WUBBUSHI: LEFTOVERISM

Wubbushi: I was working on a series that aimed to explore how AI could anthropomorphize animals in unique ways. I thought that using an image from that series would be a suitable way to represent my artistic persona online. Besides, I have a fondness for watching goats scream – they're probably my favorite animals of all time.

W: The more I learn about the art world, the more I learn what it means when people talk about how to see art. Seeing art is only partially associated with the physical (or digital) artifact that you are looking at, and mostly associated with context. And in art, context means what the art is saying, in relation to the artist making it. So when an artist is asked a question about their background as a tech entrepreneur and their transition to art, the question carries so much more weight than a simple retelling of my corporate history could carry.

The first thing I thought about when I read this question was an experience I had this weekend. I was dropping some donation items off at The Goodwill with a friend who has only known me as a successful tech entrepreneur. At the tail end of a conversation I was having with a guy who works there, I empathized with him about how hard it is to stand all day long at the job with a chronic injury like he had, because my mom had worked at The Goodwill as well for a number of years, and she also had a very hard time with the physical elements of the job.

I share that story with you because I think my friend was shocked to hear that my mom had a job like that, and the richness of a person's context is almost impossible to fit into a short biography. It either leans towards reciting boring career successes, or hyperbole of how many boxes of marginalization you can check.

W: "Good is the minimum. The baseline. You have to be so much more than good. And even if you're great... and lucky, you still have to work really f--king hard. And even that is not enough. You have to scratch and claw, and it never f--king ends. And it doesn't get better. It just gets harder."

That's a quote from a scene in HACKS. It represents the closest thing to the truth about success that I've ever heard or read. Success seems to take a lot longer than anyone expects. And then, when you finally reach a point of undeniable success, you realize that there isn't really ever a true destination, and that the reward has always been in the act of creation.

W: Getting in touch with art is such an interesting way to phrase that question and I love it. When I hear this question, I think about how I'm seemingly always chasing the feeling of getting in touch with art. It's almost always at the periphery, just out of reach.

It reminds me of when I started running. I always read about this amazing "runner's high" that you would get. And I remember the day that I was able to run my first mile, fully expecting to get the high, but not feeling it. Then weeks and months went on, and I stacked more and more miles, until eventually running marathons. One day I finally understood what a runner's high was, and that I had it all along.

I think art is much the same way. The more I pursue being in touch with it, the further I get away from it. When I am closest is when I am in a genuine flow state, creating through exploration and play.

W: I’ve always wanted to create and invent and bring new things to the world. I just didn’t realize that I wanted to be a literal artist until one day I tried DALL-E and the technology was a huge awakening. I saw the future so clearly. Then a few weeks later, OpenAI released their inpainting software, and the process of painting my Imposter series artworks possessed me. I would create for 20 hours a day, barely sleeping, completely in love with the process.

After that, there was a time when I was trying to prove to myself and my family that I wasn't wasting my time making art. I felt that if I was good enough, and other people validated me, then I could justify the time I was spending on it.

Now, I don't care about external validation. I simply want to make art that I love.

W: Two weeks into making art, I told my wife, "What I'm making is way better than what I should be making." I don't really believe in savant-like talent, and even if I did believe in it, I don't believe that I have it. So as I thought more about why I was able to make art at that level, I realized that the top end of what art can be was now elevated, and at that point, it became my driving mission to be at the forefront of exploring this new potential.

W: Yes, I believe your question delves into the core of why I express that I no longer care about it. I say this because one cannot care when there is never an endpoint. There is never sufficient validation to satisfy that need, assuming there is a need for it in the first place. The sole path to liberation is to create art for oneself or purely as a means to serve humanity, without any ulterior motives.

W: When I was younger I noticed that many great innovations happened when people were young in their careers. I believed that the greatest work could happen when someone was new enough to the domain that they didn't become set in their ways. I also had a theory that if you combined expertise in multiple domains, you could innovate in ways that single-modality people could not. I found that as an entrepreneur, my choices were not binary, and I've been fortunate to learn different things.

Most recently I spent the last 5 years learning how to invest in real estate and build homes. Discovering art, and more specifically fine art, was a great deal of serendipity. I didn't know that I had such a fire for making art and a deep love for it, until I experienced using DALL-E in early 2022.

W: After about a year of that great intensity of making art, my health was beginning to be severely harmed, and I ended up in the hospital as a result for a heart related issue. I still have a great deal of intensity in the process of creating the work, but I've assembled a team to work with me to create the work, so now my efforts are more leveraged.

I work with a team of developers building on open-source AI technologies to make creativity software, and I work with a team of studio assistants on physical and digital production.

W: Much of my intense work for the first year or so was because of this fear of missing this movement. When I started working with Stable Diffusion, I felt this overwhelming panic trying to stay in front of Midjourney, so much so that every time Midjourney released a new version, I would have a crisis of artistic identity.

However, eventually those crises were beneficial, because they helped me to gain the realization that if my art couldn't withstand a few months of technological progress, then it would likely have little long-term standing in art history. That awareness led me to develop the aesthetic of the MODERN ZOMBIES collection, and reframe how I went about creating work altogether.

W: One of the best things about AI art is that you can be fluid with your aesthetic. You can try on many different looks to find what resonates with you most authentically—at that moment. You can also tailor the perfect aesthetic to match individual artworks or collections.

However, generally, I find myself drawn to a style that I call leftoverism. Leftoverism reclaims discarded cultural artifacts to create works that challenge the fleeting significance of modern life. It shares roots and aesthetics with Murakami's Superflat, Jeff Koons, Warhol, Baldessari, and even elements of Duchamp.

W: We are in the middle of the fastest-changing times of human history. No one really knows how the world is going to look in just five years from now. What we do know is that we are most likely in the final few years where humans will be the smartest and most conscious beings on earth. This period where we are still the dominant species, and where we can collaborate with AI in this capacity, will be a very short and special period.

W: From a long-term perspective I have my guiding thesis that because of AI, we are at the dawning of the most profound artistic awakening in human history. So my holistic path is mostly set. I can just follow my curiosity, and find creative and novel ways to engage with AI to create art.

On more specific projects, what I find is that I'm generally first interested in exploring a new aesthetic. Trying to figure out how to make a certain look or feel, and then during that exploratory process, the project reveals itself.

W: FLOW explores themes of human freedom, escape, and the inherent absurdity of existence. It suggests a journey through different realms of experience: the sky, water, earth, and otherworldly dimensions.

There's a narrative of transcendence, pushing the boundaries of the human condition, and finally confronting the surreal and the grotesque.

W: AI art is especially profound and powerful in its compounding nature inherent within its creation. I begin my process by experimenting with thousands of programmatically designed prompts and settings, and when I discover an image that has promise, I can recursively run iterative variations of that prompt, and over time develop a totally unique look and feel that delivers exactly what I envision in my head.

For FLOW I did that process for the prompts and settings, and I also found a very beautiful combination of two LORA trained models that I combined together.

W: I believe all art carries a message. Perhaps decorative images may not convey, but art always does. I believe that FLOW does as well. In my answer above about "why FLOW, I touched on what the collection means to me, and beyond that I would love for the viewer of the artwork to experience their received message from the artwork firsthand.

FLOW has visuals unlike those of any specific photographer that I'm aware of, making it hard to pinpoint particular artists whose work directly influenced it. However, some of the photographers who inspired this project include Andreas Gursky, Wolfgang Tillmans, William Eggleston, Martin Parr, Todd Hido, Alec Soth, Richard Avedon, and, in a non-photographic sense, Arnulf Rainer.

The primary inspiration for FLOW may be death itself, symbolizing the ultimate transcendence.

W: Today AI is a tool, like a paintbrush. Think of it as such. If you were wanting to try out a new paintbrush, you'd just do it. You'd bring no preconceived notions to it, you'd just experiment and see what happens. So do that.

Over time, AI will become more than a tool. It will be a worthy co-collaborator. If you want to be truly innovative in this space, then find ways to lean on AI more and more to help with true creativity and ideation.

In regards to NFTs, I'd suggest asking yourself, and being very true with why you want to sell your work as NFTs. Do it for reasons that are authentic to you, and then constantly remind yourself of those reasons.