratchit than Elon Musk. Imagine a waxwork exhibit in a museum devoted to defunct technology from the previous century, that's me at my daily labors. I may not be dressed in period costume but the wages are about the same. 

Like the last of the lamplighters in the last gas-lit street in town, I perform my antediluvian errand of replacing the toner cartridge in our single remaining laser printer. Then I return to my computer to try to print again but now there is a paper jam. Surely modern business must offer easier, more productive, more rewarding ways to make a living. Or am I always doomed to be the Clerk That Time Forgot?

Purchase Of Things Past.

I've always loved vintage bric-a-brac, not necessarily antiques, but ordinary objects that lived a life before and retain within their creases and cracks the patina of times and people long since gone: art deco lamps still casting shadows from their past; ceramic teacups into which someone's soul once was poured; mid-century love-seats Beatnik girls fell asleep upon at parties they weren't invited to; coverless coffee table books, of course, and scratchy vinyl recordings of phantom orchestras and crooners; not to mention sepia-tinted old souvenir maps of Florida featuring no reference to Orlando. 

But what do with all this junk? I suppose there's the secret hope that the art deco lamp might have a magical connection with Aladdin, that perhaps the teacup will turn out to be valuable fine china hand-painted by Edward Hopper, that the love seat came from the Hollywood home of James Dean, that such dusty ephemera will ultimately be worth a small fortune if sold at auction. Unlikely, obviously. These objects, whatever their provenance, are merely the archives of our consumer society. Bits and pieces of yesterday saved from the scrapheap by a vague apprehension that even inanimate things have feelings. You are mine now, teacup, will you love me?

Kafka In The Office Park

Much like a rogue factory's clandestine sewage pipe spews outlawed effluent into the ocean, the powerful HVAC system at Oblomov Inc radiates raw ennui throughout every floor of the building. These regular blasts of lukewarm apathy swirl around our desks and I watch my colleagues wilt and collapse across their computers, never to rise again until called to the conference room for yet another pointless meeting. 

If only we could vacuum the ennui away as if it were just dust. But it has become the very substance of our working lives. Without our frowns and half-closed eyes and stifled yawns we could claim no identity at all. At least here at our desks we are not crushed into nothingness like the rusting, redundant hulks of the unemployed at the scrapyard. We remain beings who can still measure our days in desultory mouse clicks if not in meaningful activity. Come friendly AI and annex Oblomov, it's too automated for humans now.

Nevertheless, I suppose making AI images does give me something to do during my lunch break, in between bites of stale chicken sandwich from the cafeteria, washed down with a century-old can of Diet Dr Pepper. Maybe in the future, when Oblomov is long-since bankrupt and the building transformed into a community arts and craft space, I will hold an exhibition of the AI pictures I created here, like a former Soviet dissident giving tours of the salt mine wherein he was forced to labor in the bad old times.

AI And Its Discontents

AI's learning curve from text prompts, at least as far as images-making is concerned, proceeds rather like an Internet shopping algorithm: "Other people with similar tastes to yours purchased tan pants so you will want to buy tan pants also." In other words, AI interprets what it thinks you want based on what other people have wanted in the past, which probably isn't exactly what you want. It adds it's own AI gloss to your most specific prompting. For example, the image below has a certain Steampunkish tone, which wasn't what I intended at all.

What was I going for? Well, I suppose an Edward Burra or Rene Magritte type figure, in Boston, in the twilight of his career salvaging legacy media from the scrapheap of history. Instead, there's an ambivalent avian Private Investigator from some sort of pre-war science-fiction comic strip, rummaging through microfilm of top secret prototype bird-feeders stolen from the vaults of the Customs House, in a race against time before he must fly south for the winter. 

No doubt AI will keep learning, just as the Amazon algorithm will one day work out I prefer grey to tan pants, despite the fact there's a guy in Wisconsin with a standing order for tan pants who also bought the same Last Year At Marienbad DVD that I did. The funny thing is, none of the characters in Last Year At Marienbad would be caught dead in tan pants. But it's going to take years before AI can assimilate such fine shade of niche detail.

In the spirit of the times and possessing little artistic talent myself, I attempted to create an image for this blog using AI prompts. As you can see from the images below, in addition to being no Rene Magritte, I'm apparently no proficient AI prompter either. The first image looks like a GQ fashion spread photographed in Beirut. The second image is nearer the mark but still far distant from the bullseye. So much for modern technology, bring me my watercolors and a blank canvas. Paint, paper, and inspiration are still superior to zeros and ones, even in the hands of an amateur.