Pattern Cycle (Meta-Level)
- Pattern: Recognition of fundamental forms
An artist is one that can form novel constructions of form and feeling, while we are all artists we find that the advent of generative AI has created a need to look into the future of the artist. Classically art was made through the direct arrangement of sights, smells, touches, tastes, and sound into aesthetically appealing forms. As society progressed, the demand for ever more complex art increased, with concepts connected in the abstract being cleverly embedded in the physical. Society used to starve for art, but in the modern age there is more art than any individual could ever see and instead we see an arms race of marketing and influencers scrabbling at the walls of social media algorithms.
- Body: Embodiment of patterns in physical systems
Artists require significant expenditures to create, for many this is personally funded and purchased from small art stores, with ~1B spent per year in the US while the industry as a whole is over 70B. These require complex systems to support them, with the historical demand for new flavours, colours, and materials supporting entities from the silk road to the East India company. Carried along these physical artefacts were ideas, sparking revolutions in thought and culture. Without art driving humans to explore novel self-expression these would never have occurred and we would never have seen the results both wondrous and horrendous.
- Mind: Organization of patterns into models
The primary efforts of a working artists are many-fold: to create things that brought psychological completion or comfort such as rhythm or symmetries; to push the bounds of the consumers known world and provide novel ideas; to process their own internal state; or even just to signal fitness for mating. From this alchemy arises a rich tradition of creating things both practical and impractical that are able to compress large amounts of information in ways that reward the consumer for their thinking. Where the act of understanding the art itself takes the viewer on a journey of discovery, educating in both rational and arational manners. Even as the artists intent fades, the evolution of cultural perceptions around the art carries meaning and itself becomes a potent method of interpreting the transformation of culture and individuals.
- Soul: Emergence of patterns through relationship
When creating art these is an idealised state of creating art for arts sake, a state which is often criticised by the practically and politically minded. This thread prevails, and it finds a home in the idea that art is simply something that humans do rather than a privileged state; as one may move one may dance, as one may speak one may sing. The purview of the artist then was to find what these human states are and express them in their myriad forms from political to analytical to psychologically restful. Artists economic leverage is based on this ability to interpret and the skill to create art desired by a society, one that is now being encroached by algorithmic systems.
Body Cycle (Physical Systems)
- Sensing: Basic molecular recognition and response
In order to create art there needs to be a clear understanding of why that art should exist, these reasons can range from pure physical
- Encapsulation: Formation of boundaries and self
- Cooperation: Emergence of multicellular organization
- Symbiosis: Co-adaptive systems and mutual transformation
Mind Cycle (Information Processing)
- Identification: Recognition of distinct signals
- Translation: Converting signals to internal representations
- Integration: Formation of coherent models
- Dialogue: Dynamic exchange of meaning
Soul Cycle (Interpersonal Relationship)
- Witnessing: Recognition of other consciousness
- Connection: Formation of relationships
- Communion: Development of shared understanding
- Resonance: Ongoing patterns of mutual influence
The new art