There were two notable sharings during these two weeks. First there was a guest sharing by a lecturer from a Korean art university. The sharing was about computation in design. Honestly, it was quite a letdown. Perhaps it’s the nature of this atelier, but I’m noticing that there is significantly more work that is being experimental for the sake of being experimental, and while these all do fine as installations or showcases, they just simply lack a lot of the practical considerations that artefacts designed for real world use typically have. As with the guest sharing from the previous semester by Weidi Zhang, I once again asked about the practicality and purpose of such an approach, but was once again met with rather disappointing answers.

Maybe I’m just jaded from being in the industry, or maybe I’m just asking the wrong people, but it seemed like even if one were designing an artefact to communicate something, at least there should be more justification, intent and value. I compared these experimental works to some of the work that was shared during a roundtable session I attended with some of my peers a week later, and the intention is significantly more obvious in these works. The works ranged from paying homage to the traditional ways of printing on old Indonesian teabags through a letterpress-ish plate to designing cut outs that were incredibly modular–allowing the user to attach their own meanings to it.

Ultimately, these sharings weren’t too particularly helpful to my current predicament and dilemma, but it was useful to see the range of ideas that the rest of my cohort, especially those outside of my atelier had pursued. I would liken this experience more towards taking a break as I pondered on my next steps.

So as mentioned, I’m stuck. I spent these two weeks considering my next steps. I think somehow, I had ended up burning myself out from drawing the illustrations from the dataset and ended up hitting a wall. I struggled to justify the need for doing such an AI model by myself when there was a similar one that had already existed. I discovered this new model by a user named lazymindz on AI model service provider, Replicate.com, and it sought to accomplish basically what I had intended to, just without the censorship. Honestly, it was quite good at it. Like most diffusion models today, it definitely has some significant flaws, but it mostly got the job done.

But the main question I kept returning to was, what kind of value is such an interaction providing for my installation and my audience? Not to mention, if someone significantly more experienced than me was still unable to fix these obvious generation issues, then it would definitely take up more time and resources than I could spare for this project.

During the roundtable, I had gotten some feedback from the lecturers about how I could further improve my project. These weren’t related to my predicament, but I was still latched onto two main pieces of advice. First, similar to what my supervisor had been suggesting all along, they suggested that I showcase the technicalities and process of my project. This was the main reason why I decided to make my catalogue of making as part of my main installation, but I guess I would have to think deeper about this. Secondly, one lecturer noted that despite the technological progress in the field, it does seem that based on my research, the industry itself is heading backwards towards a depreciation of the creative industries, potentially reducing it to yet another tradeskill. While I feel that the validity of this observation is debatable, it is a message I want to communicate with my project. There was a third piece of advice, which was to find an external exhibitor to hold my installation. However, the project was designed from the start to be installed within Lasalle’s graduation show, hence all the somewhat ridiculous amounts of limitations I had given myself. Additionally, as a controversial topic, I can’t imagine who I’m going to offend, and as someone who is graduating into the workforce, I’d prefer to not burn bridges so quickly. Hence, while in an ideal world, I’d love to do that, that just wasn’t realistic for now.