Mayank Chhaya Daily

A squirrel crosses the road and lives

A generic squirrel

The squirrel waited at the edge of the sidewalk with its tail curled up. I am not sure if it looked both ways on the forty feet wide road of asphalt and tar before making a run for the other side. In about 20 seconds it had crossed the road in defiance of absolutely harrowing odds against its fragile body.

As I watched the extraordinary scene unfold during my morning walk today, I could not but marvel at how many things had to go right for the squirrel not to be crushed flat under a car. Although at 6 a.m. the traffic is relatively light, cars go both ways with some regularity. For a little creature to make the determination that it would be able to scamper across what is essentially a death trap. As the squirrel reached the other side a car did indeed pass seconds later.

I stopped in my tracks, smiled, and applauded. I also wondered how long before a crossing would prove fatal. I would never know even if I saw a squirrel as a flattened roadkill because how does one tell it was the same squirrel?

Humans kill so much fellow sentient life unintentionally or recklessly and yet we go about as if nothing is happening. I grant that it is impossible completely avoid roadkills but at the very least we can demonstrate a measure of sensitive awareness about them.

Is A.I.-generated art real art?

At this year’s Colorado State Fair, the winning entry in the “digital art/digitally manipulated photography" category is a work created by Jason M. Allen of Pueblo West, Colorado. The sentence so far is quite humdrum and without controversy. However, when you consider that his work titled “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” is entirely a product of Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program, it becomes a bit controversial and explains why it has set off a debate within the art world.

With a few hundred digital and actual paintings in my portfolio I am beginning to call myself an aspiring artist at the very least if not yet an artist altogether. Many traditional artists, meaning those who use actual physical implements such as brushes and knives dipped in actual paint to create their works on canvases and other real surfaces, are upset at Allen’s prize. I see their side of the argument well since I have worked on both sides of the divide. Of course, I am yet to use AI to create my paintings. Some day I will give it a shot.

Whether art produced using digital technology should be considered art is a question I have grappled with for some time now. It is personal for me because I began painting over seven years ago using various computer apps. My main motivation was to avoid spending on real materials needed to create actual physical paintings.

I was not sure if what I was creating could be called art, a dilemma that prompted me to write a short post on January 9, 2016.

January 9, 2016

“The mind is thinking two parallel things this morning. It is debating the merits and demerits of digital paint versus actual paint even as it is wondering whether my frequent resort to painting and poetry as a means to escape my chronic penury is ultimately destructive. Let me answer the second one first. The answer is yes. Yes, it is destructive but while I am in that realm I feel protected from the terrible uncertainties of chronic penury.

The first debate is a rather convoluted one. It reminds of the occasional debate among filmmakers between film and digital. Lately, Quentin Tarantino has been advocating a return to not just actual film but even the 70 MM format that alone he thinks can do justice to the grandeur of cinema. Not being a filmmaker, the film v. digital debate is purely a passing interest. However, when it comes to painting, I am deeply interested in the paint versus digital debate. There is no question in my mind that paint is infinitely better.

Since I sorely lack the skills and patience that oil painting demands I have completely avoided it so far. I have said this many times before. Whatever little ability to produce artworks that I have now is entirely a product of the extraordinary advances in digital technology. With some effort I may have produced artworks using the traditional way of painting but there is no doubt in my mind I owe whatever I have produced in the last three years or so entirely to digital apps such as Fresh Paint.

My rudimentary 2016 work

I have been meaning to start using actual paints, brushes and canvases to test if I have what it takes to be an actual painter. Of course, acquiring all those things is a function of money and hence my chronic penury enters the equation. Since yesterday I have been watching a rather engaging series of videos on YouTube channel called Top of Art painting reproductions. The more I see artists on this site brilliantly execute reproductions of the great masters using actual paint, the more I want to start doing it.

Those of you with any artistic inclination would find this channel rather compelling. The artists here offer remarkable reproductions of works whose originals fetch millions of dollars. Watching an artist reproduce some Vincent van Gogh’s works I felt immediately prompted to use the Dutch genius’s favorite colors to paint my own tribute to him this morning. (See the work above). I have titled it is ‘Van Gogh Aranya’. Aranya in Sanskrit means a forest. It is still a work in progress but complete enough to showcase it here.

The tactile texture that you see in masterworks in actual paintings is so obviously missing in digital artworks like the one above. To me that separates actual paint from virtual paint. There are minor advantages to digital painting such as not ever having to buy the supplies or having a studio or dirtying hands or waiting for the works to dry. Portability is another minor benefit. However, all those are a trifling compared to having an actual painting.”

In the interregnum since 2016 I have become almost entirely—I would say 99 percent—a traditional painter using traditional implements and surfaces to paint. Using computer apps made me feel like I was cheating even though the apps I used are rudimentary and require some measure of artistic abilities and vision. I would even argue that the apps I used were merely a digital version of traditional implements and paint. They still demanded actual hand movements using a mouse. Mouse movements are quite different from an actual brush in one’s hand.

In the context of Allen’s work, one has to ask different questions because the program he used is highly advanced and nothing like the apps I used. Compared Midjourney these apps are like a caveman’s tools, if even that.

According to a story by Kevin Roose in the New York Times, “This summer, he (Allen) got invited to a Discord chat server where people were testing Midjourney, which uses a complex process known as “diffusion” to turn text into custom images. Users type a series of words in a message to Midjourney; the bot spits back an image seconds later.”

If feeding some words, however expressive, into Midjourney is all that Allen did, then I think traditional artists are justified in being pissed. The Times quotes him as saying, “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I felt like it was demonically inspired — like some otherworldly force was involved.”

If he felt the work was “demonically inspired”, then it is a legitimate question how much role he played in its creation and whether he should have won the prize. Find that demon and give the prize to it. (I have deliberately kept demons gender neutral.)

I have a simple test to settle this debate. Can digital artists, such as Allen, also paint using traditional means and create works which are reasonably close to what they create digitally using AI? If the answer is no, then it is problematic. In that case, traditional artists are justified in their anger.

I believe that art ought to require the agency of a human artist to a predominating extent. Ordinary apps do that. Going by the Times story, that does not seem to be the case here.

In the interest of clarity, the category for which Allen won is “digital art/digitally manipulated photography.” With the being the case I think the debate is a bit silly.  

P.S.: I am not using Allen's image here because I have not sought his permission. You can see it on the New York Times and other news sites. 

Smiling like a jackass on finding 35 cents

The thirty-five cents I found this morning.

I generally stick to a particular route on my morning walk. That is because it works out to be about 30 minutes. Any change in it tends to reduce the duration. Occasionally though, I do change it on an impulse like I did this morning. In a literal sense it was at the last moment. Instead of going straight along my normal track, I suddenly turned sharp right to go over a bridge.

I had a strong sense that I might find some money on the ground. Sure enough, some 50 or so steps into that changed route and I saw two tiny shiny objects on the ground. They turned out to be these two coins totaling 35 cents. There was so much joy on my face that I had to look around to check if there was anyone else watching me grin like a jackass. There wasn’t.

I am hoping that this is a sign of things to come today. I plan to walk around all day looking for more fallen change or bills or both. It is less than likely that I would find more.

Thirty-five cents are nothing even for someone as penurious as me but then if I keep finding such change from time to time it may add up to be a dollar or two, making me wealthy in rupees.

I am sucker for such little joys of coincidence. What I find remarkable is that barely 50 steps earlier, I had no sense or expectations of finding money. Then something sharply heightened by intuition that told me I was going to find some money. More than the money, it was the vindication of that intuition that made me smile like a jackass. Thirty-five cents help too.

I am acutely aware that my gain, albeit minuscule,  was someone else's loss, however minuscule. 

Of sunlight again

While shooting my documentary ‘Gandhi’s Song’ a little over seven years ago near Talaja along the coast of Bhavnagar in Gujarat I was rewarded with an absolutely magical sunset. Fortunately, I had my mobile handy to capture the arresting light (See above). That picture would inevitably prompt a painting (see below) and an accompanying piece that I wrote on September 19, 2015. I republish it today because I thought of it this morning while soaking in some sunlight this morning as is my habit.

Talaja Morning—MC

September 19, 2015

If it mattered to me how many people read this blog, I would have stopped writing it in less than a week of having begun it. Readership is incidental to what one writes here. Response is even less relevant.

With that freedom, one writes what one feels like. Lately, that freedom has meant writing short pieces about my paintings more frequently although I do regular comment on current affairs, my main calling as a journalist.

This morning though what attracts me is this watercolor-crayon titled ‘Talaja Morning’. Talaja is a small coastal town in Gujarat where dawn and dusk produce spectacular colors. I caught the scene depicted here one summer evening two years ago. There is, of course, the sun in all its resplendent mauve, ochre, orange, rust, litharge glory. Then there are people silhouetted against it standing or sitting on the uneven terrain. What I have in mind is the figure sitting on a rock on the extreme left of the frame. I am interested in him because that could have been me.

Perhaps he has a story to tell or may be he just sitting there washed over by the fading light and energy of the star over 90 million miles away. He is thinking about how old the photons might be. In a superficial sense, they are about eight minutes old because that is the amount of time they take to reach from the sun to us.

Even those who know such things and bother to think about them often mistakenly believe that the light reaching us is eight minutes old because it takes that long for sunlight to travel from there to us. The eight-minute journey is the just the final and the tiniest part of a photon’s destiny. According to NASA, which concerns itself with such things, “Most answers for the age of sunlight come out to be between 10,000 and 170,000 years.”

A photon born at the core of the sun as a result of the spectacularly violent fusion has to go through an absolutely nightmarish journey zigzagging through various layers and materials at 300,000 kilometers a second (The speed of light). It collides millions of times with charged particles in searing plasma in the process, changing its course all the time. The photons from the sun that touched me this morning could at the very least be 10,000-years-old. The knowledge that the light that reached me this morning left before there was what we now call civilization is strangely exhilarating. The sunrise that we saw this morning  was in the making for thousands of years. If that does not thrill you, then I cannot help you. I am not even going into the fact that there was no sunrise in the real sense. The sun does not rise or set. We see it because of the way the earth rotates around its axis.”

That is what the man on the extreme left of the painting is thinking about because that is me.