I still find collage — glueing one thing to another — the most restorative thing I can do to get back to a good place in my work. It never fails to get me unstuck. These two collages were, fittingly, made from a Restoration Hardware catalog. The robot above was made for my 5-year-old, and the comic below was art directed by the same 5-year-old. (It’s been a happy, lazy Sunday.)
I love it when I see knitters out in the world, knitting. I like to imagine that they’re knitting something for someone: a scarf for their sick friend, maybe, or a blanket for a baby who hasn’t been born.
Whenever I get stuck lately, I’ll make a robot for my son. (Here’s another one.) Just a silly little something. And when I give it to him, I remember that, sure, the gift is in the giving, but the gift is really in the making.
Making something for somebody — is there anything simpler and more likely to get one unstuck?
This is a particularly weird time to be raising a kid who is obsessed with robots, because the whole culture is obsessed with them. Bots. Drones. AI. Blade Runner. Stories about robots (at least the ones I know of) are almost always stories about what makes humans human and what it means to be one. That, I think, is also exactly what Owen is trying to figure out: by learning what a robot is, what it doesn’t have that he does have, he’s figuring out his body and his emotions and what he is. (Do robots poop? Do robots get scared?) How interesting to have a kid trying to figure out, essentially, what the wider culture is trying to figure out: What are we? What are we good for? Are we machines? Can we be replaced by them? Do androids dream of electric sheep?
Owen drew this after reading about “input” and output” in one of his Robot books: “input… a signal or information that is put into a machine or electrical system… output… the movement or response of a robot to the input it receives from its sensors.”
When I was growing up, my mom said, over and over, “Garbage in and garbage out.” She was talking, mostly, about television, but I wonder if she knew its usage in computer science? (“In computer science, garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) is where flawed, or nonsense input data produces nonsense output or ‘garbage’.”)
I wrote about it in Steal Like An Artist:
Lately, however, I’ve been re-thinking the phrase. Sure, it’s important to surround ourselves with the best influences, but it’s a mistake to think that we can’t be positively influenced by “garbage.” Artists are not machines, or robots. We’re human beings, and we can take “garbage,” or what’s considered “low,” and we can recycle and re-use it, turn it into something new, or something even better.
Personally, I feel that our country is just going to get worse and worse aesthetically, so one survival mechanism is to either become a beauty detectorist, find gold buried in the dirt, or turn yourself into some kind of sewage treatment plant or trash refinery. (As Jesus said, in Matthew 15:11, “What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them.”) In addition to saving and celebrating the best our culture has to offer, we might also have to turn our minds into the equivalent Doc Brown’s Mr. Fusion device:
Related reading: Problems of output are problems of input
“REJOICE IN HUMANNESS! Machines can’t make mistakes. If you compete with a machine on its terms YOU LOSE! So don’t reduce your writing to be like type. YOU ARE NOT A TYPEWRITER! Admit mistakes, correct them, & go right on.
—Jacqueline Svaren, Written Letters
Andy Warhol said, “I want to be a machine,” but we’ve been there and done that, and besides, he was delight-full of crap, like all great artists, because when I stood in front of those big silk-screened flowers last week they sure didn’t feel like they were made by machines. You could sense the human behind them…
“These are not yet automata.”
—Studs Terkel, Working
I remember a few years ago how triumphant I felt when the Twitter spam account @horse_ebooks turned out to be a human pretending to be a machine. Some were disappointed, but the feed seemed too weird and beautiful to me to be completely random. I was happy to see a human behind it.
“The next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
I like my machines just fine, but I’m not interested in turning into one. I’d like to remain a person. I truly believe one of the most subversive things you can do today is spend as much of your time as possible nurturing what is not machine-like in you.
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