What’s all this about artwork?

 

One of his innumerable selfies. 

Despite generating literally thousands of custom graphics for his Internet works, ARIFLIP is like a broken record on the subject of his artistic talent and how he rates it. “I see myself as the James Thurber of artists on the web,” he says repeatedly in posts. At one of his more personal sites, he explains, “My father could paint on canvas with oils and watercolors. I can’t. My only paintbrush is a keyboard, and my artistic motto is “WYSIWIG.”

That’s true for himself as much as for his audience in my opinion. He has a different relationship to the visual arts than to the language arts, where his confidence is conspicuous. His limitations are few when it comes to words. He has a vast arsenal in terms of vocabulary, grammar, syntax, figures of speech, and genres of rhetoric. Images and video projects are a different matter. Working strictly on his own, he is constrained by two severe limitations. He can’t afford to buy software so he has to make do with freeware and perpetual gaming of the products that give you some free usage before shutting down. Tricking the software to make it think the trial period is renewed or still going is part of the job. 

The other limitation is lack of talent for freehand drawing. He has some feel for composition and perspective, but he is always winging it. He is to an artist what a hunt and peck keyboardist is to professional typist. But he plugs away at it for years. No. Decades when you add it up. Why?

A key of sorts. Dr. Doolittle’s Pushme Pullyu.

I found the llama graphic above in a sequence of images in the time period corresponding to adonald Trump’s first presidential campaign. There was no indication if he used it, but I’m guessing he thought it might explain how establishment Republicans tried to deal with Trump as either friend or foe. Pushing, pulling the balky newcomer (yellow hair was the giveaway on identity), who seemed to stay where he was regardless of the direction which pressure was being applied. Discovering it just sitting there all these years later, I had a different thought about the graphic. It was a good depiction of ARIFLIP’s relationship with his cheap software and indifferent drawing skills. He pushed his abilities as far as they would go, and when he got stopped by his own or code limitations, the project itself changed, adapted, and sometimes grew better than the original intention. 

Later I discovered he had actually written about this phenomenon on a video project he came to like despite the many difficulties he had with it.

Click on the graphic to see the video.

Here’s what ARIFLIP wrote about making the video:

When I read Jeff Childers’s essay, I decided to respond to it at IPR. The term ‘black boxes’ reminded me that I had once roughed out a prose poem called by that name at another website in a different context. Childers was referring to the black box hiding “how AI works.’ My own writing about AI had also made reference to black boxes of the kind used to figure out why commercial airliners crashed with great loss of life, including the pilots. In other words, ‘how AI often doesn’t work.’  I thought I could use the words I had written with the image of the black box from my more personal context (greenhead boxes) as an evocative thought starter in my response. 

I recorded what I had in a voice app, gave it a cover image of a greenhead box like the one you see above and tried to upload it at Rumble. Didn’t work. Not enough images to play it as a video. Excuuuse me. I tried to make a video in my Movie app. Same problem. Find enough images to back up the audio file, then play that in. How I arrived at the video shown above.

Cheating was possible. I could have done a burst of pic files from a single image and fooled the video app, which also has no knowledge of the content it displays. But, as happens, when I was staring at the screen and playing the words over in my head, the problem bug bit me.

How to make the sequence of pics used seem plausible without stepping on the words. A kind of visual narrative formed in my head. I imported the audio file and started ransacking my image database for appropriate complements to the words.

There’s no need, by the way, for any reader to like the video or the words. I’m just describing how the process,of making it worked, which is similar to the way I’ve made many things in the past. The words changed, the visuals changed, the process was interacting with me, its constraints becoming mine, plus opportunities I wouldn’t have glimpsed otherwise. 

I think he liked Black Boxes because it made him work, even though there were flaws he finally left where they were. With images more than with words, there is some truth to the adage that the work is done when you just can’t work on it anymore. 

It’s easy to find flaws in ARIFLIP’s artwork, which I’ll call it even if he mostly didn’t. I have made a pass through the giant catalogue of image files and pulled out some of the ones that I liked best or demonstrated the variety of his visual projects. Wheee appropriate I’ve added an identifying caption that provides helpful background. I make no claims about its degree of representativeness or level of overall quality. Eye of the beholder in that last criterion.