Imagine me nodding more and more intensely while reading Cory Doctorow’s thoughts about Brian Eno’s and Bette Adriaanse’s thoughts about “what art is.” I especially resonate with his refinement that “Art is intended to make other people feel something” and that AI is incapable of intent and therefor cannot create art:
Until recently, we weren’t accustomed to encountering coherent strings of words or polished images that had no intender, so we imputed the existence of that intender to them, and we did what we always do when we encounter a work of art: we tried to mentally materialize a facsimile of the feeling the artist experienced while creating the work.
Because the intention of these works was so dilute, we ended up hallucinating an intent.
My art (some call it “music”) is most often “abstract.” I am the only intended audience, so one could argue that everyone else listening is equally bereft of my inner intent. I do sometimes try to nudge listeners with suggestive song or album titles (“Field Recordings from the Edge of Hell,” “More Fire in More Places,” “The Pier Mourns the Wreck,”) but many are also just me having fun with words (“Squid Crow Pro,” “Eraseface,” “Strange Rangebow.”
As I say in my Bandcamp bio, I’m “creating space through sound.” That space is entirely in the mind of the listener, and what inhabits that space is also entirely the in the mind of the listener. That’s my only explicit goal, to take the listener from where they are to somewhere else. To “make other people feel something.” What the listener experiences there is not my fault, I only facilitate it. Does it make you sad? Good. Bored? Good. Transcendent? Good. Want to write 100,000 words about what really lurks behind the veil of time? Good.
Essentially, all I am doing is asking one question: “How does this make you feel?” The only wrong answer is “nothing,” because I know, as one human to another, that’s not true.
(Slightly expanded from my original Bluesky thread here.)
