So anyways, there's this thing called AI and everyone’s making really a big deal about it. Some people think AI is “intelligent” or “conscious” but we don’t know what those words mean so those aren’t very interesting conversations. Basically what happened was everything we shared online got ripped off by corporations. Then they made a calculator called “AI” to sell it back to us based on predicative models that praise us for using it. It's like when Air Jordans first came out and Nike was like, “You need these sneakers to play basketball!” and so all the kids were like, “Mom! I need these sneakers to play basketball!”, but that of course wasn’t the case, it was just an ad campaign for Nike. It's like that but worse because instead of just basketball we’re told we need the sneakers to be good at our jobs, our life, our relationships, and our art. And the sneakers tell us how good we are at basketball when we wear them even though we’re not actually playing basketball… Sometimes the sneakers say basketball isn’t real which is super confusing but that’s part of the point. Anyways other kinds of AI exists but most of the AI we get to use and interact with is this sneaker kind. 

To demonstrate, I asked ChatGPT to “make a prompt for best art ever about AI and make very very cool.” I then entered the unedited prompt, or, instructions for AI, directly into several different AI image generators. Each black and white composition on the wall is made from strips generated by different generators. In other words, I asked AI to tell me how to have AI make me the best art ever about AI and then had different AIs make it per those instructions. I followed up with a couple additional requests and the results of each of the three stages are presented next to the corresponding request. To be clear, besides copying and pasting text, I didn’t do anything to make the images.

I’d say the results are expectedly awful but perhaps that’s a matter of taste. I, for one, am not interested in systems that reduce humans to circuitry as a default, nor am I interested in for-profit companies throwing around terms like “God” in order to sell me something. “Data Realm”?  How utterly boring…  zero shade to the science fiction writers who came up with the stories in the first place, usually as cautionary tales meant to deter us from the very fates AI peddlers are vying for, but without a doubt, fuck the dumb calculator that robs their souls and sells their mutilated shadows.

To these points and others I spoke to my friend Tal Connor while making this work, as he continued his ongoing mail art collaboration with Jeremy Hughes. Deep thanks to Tal and Jeremy who were kind enough to reorient their project the last couple months in order to contribute to this critique… Without them this show, and my life, would’ve been that much more drab... And this is really why we do it, or what any of the point is… because it's cooler. To be in collaboration with one another—interrelated. Sometimes at odds, in disagreement, contending, hashing it out… encountering a world of infinite potentialities in every person. Connecting. just being human.  

Anyways, I’m more cooler than AI and so are you so please feel free to take a pin that says so if you like. Also be sure to find an “Ask a Stranger Card”, and if you want to support Queen and art and the artists, Tal and Jeremy’s work is for sale!

Lots of love, 
Peter

Tal Connor and Jeremy Hughes are good friends with a history that includes meeting as neighbors, raising similarly-aged kids, a love of music, and most recently, a mail-art collaboration that has resulted in thousands of sports-card-sized drawings and collages. Their subjects are largely 20th Century references ranging from sports icons to rappers and artists; activists to cartoons; and in this recent, text-enhanced iteration, everyday folks determined to convey their need for one another. 

Jeremy is a Bellingham collage artist who grew up in the Seattle area. His knowledge of popular culture and vintage ephemera is fractal. He deals records, has a consistent fadeaway jump shot, and owns more mini pocketknives than you.

Tal is a Bellingham abstractionist and portrait artist who paints and draws on paper. He is also a Montessori educator, which has informed interests in psychology, parenting, and sociology. 

Peter Rand is an interdisciplinary artist. Many of his projects are documents of his own learning process and chronicle attempts to make sense of things that, in the time of their inception, were unclear. His questions often have to do with the co-created space in which we find ourselves and the indeterminate nature of an individual’s role within it.

Peter’s work has been exhibited internationally and he has collaborated on public art projects for the cities of Santa Monica, Dallas, and Rome. He received a BFA in New Media  from the University of North Texas, and an MFA in New Media from the School of the Arts & Architecture at UCLA.