REPRESENTATIONS
I’ve been working with AI art tools for a few years now, and while I was met with misunderstanding and fear sometimes, now I’m met with it MOST of the time. Even if people want to understand, now they have to UNLEARN and overcome what the media and misinformed audiences have planted into their brains. To be honest, it surprised me when I was met with fear and apprehension about what I was doing - training an artificial intelligence model on a body of my work, and working with the results - because I was absolutely delighted by it! It was so reflective, it fit right into my practice, bringing my knowledge about art therapy, mindfulness, connection, energy… all together. It felt therapeutic (from actually studying to be an art therapist and counselor, and from being a person with C-PTSD, actually in therapy). How could everyone get it so wrong?
I saw the Terminator films too! But I have also realized that I’m an early adopter, I’m someone who gets excited about ideas, and who is generally interested in changing the world to make it a better place. I also strongly identify with the concept of radical hope! I got really down about people being so hateful this year - if you didn’t know, the internet can be awful…
People fear what they don’t understand.
And this backlash has happened before in art history, with impressionism, dada, pop-art, the camera, the digital camera, photoshop, digital art… and now AI, which is probably the biggest change art historically, that most of us have been alive for.
So I really tried to listen, and what I kept hearing was the fear. Not only were people kind of afraid of AI becoming sentient and taking over the world, but they were also very afraid it would cause artists to lose their jobs, it would take over and kill art and creativity, and it would degrade the value of art. Everyone also seems to think all this creative AI was made up by big tech bros with an evil agenda to make money, and completely misunderstand how any of the technology actually works.
What I’ve heard about problems with AI are really systemic issues and total misunderstanding.
Which is why I chose to do the REPRESENTATIONS collaborative project for Taking. Up. Space. this year. It’s so important that people understand how this stuff works, and how to use it, because it’s here, and it’s happening, and you all need to be part of it! How else can you influence its direction?
This project has its own tab on my website, and will be virtually exhibited during May/June of 2023. Click Here to visit the page and learn more.
Enchanted AI Art
I’m excited to announce that the Visionary AI Art Learning Collective is LIVE!
Wait, the what what?
Okay. So I met these two fabulous women who were as excited about using AI to create as I have been, and we talked, and IDEAS! They had launched Magical Stock Art, and had been getting requests from people who wanted to learn how to make art this way themselves. …So I’ve been teaching AI for Fine Artists and AI for Creative Expression, and we’ve been testing and figuring things out. It’s been awesome to see people get inspired by the process of creating with AI art tools!
There is also a LOT of hate towards AI art tools being used right now. So let me dispatch it - with the many, many, many conversations I’ve been having, it comes down to fear, misinformation, and systemic issues.
As women, we are legendary at transforming fear into love through creativity and community.
THIS IS THE VIBE!
After I did a residency with a big community component in September, I knew I wanted to teach people how to use AI art tools, and I was already doing it as part of explaining how the heck I make my art. I believe I can make this a little less scary for people! - I genuinely LOVE people, and my enthusiasm for what others are creating is deep and authentic. I also think it’s important for womxn to pick up these tools and show up in this space because it’s crucial that we influence it!
So, I’m leading the Visionary AI Art Learning Membership! And you can join me there!
The Savannah Storm Drain Project
Where does the water go to when it goes into the storm drain? It turns out that most people in Savannah didn’t know the answer, so the city (Laura Walker the Water Resources Environmental Manager) started this project to raise awareness and help people make the connection. The city has a website here to learn more about the project and view all of the entries and finished murals: https://waterconnectsusall.com
Above: Some images of me getting started - the color palette is definitely mine!
I really lucked out with the location I was assigned, Heard Elementary School - a STEAM school! I had some really great moments with the classes that came to visit my worksite - their understanding of why projects like this are important (and the fact that they’re being taught this) - just phenomenal! So much love for the inclusion of art into everything 🖤 I also had the chance to be part of a roundtable discussion with faculty and students at Heard, and Tamara Garvey of on Art(s) on the Air. Listen to the episode (and the rest of the radio show!) here: Art(s) on the Air -It’s also available as a podcast wherever you listen to those ;)
In progress - I didn’t realize until later that my face got quite windburned! The wind really picked up my 2nd day on this project as Hurricane Ian was heading through (Radar screenshot from my phone - yikes!)
Images of my finished storm drain mural!
Rob Hessler wrote an engaging article for the Savannah Morning News about the project, you can read it here: 'They're our waters': Savannah's Storm Drain Art Project involves community in our waterways
It’s been truly lovely to work with every single person I encountered throughout this project, I’m grateful to do this work, and to get to do this work with you all!
ON::VIEW Residency Finale
I’m so grateful for having been able to spend the past month in residence ON::VIEW at Sulfur Studios! Connecting with people, sharing my process, and how I use artificial intelligence in my work has been a great experience. Everyone comes at this with a different perspective, so I’ve gotten a lot of practice talking about the work and bringing people into my process from where they are.
During the residency, I held open studio hours, inviting people in to participate by painting with me. Participants were given the option of learning a little about how waves are physiologically calming, and creating a waveform painting, or doing a meditative prompt about body awareness and creating an intuitive abstract painting. With 30+ paintings in each series, the works were digitized and used to train two separate artificial intelligence models. These models then generate more work, that is a combination of everything it learned from that dataset. I comb through thousands of resulting images, and work with them further to create a final collection of images and video clips.
Here are some of the intuitive abstract results:
Here are some of the waveform series results:
It was cool to see people come back in for the finale reveal that had worked on the project with me, or checked up on its progress over time. I really liked having all the work hung from the walls as it built up, and still on display with the video pieces being shown on screens in the same space. It really gave a sense of the entire project.
The month flew by! I was too engaged in conversation all evening to get photos with people in them, so here’s one last shot of the studio before I moved out.
There is an NFT to collect for free from the project, and I’ll be sharing more from it going forward. You can collect those here: https://jenpalmerart.cent.co
I’ll also be making more prints available from this work, make sure you’re subscribed to get updates when those become available.
Thanks! 🖤
In Residence…
I’m liking the cyclical rhythm that the Thrive Together Network is creating. Previously, in the Red Tent, we talked a lot about these things, how the seasons affect us, and how we can use that information to our benefit. I have needed more of this in my life! The entire community just came off of a general sabbatical and into planning for the virtual residency, which started or starts for most of us this week. Coincidentally, I was offered the opportunity to be in residence at Sulfur Studios, pretty much the same as the virtual residency - I’ll get to check in with the TTN community the whole time☺ For the virtual residency, I just figured in all the other things I’m also working on during this time - like the storm drain awareness painting project with the city, reading, and keeping up with my research and applications. So I get an extra layer of accountability (Hello, Obligers), and support 🖤
The ON::View Artist Residency Program at Sulfur Studios interested me when I heard about it, because I was seeking opportunities to work in a more public setting, with community, and for this, the whole point is that it’s ON VIEW. I’m thrilled to have the support of Playform going into this as well, so I can share my methods and do more demonstrations of the process. Read more about the ON::View Residency below, subscribe to my newsletter, and follow on the socials if you don’t already 🖤
“What are the possibilities for NFT’s beyond Bored Apes and Pudgy Penguins? Will artificial intelligence turn on us - their human creators - and create a dystopian future of Terminator cyborgs controlled by Elon Musk and Skynet? Jen Palmer may have an answer to these important questions!
Jen Palmer moves beyond the tired stereotypes of NFT’s and AI (artificial intelligence) to explore the possibilities that this nascent technology holds for the intrepid artist. Palmer combines meditative reflection, traditional media and technology in her art practice. During her Residency, she will be working with mixed media and inviting the public to participate using simple meditative prompts as a guide. The works created will become part of a dataset of images to train AI. From that output, Palmer will develop a set of images and create short videos that will be shared through projection on-location in the Residency space, and as freely collected NFTs. Through the window, passersby will be able to view the work being made from the datasets, as well as the projections of work created collaboratively with artificial intelligence.
Hailing from rural Southwestern Pennsylvania, Jen Palmer currently lives and works in Savannah, Georgia. She works across various mediums, using her artistic process to hold space, make connections, and create expressions of radical hope.
Open Studio Hours: Thurs - Sun, 12 - 5 PM - Pre-registration via calendly is encouraged!”
Punk is forever.
Recent research has shown that the music you listen to as a teen and young adult will shape you - forever. Think about what you were listening to then. How do you think it affected you? I certainly know not all of us were listening to songs about unity, freeing political prisoners, and human rights in general. Since I grew up in pre-internet times in rural PA, I didn’t have a lot of access to anything beyond. I was hungry for art and music and community. One of the main things my friends and I connected over was music - we cherished our traded mixtapes, CDs, and eventually digital playlists. We went to shows, to gather, to meet other people who felt like us, to feel accepted. Pittsburgh has its own breed of punk rock, too. It’s deeply planted in our local history as part of the rust belt and worker’s rights. I think about the determination of a bunch of kids, to get to a freezing cold fire hall in the middle of a snowstorm in Johnstown (before we even had GPS), just to sing along to a few of our favorite songs, and how that determination has shown itself in the years since - to challenge the systems, to refuse to accept the damages of our society, to talk to each other, to organize, to act.
This year has been especially challenging. I reflect on who we are, as individuals of this community, and how we’re doing in 2020. We are making art and music. We are spreading knowledge and supporting each other. We are raising money for others. We are feeding others. We are making masks and donating them to people who need them. We are setting up testing stations. We are marching in the streets. We are speaking out, making calls, organizing to educate voters. We are trying to keep our families and workplaces safe. We are demanding better wages. We are calling for justice. For healthcare. For education, For freedom from debt and capitalism. We are (virtually) holding each other’s hands, reminding each other to rest.
I have known that this group of people is bright and passionate, but this year, the way everyone has responded, makes me love them all the more.
Being sensitive, holding space, and radical hope.
For a long time, I would be disappointed by people for their actions. I couldn’t understand it and I always felt let down by their behavior, as incongruous to how I saw them. Not all that many years ago, I realized that this is because how I saw them was incongruous with how they actually were - and that my mistake is inherent in how I use what I see. How to put it? I’m sensitive. Not just in the way that got me made fun of growing up, but also in the way that I have access to other pieces of information that aren’t exactly within the “normal” range of experience. Some of these things are categorized as psychic and/or empathic abilities, like being able to actually feel what someone else is feeling, in my body. And all of this information can be really confusing and overwhelming - especially when it’s all tangled up with trauma and unhealthy dynamics. But back to what I came to understand about my experience of other people, I realized that I am able to tune in to who a person really is, and I experience this knowledge at a feeling level.
There are ways of knowing that are intuitive, and the more we learn to use them, the more we come to understand about ourselves, our relationships, and our world. I think that artists are in tune with these abilities in different ways. Learning that I have a strength when it comes to claircognizance (knowing) and clairsentience (feeling), has been very helpful to me. Now, when I meet people, I know that the sense I get of them has more to do with their greatest potential than the level they actually operate on. I’m able to stay out of situations where I, because of my empathy, obliger tendency, and familial relationship templates, would be blindsided and taken advantage of. I know more of a difference between who I am, what I’m feeling, and who someone else is. That might sound crazy, but if you’re able to pick up on all kinds of information and don’t know how to/ can’t process it, it can be VERY confusing.
To parse out all of this info that’s coming in, I needed to put boundaries in place. I needed to have help and support creating a practice. It has to remain in place this way for me to just feel semi-ok. Lately, it’s hard. I want to hit pause on everything and just paint and process. Just staying grounded and mindful is much of my self-care.
The idea of radical hope has been getting me through. It’s been so important to me at the core, and the more I contemplate, the more I realize that radical hope is at the very foundation of who I am. It is tied to the reason that I sense people’s potential state, not just the current one. It’s the reason that I can know, absolutely, in my bones that something is righteous. (Not that I am right, but that a concept has a righteous feeling, I think about it, and my body just knows). It’s like having a sense of direction, knowing which way is North. I’m just orientated to a different set of parameters that is intuitively defined, and the concept of radical hope is a compass.
Radical hope is essentially having hope in situations that have absolutely no hope. Radical hope is wise hope, not toxic positivity. It is a hope that doesn’t deny the reality of our suffering, but chooses to see it all, and take action.
Writings by Joan Halifax, Rebecca Solnit, and Jonathan Lear explore this subject further. I find the concept of radical hope to be in alignment with Catholic social justice teachings, and present in the punk rock community. It’s active. It’s defiant. It’s also very present in post traumatic growth, where there is space, often uncomfortable space, between what happened, what is, and what will be. It is in this space that we may act. This is what my work is all about. Holding space for the truth and the capacity to transform it. Radical hope.
What a great realization to have.
I have known that the work I do is about holding space - for people in portraits, in installation work of shrines and imitation relics. There is repetition of information, movement, shifting of forms. These constants have existed, and I can only see them now that I look backwards through time and media and a plethora of projects. I’ve focused on the beauty of an individual, seeing what makes them true. I’ve created experiences - literal spaces to be in, and prompted an ignition of radical hope in the face of systemic injustice. I’ve made bowls filled with intention and set them on fire. I’ve sought community through my work, connection to others to create a shift. I’ve tried time and time and time again to capture visually, something that I know in my bones, that I feel and experience, that is completely invisible and goes back to the concept of space. It is wild how filled with radical hope it always was, and how I lacked the descriptive words to say it. I have them now.
My work is about radical hope, and I want to share that with you.
Hold on.
I read somewhere that today’s date is Blursday the somethingith? That seems correct?! How are we all doing out there?
How am I? I am frustrated, angry, sad, furious, heartfelt and full of love, shut down, wound up, choked up, exhausted, strong, defiant, silent, screaming, full of hope and rage.
(But like, more so than normal)
I have been hanging onto words and paint and music. (Again, more so than normal) Aaaaaand Animal Crossing. That game is an absolute delight full of art, music, and silliness.
Also, the universe is sending me clear messages this week, and it’s weird in contrast, because everything else feels so foggy. There have been so many synchronicities happening that I’m starting to laugh out loud about it.
One of those messages I’ve received being, “It’s time for me to dig in.” So I’ve been thinking about the meaning of that, because my nature is typically to do exactly that. But it was presented to me in a way that meant maybe I’m not… Maybe I have this “skill” of being able to dig in, but maybe I’m not applying it correctly? Hmm. This feels as true as today being Blursday.
This feels like a call to a “this is it” moment of self-commitment and truth, all else be damned. What a weird moment of frightening clarity in this space at this time. I’m just going to hold on.
Artist of the Week
You Are Here is an awesome non-profit art gallery in Jeannette, PA, and they are starting a new project to help support artists during this time, when so many opportunities have been lost.
Feature artists will be sharing how they’re being affected by the COVID-19 pandemic situation, along with what they’re offering as far as art you can purchase, services, etc.
If you’re in a place where you can support working artists, this is a great opportunity to connect and make a difference. You Are Here is making these features into a permanent artist roster for the direct support of artists and their work.
I’m always grateful for the support of You Are Here, I’m currently doing their Satellite Artist remote residency, and now am the first featured weekly artist!
You can check out the ARTIST OF THE WEEK page here, and my Satellite Artist Blog here. Thanks!
2019 reflections & 2020 visions
For the past couple years, I’ve been playing along with Gretchen Rubin, Liz Craft, and the Happier Crowd when it comes to my new year planning. I love this time of year, when our energy is drawn inward and the mood is set , in this part of the world, for slowing down and reflecting on our lives, and figuring out what we want moving forward.
I also pick a word or phrase for the year - inspiration, or a general reminder of what I want, when it comes to things that aren’t on that list. I really needed to get good at setting boundaries, so it’s helped me figure out if I should say yes or say no to something - does it further my overall vision for my life? I think it’s a really powerful tool, which is why my word for 2020 is “curate”.
Last year, it was “embrace being multi-passionate”, which was all about me just being who I am, and having a variety of interests, from painting, to photography, music, social justice, podcasting, reading, beading, and playing Magic: the Gathering. One gain I got from this focus, was noticing how these seemingly different things overlap, and seeing my own patterns elevated through my interests and how I pursue them. Social justice and art - DUH, social justice and Magic: The Gathering? ABSOLUTELY! Through this lens, I got to see my strengths and really think about how each of these things brings more happiness into my life. I also got comfortable with the idea that I’m allowed to do this. So this year, I’m further embracing that empowerment with the word “curate”. Part of saying yes to all that stuff I love was saying no to other things. Which is ok, and I’m allowed to do that. WHOA! Apparently this struck me as vital, because here’s the definition of my word for 2020:
curate
noun
Chiefly British. a member of the clergy employed to assist a rector or vicar.
any ecclesiastic entrusted with the cure of souls, as a parish priest.
verb (used with object), cu·rat·ed, cu·rat·ing.
to take charge of (a museum) or organize (an art exhibit):to curate a photography show.
to pull together, sift through, and select for presentation, as music or website content
Let’s check this out…
person entrusted with the cure of souls - healing, caring for the health of, ridding of detrimental factors
taking charge
organizing
sift through and select
POWERFUL STUFF. I am in charge of the care of my soul. I have the duty to rid it of detrimental factors. I say what’s welcome, what stays, and what goes. Holy boundaries, Batman. (I’m super proud of myself for getting to this point, BTW!)
In 2019, my list of 19 things included a bunch of health goals, finance goals, and creative community related goals. There are a few things I haven’t completed, like organizing everyone’s birthdays and current addresses, and getting the storage space cleaned out to make my encaustic studio, but I did a lot of things this past year that I’m happy about because of that list - like finally participating in book club! I did hard things, like paying off a huge loan, and going to all my appointments (2-3 a week, usually). I visited a Buddhist center, became a THRIVE member, and found YAH Women in Art right after too! I looked at a lot of art! I also played a lot of Magic Arena (even though I only made it through Platinum one season), worked on my oracle project, started a podcast with my friend Jess, launched this website, and ordered that perfume I’ve wanted for the last decade. I looked at campers, got new brown boots, and tried RASA, (adaptogenic coffee alternative) - I love it! I still don’t have a photography project I’m passionate about, but I've pitched a few ideas for grants, and that’s a step. I might scale back that project so I could do it in some form? Maybe? It’s going on the 2020 list!
I’m still thinking over a few things for 2020 (I’ve got a day!), but here’s the list so far:
get 20 rejections
put photos on my website
save down-payment
explore digital painting and illustration more deeply
do block printing
walk 20 in 2020
write consistently
make postcards
do a photography project
podcast with Jess
have a really good artist statement
make new business cards
explore my visual language
plan some day trips (Serpent Mound, Polymath Park…)
find tiny earrings
collaborative art projects with Alicia & with Meghan (It’s happening, it’s on my list!)
organize addresses and birthdays
acquire white tortoiseshell glasses
clean out storage - set up encaustic studio
find a good framing solution
I quite enjoy the whole dreaming up of possibilities, don’t you? What are your plans for 2020? I encourage you to make a list and play along! It gives us a unique opportunity to recognize and support one another. Jess and I will be discussing our lists on the podcast, and checking in throughout the year on our progress - we’re both Obligers, can you tell?
OK folks, I love you! Well wishes for 2020!
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