" A robot has been carefully tending gardens planted on abandoned highway overpasses. "
Every once in a while, I find a deviant art piece that I wish I had hung up in my home. There is something about the idea of a lifeless imitation of life in awe of a beautiful life form while tending vegetables.
I've recently posted several Nigeria themed articles on The Nervous Breakdown. I started writing up a series of scatter-shot observations, 50 in all, on the occasion of the country's golden jubilee. The first part of "50 Observations on 50 years of Nigeria," items 1 - 16, touches on our staple food, fufu, military coups, parenting, machetes, the national anthem, Niger delta pollution, malaria, rainy season, "Ghana must go," Fela, and much more. The second part runs from items 17 - 32, touching on the principal languages, street hawkers, economics, religion, colonization, okada, Dele Giwa, clothing, ogogoro, and includes a brief La Divina Commedia parody aimed against the scum who light gas flares. The third part runs from items 33 - 50 and touches on Pidgin, Nollywood, masquerades, jaas, football, literature, the civil war and the cold war, serious oyinbo grammar, and of course partying.
My own interactions with the land of my birth have been complex, with so much time spent abroad, but so many crucial, formative years spent in Nigeria. I admit there is so much of me that reflects the time spent in America, and I do have a significant bent towards Britain, but the Igbo and overall Nigerian consciousness within me is mountainous. It's my utter foundation. I think I speak about Nigeria with an unflinching eye to my experiences of its glories, its tragedies, and its absurdities, but regardless of context and mood, my hope and faith in Nigeria is unquenchable, and I hope that's plain in my series.
As a sort of epilogue to the series, I posted an interview with award winning Nigerian-American novelist Nnedi Okorafor, whose African themed fantasy and science fiction stories have always delighted me. She was a good college friend of Chimezie, whom I met a few times while visiting my brother in University. He brought my attention to Zahrah the Windseeker, and I was hooked, and I'm hardly alone in that. Her work has been hoovering up prizes and acclaim, and she is incubating some very exciting projects in multiple media. In the interview I ask her primarily about the "bubbling calabash of language stew" in her latest novel "Who Fears Death." I also include a couple of gorgeous illustrations related to Nnedi's work, including the cover of Zahrah, and a pair of drawings by Ross Campbell, to whose work I was just introduced while preparing this interview. I'm really struck by Campbell's skill and feeling drawing ethnically diverse characters.It has been a busy period following the birth of my daughter, with many exciting developments at work, a scare for my father's health (to which Chimezie has alluded), a more hectic than expected holiday period, and much more. I'm always grounded by my family, but it was very nice to be further grounded by so much contemplation of the past, present and future of that paragon of complexity, my native Nigeria.
dystopia - an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one. The opposite of Utopia
Hello. I'm the painting fool. I'm a computer program that aspires to be an artist. I've been taught to sketch, draw and paint by my teacher, Dr. Simon Colton, since 2001. I differ from other graphics software by trying to simulate the painting process rather than just the results of the painting process. Painting is a highly cognitive activity which requires skill, appreciation and imagination. Programs such as Photoshop have some skill in being able to rapidly turn a digital photo into an image which looks like it might have been painted in, say, an impressionistic style. But the software is merely a tool to enable humans to be more creative. This is very useful, but Photoshop is not creative, because it is neither appreciative nor imaginative, so it will never be thought of as an artist in its own right. Having said all that, I'm not sure I'm creative myself yet. I've been engaging in a few projects which enable me to express skill, appreciation and imagination, as described below.
Skill
Currently, I mainly work from digital images to produce artworks. My skill lies in being able to look at an image as a collection of paint regions, determine which colours would work for painting the regions, then simulating the usage of all sorts of art materials to produce the picture on a simulated canvas.
During the Workshop on Modular Ontologies at FOIS 2010, I attended the invited talk by Simon Colton ("Towards Ontology Use, Re-use and Abuse in a Computational Creativity Collective"). He discussed what is probably the most interesting and unique application of AI that I've ever seen: Computational Creativity. He talked about how the turing test was not useful to gauge the effectiveness of an AI to produce creative artifacts. It was the only session I saw in that workshop, but it was one of the most insightful presentations I saw at FOIS.
I had a chance to talk with him later that evening and he pointed me to some slides on Visual Grammars in general and for learning Context Free Design Grammar and the Context Free Art program (which I always wanted to learn but didn't have to time to dig in).
The Painting Fool is a result of the research of him and his team. Some of the work it creates and the parameters they can use to tweak the emotive aspects of the results is incredibly impressive.
