Ran Prieur

March 8.

2017-03-08T20:00:20Z

March 8. Today I want to rave about Picbreeder, a website where you can make art by selecting images as a computer alters them with an algorithm based on biological evolution. Here's a 40 minute video by one of the guys who made it, mostly about how the best images come from headlong improvisation instead of planning, and from individual judgments rather than consensus.

But I don't think he sees half of it. For me, Picbreeder is the most valuable technology of the 21st century. So far I've put 50-100 hours into it, way less time than someone might spend on video games, and I feel like I've already learned more about creativity than in decades of writing, and made images that I could never make alone even if I mastered painting software.

Suddenly I understand that creativity has two components that are completely separate. One is the magical well that ideas come from. And the other, almost as magical, is how you decide what ideas to trash and what ideas to run with. What I mean by "magical" is that my conscious mind has no creativity at all. It's like the manager for an art department where the "artists" are hard to explain with current theories of mind.

In this condensed video of the 1956 film The Mystery of Picasso, you can watch Picasso's creative process as he starts with a sketch and puts it through changes until sometimes there's no trace of the original idea. Of course he does everything: the ideas, the rendering, and the selection. But Picbreeder allows someone with no skill in ideas or rendering to still practice creative selection, ten times faster than Picasso, plus a back button.

Another way to say it: the stuff that bubbles up from the Picbreeder computer is not that different from the stuff that bubbles up from your own mysterious subconscious, and might almost replace it. If I can use only selection to make an impressionistic landscape like Mordor, or a near-realistic portrait like Sunbathing or Spacewalking... could someone with no ideas still use selection creativity to produce good fiction, or choreography, or architecture, out of nothing but AI-rendered noise?

If you want to try Picbreeder, here's my strategy guide: 1) Go immediately to advanced with color. 2) At first, breed for color and structure together. At some point you'll either really like the colors and want to keep them while you breed structure, or you'll nail the structure and want to color it differently. In a long project you might go back and forth. 3) Usually it's best to select only one image. A good reason to select two is if you can't decide between them. 4) Combining two images into one with elements of both is really hard, but it gets easier the more similar they are, and the more patience you have. It took me at least a hundred evolutions to give my spacewalker a chest icon in blue space with a sun. 5) When in doubt, go for gut aesthetics over rational thinking. Pretend you're looking at a bunch of album covers and deciding which one to reach for even if you can't explain why. 6) If you're in a rut, either use the back button to find your last exciting image and go a different direction, or go forward with big changes. 7) Marijuana.

March 6.

2017-03-06T18:40:10Z

March 6. If you missed my Saturday post, this week I'm raving about what makes me happy. Today it's my biggest science fiction influence, and if you think it's Philip K Dick, guess again. Of course Dick is the best. In some of his early novels, like The Game Players of Titan or Dr Futurity, it's like you're watching figure skating, and nobody's ever done a triple axel, and then this guy comes out and pulls a quintuple axel. A Chinese philospher wondered if he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man, and after two thousand years suddenly Dick turned that shit into a fractal. (And he barely made any money, and someone probably thought he was wasting his life.)

But Dick's protagonists are mopey and angsty. In the face of uncertain reality, they're treading water in a dark ocean. Then along comes an author whose reality-tripping characters are surfers: Roger Zelazny.

I'm thinking of two Zelazny works, and neither is his serious and brilliant early novel Lord of Light. That one pleased the critics, and he was probably thinking, with that out of the way, now I'm just going to write experimental shit and have fun.

The first Chronicles of Amber are the funnest books I know. There are classics I've never opened, but I've read those five books three times. The story hits the ground running, with a first person narrator who wakes up with amnesia and super powers, but the star of the books is Zelazny's colorful, dreamy mechanism for shifting through parallel worlds by using attention to make the world change around you.

What I don't like about Amber is that the characters are too often motivated by vengeance, competition and fear. Zelazny's secret masterpiece is a little book about time-traveling highways, with an emotional tone so playful that even deadly adversaries usually turn out to be old friends. Roadmarks is luminous on multiple levels, and poetic, and totally trashy.

March 4.

2017-03-04T16:20:20Z

March 4. I've been thinking about that Beatles song, "Hey, you've got to hide your love away." (Referencing Chris Farley...) Is that true? Do we really have to hide expressions of love, and why?

I can see more than one reason. First is that our love is often at odds with the world. You know that quote, "Everything I like is either illegal, immoral, or fattening." The word fattening makes it funny. If you stopped with illegal and immoral you would have a dark message -- and yet not completely untrue. It also reminds me of a line from one of my favorite 90's hits, Here's Where The Story Ends: "The only thing I ever really wanted to say, was wrong, was wrong, was wrong."

Even if you love something appropriate, the people around you don't love it and will just be annoyed (or envious) if you chatter about it all the time. Yesterday there was a thread on the subreddit (now deleted) from a reader who tried to leverage my personal blogging into unsolicited advice. I answered that I think readers want to hear about my struggles that they share in this difficult time, and they don't want me to rave about what makes me happy.

But maybe I'm wrong. So next week (unless it's bumped by a new subject) I plan to just rave about stuff that makes me happy. And I'll find out (quoting the same song) if people weary of me showing my good side.

March 2.

2017-03-02T14:00:13Z

March 2. One of the things I'm doing differently now is that instead of saving up links where I have little or no comment, and posting them here in occasional bunches, I'm just posting them to the subreddit.

Today I want to write about motivation. We've all read thousands of motivational sayings, yet most of us still struggle with motivation, so words aren't as powerful as we hope. But I've been getting a lot of mileage lately out of a few attitudes that can be put into words.

One is a Zen saying, "The obstacle is the path", and there's a popular self-help book called The Obstacle is the Way. I don't even want to look at it. It's all in those five words, and I think it would weaken the words to have someone else do the work of digging meaning out of them.

Another is a line I've seen attributed to different sports coaches: "If you want something you don't have, change what you're doing." Again, that is drum-tight language that shouldn't need any exposition.

Here's one I came up with myself, and it does need explaining because it's so peculiar and specific, but I think it applies to more than this context: "Pen on paper is the dictator." When I'm writing, there are at least two voices. One is what I was planning to write, or what I aspire to write. The other is the actual words that I enjoy writing so much that more words follow. And there is no way to know what those words are until the pen is touching the paper (or until the fingers hit the keyboard).

"Dictator" is a strong word, but I think it's that important, when there is a conflict between what I planned to write and what comes out in the process, to squash the plans under the jackboots of the process. Creativity is not at all like following a blueprint, but like being the first explorer of a new land, or like tuning into alien radio. My favorite songwriter's peak album is described like this: "These songs forged themselves. They exploded out of us."