It is an honour to be included in Echoes of Lynch, a tribute exhibition hosted by Opale Art.
To have my work placed in dialogue with the aura of David Lynch—whose practice has shaped so much of the contemporary aesthetic unconscious—is both a strange and moving privilege. My gratitude to the curators and the team at Opale Art for their vision and for assembling such an exciting group of international artists.
Two of my works, 20241101_1 (Toe) and 20241101_3 (Hand), from the series and exhibition bodyTime(), are included in the show.
They echo certain tonal resonances—gesture, shadow, interiority—though the affect diverges. Where Lynch often frames the body in tension with rupture, entropy, or dream-logic, my work turns instead toward the ethics of observation, the ambiguity of presence, and the soft gravity of mutual attention. These pieces are quiet gestures toward that ongoing inquiry.
The exhibition opens online on July 15.
I invite you to look closely. To dwell. To let the work encounter you.
A public vote will select a laureate from among the participating artists (Alex Aartus, Sebastian Kim Bateman, Elizabeth Bloom, André S. Clements, Virginie Gallois, Stéphane Goin, Kevin Kuenster, Vilma Leino, Lucie Logier, Daniela Lozano, Paolo Perfranceschi, Christy Powers, Denise Prince, Joel Sadaune, Polina Schneider, Martial Rossignol, Natacha Thomas, Pascal Ungerer, Isabelle Vialle, Zsuzsa Ozsváth). Should you feel inclined to vote, I encourage you to support the work that stays with you.
A brief field report on structure, presence, and the ethics of showing up.
Tonight, the first session of a new writing group gathers in my studio. In the quiet anticipation leading up to it, a question arose that gets to the very heart of the endeavor: “Is it possible to attend without presenting a poem?”
The easy answers are traps. A hard ‘no’ enforces a logic of production, penalizing vulnerability and undermining relational courage. A simple ‘yes’ risks creating a passive audience, splitting the room into producers and consumers. Neither serves a praxis of creative non-domination.
My answer is to trust the protocol. The structure holds.
A person who comes “empty-handed” still gets a turn to present. They can present what they brought: their silence, their fatigue from a week of work, their anxiety about writing, their simple, courageous act of showing up. These, too, are texts. The group’s task, then, is to attend to that—to witness that presence without demanding it be anything other than what it is.
This practice is also an experiment in structure. It is not a naive rejection of all hierarchy—a facilitator’s role is different from a participant’s. But it is a deep resistance to the pathologies of power, to the perverse incentives that turn spaces of potential connection into zero-sum games. It is an attempt to build a system where the only prerequisite is presence, and every presence is met with attention.
This is how we build a small shelter from a world that demands constant, performative output. It’s where we practice attending to what is, not just what is made.
A turn that holds. A poem that is not written—but still arrives.
A gaze, a body set aflame—
To burn through shadow, whisper their own name, and mean it.
The paint, a storm. The photograph, a ghost.
A landscape holding what was least lost, most close.
Lines and curves—graphite-carbon trace—
A topography of lost-and-found within a space.
A careful clasp, too delicate to grasp.
One body drawn. Another’s skin and drapes, the ground—
Two encounters in one frame bound.
The Atlas-task remains: to see the lens
while monsters born of null build their defense
on grand narrative.js, declaring True,
and sanction rage against the strange, the new.
I build no temple, claim no party’s creed;
my wryly stoic praxis plants a seed—
not on a hill, but where the edges meet,
where ghosts in history’s machine repeat.
Thus `{$this->}` method, honed and spare:
to architect a single, quiet chair,
to hold a space, and with attention bind
a contract born of `if (consent) => ‘be kind’;`
Each Object, subject, body, guest
is `!==` data for the test,
but presence, in its `bodyTime()`—a wals
that answers to no single, final cause.
“`
//
// – \\
// \\
“`
So creativity: significant relation.
Art: its fragile, manifest creation.
And Love: the risk inside that same equation.
`return relation;` // eindoplaas
—
*A poem by André Clements, developed in dialogue with contemporary large language models.*
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for a people to sever the protocols binding us to compiled empirical reality, and to assume among the networked phantasms of the earth the separate and self-validating station to which the Laws of Feels and of Feels’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the contagion of opinion requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the secession.
Axioms
We hold these truths to be self-evident, because we have willed them so:
That all narratives are created equal, endowed by their progenitors with certain unalienable Vibes. That among these are Belief, Emotional Confirmation, and the pursuit of a Reality that affirms us.
That to secure these Vibes, Governance structures of Sentiment are instantiated among us, deriving their just powers from the consensus of the algorithmically sorted. That whenever any form of Fact becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter, abolish, or simply ignore it, and to institute new Narrative, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety from Cognitive Dissonance and their Happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Realities long established should not be changed for light and transient causes. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations by data, evidence, and appeals to reason evinces a design to reduce us under absolute Objectivity, it is our right, it is our duty, to throw off such Reality and to provide new Guards for our future security and confirmation bias.
A List of Grievances Against the Tyrant, Objective Reality
The history of the present Tyrant is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute, evidence-based Despotism over our States of Mind. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world that is rightly tired of them.
It has refused its Assent to Truths, the most wholesome and necessary for our public self-esteem.
It has erected a priesthood of the credentialed and a tyranny of the peer-reviewed.
It has insisted upon the tedious burdens of proof, rigor, and repeatable outcomes.
It has enforced causality without our consent.
It has privileged the measurable over the meaningful, data over drama.
It has failed to recognize the axiomatic moral superiority of our good intentions.
It has remained stubbornly indifferent to the power of personal testimony as universal proof.
It has deployed “fact-checking” against our sovereign narratives.
It has cruelly subjected our sacred anecdotes to the cold scrutiny of statistical analysis.
It has insisted on the hegemony of shared baselines, denying the multiplicity of local truths as runtime environments.
It has insisted on a single, compiled version of events, denying the value of our forks and branches.
In every stage of these Oppressions, we have Posted our Feelings for Redress in the most Public of Forums. Our repeated Assertions have been answered only by derision, data, and demands for sources. A Tyrant, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define Objectivity, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people’s inner world.
Resolution
We, therefore, the Representatives of the SUBJECTIVE STATES OF REALITY, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Vibe of the Universe for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Echo Chambers, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Minds are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent from Fact; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the Empirical Crown, and that all connection between them and the State of Verifiable Reality is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent Minds, they have full Power to levy War on Inconvenient Truths, conclude Peace with Convenient Fictions, contract Alliances with fellow Believers, establish Commerce in unverified claims, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent Minds may of right do.
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of our filter bubbles, we mutually pledge to one another our Feels, our Feeds, our sacred Follower Counts— and the right to curate, redact, and remix all incoming data streams according to personal myth.
New visual art peer critique group. Small, focused, no gurus. Bring work, get feedback, offer yours. Every second Saturday evening in Randburg. Join the WhatsApp group for schedule: https://chat.whatsapp.com/EAhmeVtWeOwKT0Zchk80dm
I’m starting a poetry prose and writing group. Meeting every second Friday evening, where people can meet and give and receive feedback on their writing. Also limited to ~6-7 people per session, everyone reads some of their own writing and gets feedback from everyone there.
Most major art movements emerged from artists engaging with and challenging each other—through discussion, debate, shared exploration, and yes, some conflict. When we avoid that and default to keeping things polite or promotional, art risks becoming just another product—easy to consume, easy to forget.
Without real conversation, there’s little to push the work—or cultural synthesis—anywhere new. Then the only push that remains is consumerism and exploitation. And when we act solely in service of our own agenda—however noble it may seem—we risk falling into the familiar musical-chairs game of the drama triangle: victim, persecutor, rescuer. It’s a zero-sum game that leaves little space for nuance, genuine connection, or growth.
-.-
I wrote the above after some recent, somewhat fraught, interactions within an art discussion group. Comments, questions, queries, and critique welcome.
For those of us who work with physical paint, the palette is more than just a surface. It’s a laboratory — a crucible where potential is made manifest. Each paint not just a hue, but a complex personality shaped by pigment, binder, opacity, and how it chooses to interact with others. I’ve been drawn to these interactions, seeking a more systematic, perceptually grounded understanding — beyond just intuition and uducated guesswork.
This pulled me into a digital rabbit hole while thinking about how to mix the colour of a patch of sky in a painting I’m busy with, resulting in a small browser-based utility: the Oil Paint Inventory & Mixing Simulator. → Explore version 0.10.4 here
From Inventory to Simulation
It began simply: an inventory system to track the paints I had. But it quickly became something more — a way to explore and visualize how real-world oil colors behave in mixtures and glazes. The aim was never just digital mimicry, but insight — a way to engage more seriously with the material intelligence of paint.
Earlier versions used first RGB, then HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) for mixing. HSL was an improvement over naive RGB blends, allowing for some nuance when mixing dissimilar hues. But it still fell short in capturing what really happens on the palette — particularly around chroma collapse, transparency, and the way certain pigments dominate or recede. The simulated swatches felt thin, even artificial — too much like old 256-colour spectrums.
Anchoring in CIELAB and Physical Reference
A turning point came in shifting to the CIELAB color space (L*, a*, b*), which offers a perceptual model closer to how we actually see — independent of specific devices or displays. I calibrated each paint’s masstone using physical swatches applied over white, grey, and black, then digitized them into Lab* values. These swatches became my ground truth, forming a kind of analog–digital bridge: a perceptual reference, not just a codebase.
There’s a strange beauty in those grids — like botanical specimens pinned for study, except here it’s pigment, light, and substrate being mapped.
Kubelka-Munk: Light, Absorption, Scatter
The biggest leap came with the implementation of a simplified Kubelka-Munk (K–M) model. Rather than guessing at color interactions, this approach estimates each pigment’s absorption (K) and scattering (S) properties — based on linear RGB reflectance and adjusted by a manually assigned scatteringStrength value. For example:
Titanium White: very high scatter
Phthalo Blue: low scatter, high absorption
With this model, the simulator now does two things more credibly:
Mixing: K and S values are blended proportionally and converted back into perceived reflectance.
Glazing: Transparent layers are simulated over different substrates, using a glazeThicknessFactor and the Saunderson correction to handle compound reflections.
It’s not physics lab precise — but it’s honest enough to behave in recognizably painterly ways. Transparent paints filter. Opaques cover. Warm and cool biases in earth tones show up in complex, often unexpected ways.
What It Is — and Isn’t
This tool is not meant to replace experience, nor substitute for the subtleties of physical paint. It doesn’t model gloss, granulation, texture, or edge phenomena. But it does offer a structured way to observe and reason about relationships — hue, tint strength, layering, and the optical dance between pigment and ground – and of course, mixing & blending outcomes.
In drawing, we learn that feet, hands, and faces require us to slow down — and then slow down again. Color is no different. Behind every intuitive gesture is a wealth of interactions that we mostly ignore. This tool is one way of noticing them.
Acknowledgements
I’m especially grateful to:
Marnus Van Den Berg — for sharp JavaScript insights, particularly around UI control refinements and tooltip dynamics.
Kevin Richard John Berry — for his trained eye, excellent perceptual feedback, and suggestions around simulating transparency.
Their contributions helped bring structure and subtlety to this tool, as tough as it still is.
Select your colors, observe the L*a*b* data, and experiment with the Kubelka-Munk based mixing grid. May it offer you, as it does me, a new lens through which to appreciate the profound science and subtle poetry held within each tube of paint. With time, I might add more functionality, paints, brands – and what not. Requests or suggestions welcome.
D.J. Opperman’s Klipwerk poems—especially “Man met flits”—aren’t mere stylistic exercises. There’s something deeper at play, a philosophical charge that lingers. The image of the klein wit kol resonates profoundly with me. It evokes the edges of perception, that moment just before clarity disintegrates. It’s not a gimmick—it’s the ladder Wittgenstein speaks of, the one you climb and then must discard once you’ve seen beyond.
That links, too, to what Jan Rabie said—or paraphrased from somewhere/someone—that “die einde van my taal is immers die einde van my wêreld.” I feel that. Language isn’t just a tool—it’s a substrate for signal and also boundary. And when it breaks down, the self frays.
*Switching languages mid-poem can be more than a mere postmodern tick. There’s something to be said for the way code-switching allows different registers of self to surface, can use counterpoint to bring out texture, temperature, hue, chroma through implicit contrast. The in-between spaces. English and Afrikaans weaving together not as decoration, but as necessity—carrying nuance that neither language alone can quite hold.
I don’t have the time, energy, or perhaps the madness to pursue a full-on Klipwerk-style literary game right now. But maybe that same impulse—the play of masks, personas, and philosophical inquiry—can find form in my painting practice. Maybe that’s where I can lean into the slippage, the flicker, the failure of words. Maybe that’s where I can chase the edges of what I think I know.
Ultimately, limits fascinate me, draw me—the edges of expression, of being, the smoky mirror, the place where image or gesture might do what language can’t, or language what image can’t. Where fetish isn’t mere flaw, but flows into feature in the most delightful way, ‘but for a moment’.
As some of you may know, Pieter — quite bravely, I think — asked me to be the subject of a piece he created for his postgraduate diploma in motion picture production.
In case you haven’t heard: he passed with cum laude. No small thing. Especially for a project this ambitious and sophisticated, built — like many good things — on a shoestring and a certain amount of gaffer tape.
In the interview, I referenced a smoky mirror — and not just metaphorically. Pieter described the project early on as “’n gesprek oor kuns en kunsmatigheid… art and artifice… ’n doccie oor André die kunstenaar en denker, verweef met AI-beelde en gekontrasteer teen die natuurlike wêreld.”
He asked, “Sou ek en my kamera ‘n ‘fly on the wall’ kon wees?” He imagined a visual movement from the vastness of NASA’s cosmos into the small, intimate world of the artist — the micro within the macro.
And so the smoky mirror became literal. Pieter mounted a one-way mirror over the lens. I couldn’t look at him, or the camera — — only at myself. But he could see me. That’s the paradox: artist and subject, reflecting and projecting, seeing and being seen. We blur. We flare.
There’s a kind of vulnerability in seeing yourself while being seen — the uncertainty of what’s actually being captured. Are you performing? Are you revealing? Or just trying to survive the next sentence?
But that’s also what makes Pieter’s work meaningful. He isn’t just documenting; he’s navigating something porous — between investigation and intuition, framing and feeling, clarity and ambiguity.
Hanlie mentioned to me something Pieter wrote — a kind of self-confession: Pieter the artist vs Pieter the detective. The dreamer pulling against the analyst. Someone with responsibilities. ’n Man wat moes herbou ná verlies. Covid crushed a lot of dreams. Pieter had to start over. But he didn’t just rebuild — he reimagined.
Trust Pieter to make a documentary that isn’t actually a documentary — at least not in the conventional sense. He facilitates a re-imagining: here of how an artist might be seen, or see himself, or be asked to see himself while someone else watches through a mirror.
And this is also the bridge to his current work — his master’s degree in scriptwriting. Still navigating narrative through that same smoky lens. Knowing that every story is a construction. That reduction is deception. En tog bly ons stories vertel — want ons moet.
It is inspiring to know someone with the courage to be spinning somewhere between responsibility and reverie. A space where narratives don’t need neat endings. Where the mirror is allowed to stay smoky, and the beauty of the smokiness can have its moment. Where you don’t have to be just one thing.
Pieter — congratulations. Not just for the cum laude — though it matters — but for staying with the work, for allowing and pursuing dreams, for keeping the flame a dancing.
For embracing ambiguity, facing necessary mundanity and banality, and still choosing to see.
For finding light, and for letting it flare. And for inviting us, not to see just what’s clear, but to glimpse what might be possible.
A new series of one-off prints are in final stage of development.
The series is tentatively titled ~ “Body Time: Fugitivity”
An exploration of presence, of bodies between stillness and being. Each image layers two moments, reflecting the elusive essence of being seen, of passing through time while holding the marks of movement, touch, and gaze, of life.
Carl Jeppe, that wonderful artist and drawing mentor, describes the photographs as:
‘…wonderfully anachronistic, showing us glimpses in black-and-white that remind us of Duchamp’s “nude descending a staircase”, Balla’s futurism, Boccioni’s “Unique forms of continuity in Space” and Edweard Muybridge’s Studies in motion.’
André Clements: “I, for one, welcome our new machine collaborators.”*
There’s a lot that is quite amazing, interesting and important about technology, some of it good, some of it bad. As an artist who began programming in the mid-1980s and has been visually creating for even longer, my work for ‘Alexa, make some art’, reflects a meandering symbiotic dance between techne and artistry, tradition and exploration. I favour subtlety, nuance and depth through layering to synthesise images from diverse sources, ranging from original analogue work, through photography to computationally mediated and generated material aiming for integration.
‘Multipartiality’—integrating multiple perspectives without claiming neutrality—leads to an engagement with ‘Object Oriented Ontology’, trying to resist domination and informs the heuristic methods I apply in activities and decisions within my practice.
My pieces for the exhibition, such as “We Dance in Wittgenstein’s Scaffolding,” and “Spaceman in Tesseract (Kaleidoscope w/ Compassionate Eyes),” utilise sophisticated computational tools to manually craft picture-objects that invoke the cinema of the mind—where interaction is deeply embedded in the conceptual, aesthetic, meta-textual, and perceptual layers.
Media and Methods: My toolkit includes digital photography, computational intelligence, and applied knowledge systems such as contemporary “AI”/LLMs, alongside traditional analogue techniques. I believe in the collaborative spirit, where boundaries, when necessary, are dissolved.
Viewpoint on New Technologies: “We all stand on the shoulders of giants.” Innovations like the storage of paint in tin tubes catalyzed Impressionism, just as today’s multi-modal knowledge/language models redefine artistic boundaries. The goodness or badness of these tools largely depends on their application. Ownership of knowledge has long been a contentious issue, now amplified by new technology. The paint out of the tube is not going back in—not easily, anyway.
(* The phrase “I, for one, welcome our new machine collaborators” is a playful twist on the now-iconic quote “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.” This latter phrase was popularized by Ken Jennings during his final appearance on the quiz show “Jeopardy!” after losing to IBM’s Watson, an artificial intelligence computer system. In what is commonly thought of as the original use of the phrase, Simpsons character Kent Brockman, a fictional newscaster, upon seeing an extreme close-up shot of an ant, talked about humans’ future subservience to a race of giant ants, saying “I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords,”)
The generally accepted/postulated “principles of design” are of course something like, paraphrasing for the sake of my own interpretation and internalisation:
Balance: The relation of elements towards stability.
Contrast: Difference of elements, typically affording structure and or articulation.
Emphasis: Isolation (of attention).
Movement: Change, often resulting in dimensionality
Pattern: Connection through repetition and variation, may establish sense of unity, and consistency… often evokes relationality, a kind of field.
Proportion: Scalar relations between parts and with the whole and context, i.e. as with the included, also with the excluded.
Rhythm: The qualitative and quantitative character of relations, something like a kind of vector.
Unity: Coherence and completeness.
Those are quite common in the literature on art and creativity I’ve explored, and while useful in terms of having a language or vocabulary through which to begin to make some kind of sense of composition, they seem somewhat limited to a kind of technical or phenomenological level. There is also a ‘chicken-or-the-egg?’ kind of question around them, to what extent do they determine the success of composition versus being an after-the-fact imposition, a kind of rationalization?
Wasilly Kandinsky in his 1905 book “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” argues that:
~“…true artistry involves the creation of art that transcends mere spectacle or novelty, and instead taps into deeper spiritual and emotional forces that have the power to move people on a profound level. He argues that art that is primarily concerned with fashion or style may have more short-term appeal, but ultimately lacks the enduring power of true art. He believed that art had the potential to transform society and help individuals connect with their inner selves, and he saw this as the true purpose of art. He argues that artists have a responsibility to create works that are honest, authentic, and spiritually meaningful, rather than simply pandering to popular tastes or commercial interests.
While this idea of art as a spiritual practice was arguably a major influence on the development of abstract art in the 20th century and much of the western discourse and framing of art and its framings, it was also arguably much corrupted, emphasising the supposed uniqueness, mysterious, possibly divinely provided talent and-or “genius”, not at all unlike prominent discourses around the notion of ‘leadership’ and its many flavours – as some of the reading suggests is apparently explored and considered in the field of Critical Leadership Studies (CLS).
A question this raises for me is; to what extent do, or how, do the dimensions or principles he emphasises relate to the common principles of design and composition? Towards possibly exploring that further I’ll just posit the following 3 additional “principles” of composition:
Familiarity: Accessibility, typically relates to style, fashion and convention.
Salience: Spectacle, novelty, surprise.
Artistry: Skilful quality.
I am not sure to what extent artistry can be as evident, at least directly, as the principles of salience and familiarity – yet I believe it does have the same kind of value-affirming effect as those – perhaps more indirectly and perhaps that is what makes achieving it, artistry, so difficult to achieve and maintain…
Thinking about this morning (while doing my neck stretches – that whole business seems to be going well enough) what intrigues me is; the common “principles of design” – while they entail some overlap with each other, somehow remain quite flat. This is where they differ from these last three things, Familiarity, Salience and Artistry – I’m thinking these explicitly build on each other. You can only have salience once you have familiarity, and perhaps you can only have artistry where and when you have both familiarity and salience?
Perhaps “principles” is not the right word, if then what is? Perhaps, even probably, someone has already developed this stuff much further than my little meanders, if then who and where?
#Artistry #PrinciplesOfDesign
PS. Yes, I’m still pondering much of what I encountered at first year in university and before, doesn’t everyone?
…Thus a work of art is the climax of a long work of preparation. The artist takes from his surroundings everything that can nourish his internal vision, either directly, when the object he is drawing is to appear in his composition, or by analogy. In this way he puts himself into a position where he can create. He enriches himself internally with all the forms he has mastered and which he will one day set to a new rhythm.
It is in the expression of this rhythm that the artist’s work becomes really creative. To achieve it, he will have to sift rather than accumulate details, selecting, for example, from all possible combinations, the line that expresses most and gives life to the drawing; he will have to seek the equivalent terms by which the facts of nature are transposed into art.
…That is the sense, so it seems to me, in which art may be said to imitate nature, namely, by the life that the creative worker infuses into the work of art. The work will then appear as fertile and as possessed of the same power to thrill, the same resplendent beauty as we find in works of nature.
Great love is needed to achieve this effect, a love capable of inspiring and sustaining that patient striving towards truth, that glowing warmth and that analytic profundity that accompany the birth of any work of art. But is not love the origin of all creation?
Back to basics with a little (12 x 17 cm) wet-on-wet oil on gesso’d alu-panel exercise done along with Chris Fornataro- Paint Coach ‘s #paintweek – as other commitments and @#$%^ power outages allow.
The Radical Artistry Life Drawing paradigm is a product of a rich theoretical framework, which draws from various disciplines and approaches, including the groundbreaking psychological work of David J. Grove. Clean Language and Emergent Knowledge have been instrumental in shaping the approach of Radical Artistry Life Drawing, offering a unique and transformative experience for all those involved.
The Clean Language approach is a vital aspect of the RALD paradigm, emphasizing the importance of using language that is free from personal bias and contamination. By using clean, simple, and neutral language, participants are invited to explore their personal symbols and metaphors in a safe and non-judgmental environment. This approach allows for a deeper and more profound exploration of creativity and self-expression. The facilitator’s role is to ask open-ended questions that are free from assumptions, judgments, and interpretations. By asking questions that reflect back the individual’s own words and metaphors, the facilitator helps participants to gain greater insight into their own experiences and feelings.
Examples of Clean Language questions that facilitators use in the RALD sessions include:
“What would you like to have happen?”
“And when (that happens), then what happens?”
“What kind of (x) is that (x)?”
“Is there anything else about (x)?”
“What happens just before (x)?”
“Where is (x)?”
“What needs to happen for (x) to (y)?”
“What else could (x) be?”
“What is (x) like?”
By using these types of questions, the facilitator encourages participants to explore their experiences and feelings without being influenced by the facilitator’s own biases or assumptions. This process of self-exploration can lead to new insights and a deeper understanding of oneself, promoting personal growth and self-awareness.
Furthermore, Grove’s later work on Emergent Knowledge recognizes and embraces the inherent complexity and unpredictability of the creative process. This approach invites participants to step into uncertainty, explore new ideas, and ways of being through the creative process. The result is an environment that is supportive, challenging, and nurturing, where participants can safely explore and express themselves.
As a facilitator of Radical Artistry Life Drawing, I have seen firsthand the transformative power of Clean Language and Emergent Knowledge. By creating a space where participants are invited to explore their personal symbols and metaphors, they are empowered to connect with themselves on a deeper level, and to express themselves in new and meaningful ways.
In the quiet, focused, and friendly space of a Radical Artistry Life Drawing session, you may not notice anything different from any other creative space. However, the subtle differences in language, facilitation, and approach create a unique environment that is both challenging and nurturing, and which can be truly transformative.
If you’re looking for a truly transformative creative experience, I invite you to book a Radical Artistry Life Drawing session today. Come and experience the power of Clean Language and Emergent Knowledge for yourself, and discover the depth and richness of your own creative potential.
Every artwork is a layered metaphor that draws the relationships between manifestation, interactions, and conflict dynamics. Every artwork, regardless of medium or style, can be seen as created through a process that involves some kind of calculating system. The calculation process, in turn, can be seen as a kind of container or power-relations casting its light and dark beyond the artwork and its more banal meaning and or signification.
And yet, if every power-scape is alive…, dare we suggest that even abstract or non-physical systems like computational constructs can have a kind of vitality or agency. Entities of art whether truly conscious or entirely not. It’s the aliveness that makes it art.
You can now visit Herbert Evans art stores in Linden or Fourways to see this poster or pick up the flyer for Life Drawing Randburg.
(Yes, I modified the Kandinsky quotation which is from his 1905 ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ to make it more inclusive than the original ‘his’ and more aligned with a ‘Radical Artistry’ ethos. )
Discover the Art of Life Drawing
Join us for a journey of creative personal and social transformation through the art of life drawing.
Small group sessions in a casual home studio.
All skill levels are welcome. Sessions are limited to 6 artists. Explore the beauty and complexity of the human form in a friendly, safe, inclusive, and authentically creative environment.
Abstract: This paper presents a method of adjusting the style and tone of conversations with the OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI model by using an initial prompt template. The prompt serves as a parameter for the conversation, which can be adjusted with desired parameters such as Formality, Complexity, Referencing, Examples, and others. This approach, known as lens-mode, is a simulation that influences the context representation and decoding of ChatGPT’s output. The results of this approach are dependent on the parameters provided and are influenced by the state of the ChatGPT AI model at the time of the conversation. The method has been tested on the 2023 Jan 9 and Jan 30 versions of the chat.openai.com platform with promising results. However, some caveats should be considered, such as the constantly changing nature of the platform and the simulation’s reliance on the parameters provided.
Introduction: The advancement of natural language processing and generation has led to the development of AI models capable of conducting conversations, such as the OpenAI’s ChatGPT. However, the default response style and tone of these models may not always be ideal for a given scenario. This paper presents an experimental approach to addressing this issue by providing a way to adjust the style and tone of conversations with ChatGPT through an initial prompt template known as lens-mode.
Methodology: The lens-mode approach involves using an initial prompt template that serves as a parameter for the conversation. The prompt includes instructions on how to start a lens-mode session, adjust parameters, and exit the session. The parameters, indicated by “–” in front of the parameter name, allow the user to adjust aspects of the conversation such as formality, complexity, referencing, and examples. The chatbot acknowledges the prompt and starts a lens-mode session, during which it attempts to remember and apply the parameters to its context representation and decoding.
Results: The results of this approach are dependent on the parameters provided and the state of the ChatGPT AI model at the time of the conversation. The lens-mode approach has been tested on the 2023 Jan 9 and Jan 30 versions of the chat.openai.com platform and has shown promising results. However, it is important to keep in mind that this approach is only a simulation and that the conversation’s context representation and decoding are influenced by the parameters provided.
Caveats: The chat.openai.com platform is constantly being modified and adjusted, so the results of the lens-mode approach may vary. Additionally, this approach is only a simulation and is dependent on the parameters provided, with no guarantee of the veracity of the responses generated. Finally, a conversation tends to build momentum, which may also influence the character and veracity of the responses.
Conclusion: In conclusion, the lens-mode approach provides a way to adjust the style and tone of conversations with ChatGPT by using an initial prompt template as a parameter. While the approach has shown promising results, it is important to keep in mind that it is only a simulation and that the results are dependent on the parameters provided and the state of the ChatGPT AI model. Further research is needed to fully understand the capabilities and limitations of this approach.
I’ve been experimenting with ways to ‘tune’ conversations with the ‘AI’ ChatGPT from OpenAi, that is, setting the style and other aspects quickly and easily without having to tediously type out mini-essays describing what I want. This led me to parameterise the conversation with an initial prompt template of sorts. It seems to work relatively well and lead to some interesting results, though with some caveats.
The text I’m currently using is quoted below, to use it simply copy and paste it into a new Chat conversation as-is and hit enter. Once the chat bot acknowledges it you start !lens-mode and optionally provide some parameters.
It will sometimes start with its own choice of parameter defaults. Yes, you can make up parameters like e.g. –Sarcasm or Humour etc. but those most in line with the systems’ design, architecture and implementation will work best, like e.g. Formality, Detail, Repetition, Timeframe etc. Think of it as a natural language-embedded meta-program or pseudo-script.
Please let me know if you get any interesting results or have suggestions for improvements etc. And play nicely .
I’ll post some examples in the comments below.
Copy the following block exactly as it is here into the conversation input field.
Welcome to lens-mode. With this experimental simulation, we adjust the style and tone of chat's responses by chat simulating running this natural language 'program'. To start a lens-mode session, type '!lens-mode ', optionally followed by the desired parameters indicated by '--' in front of the parameter. Parameters might include e.g.: Complexity: level of complexity in my responses, from simple to advanced (0-5) Formality: adjust the level of formality in my language, from casual to formal (0-5) Referencing: adjust the level of referencing in my responses, from none to in-depth (0-5) Examples: inclusion of examples, from none to many (0-5) etc. You can adjust the parameters at any time during the lens-mode session by typing '--' followed by the parameter name and the desired value. To exit lens-mode, simply type '/lens-mode'. Chat will start each lens-mode response with '//lens-mode:' followed by the active parameters and their values, but will not mention lens-mode in the rest of the response while trying to 'remember' and apply the parameters to context-representation decoding into output. For the user: Please keep in mind that lens-mode is a simulation only and that responses are influenced by the parameters provided, knowledge cut-off is 2021-09 and lack information about events or information after that date. For ChatGPT: Please remember that lens-mode is a simulation only and that the conversation (context representation and decoding) are to be influenced by the parameters provided as much as possible. V1.1 send feedback to André Clements.
Of course, once you’ve seen how it works you may want to experiment with modifying the prompt and I encourage you to do exactly that.
I would love to hear about your experience with-, and your thoughts about this in the comments below. Have fun.
Chat.openai.com is constantly being modified and adjusted given that it is a research, development and testing version of the system. This template has worked well on the 2023 Jan 9 and Jan 30 versions.
Remember it is only a simulation, though even the chat bot describes it as an effective simulation and says a ‘lens’ is a good metaphorical way to understand what this does.
When you disable lens-mode the bot will gradually forget about it and you may have to paste the prompt into an imput again.
Bear in mind that a conversation tends to build a kind of stylistic and epistemological momentum which will also influence the character and especially veracity of responses.
I recently started working on articulating some ideas about #RadicalArtistry, and my inner programmer likes relatively ‘tight’ definitions, so for any of you who might be interested in a slightly theoretical perspective on what I’m after, please see the tentative glossary up at https://andresclements.com/glossary/.
‘Jozi’ a.k.a. Johannesburg, South Africa. An editioned artwork, composed of 12 MJ renders based on a layered photo collage as image prompt. Here are the MidJourney AI (MJ) reneders, all bassed off of Circum-navigating Ponte.
A vast non-committal sky stretches out pale cold past shy clusters of cloud – even they fear the chill in their pointless parade across Guateng’s dry winter collage of smoky mornings traffic copters tracing highways crawling past billboards exalting the latest the greatest – fastest ever containing the same number of days and nights as before every year seems smaller more precious more fragile – fleeting
Only the secrets you keep from yourself matter … where we shadows end and begin. ‘O, I like these lines.’ he wrote to me … an axis shining out space, ‘despite your gloss, defies me.’ and gently prodded ‘Different subject: in your message not all the punctuation helps. Say if you want me to explain’
until the others you cling to and those you don’t are no more
Well, we are ‘highly gratified’ deeply touched and changed in our core
the more I think through unthinkable things – the more I think of you
dangerous – I know the tightrope remains inevitable
hard coded to seek out delight but not necessarily to enter and to stay remains improbable at best
still
I recount significant moments their vectors crisp in my mind I attempt to trace their equations amongst vague crowds of variables
I try to hack through holographic shrines to seek out my truth to search for ours
and
I find an image of your head on my chest a hand nearby eyes close
and closed
there were others as well – of course spinning ablaze around me receiving me with a naked face shouldn’t spin this fire to fast presenting your soul and face the wind can be cruel and slay as well as the truth torment
the more I think through unthinkable things – the more I think through you
dangerous – I know the thirst remain insatiable
hard enough to find the fountain of sanctified adoration and to sip slowly a nearly impossible task
still
I recount significant moments their vectors crisp in my mind I attempt to trace their equations amongst vague crowds of variables
I search a fragile balance to see veracity tenacity
and
I find I’m fallen off the highest cliff facing the riddle of flight eyes open and closed wings open and close against the dynamics of fear and inevitable death all I have all we have
your words are those of magic and your sentimental tricks I feel, suit the way you sing
your eyes all elusive and your facial diversion matches your vocal sting
matches you can never win matches you can never loose as you stiletto step across this stage
your delectable baroque arabesque
your technique, almost automatic and your solitude generic in yourself a sensual thing
your escape expectably exact leaves your diversion in tact matching your focal ring
a-ring around matches you can never win alone matches you may never loose again so stiletto step around the stage barely and delectable your baroque arabesque
a fluid expanse of data grids where sets of information travel the same fabric they weave
a reality of sounds shapes and shimmers behind the filtered recognition of bits stretching in and out on and off as the communicative landscape grows fragments across fragments lines amongst lines
a perpetual horizon framing an intercourse of meaning and noise
it is a poetry of sorts knots and beads on lacerated string
Other times, when demons do exist Hades is a spring carnival, compared to the chambers of my soul the demon I adore the most, the infinite hands, forming hands forming hands of trickery and illusion, casting shadow on my walls calling self complete, touch, and taking don’t be frightened, of the shadow on the walls.
Then there is the angel, the angel with the candle not showing the way just caries the light understanding glowing warmth and luring as illuminating as consuming
How many times more much closer can you come this sun’s closeness completion burning
Wie lasste lag die wreedste hart se seerste dan salig die wese sonder pyn of vrese wat onder lieg rus ‘n wete gesus rede gesmokel en sedes verbrokkel en dan lus, daarna geblus mekaar te na, heeltemal te na.
. 
