‘This is my picture and I dunno what it means’ – A Journey of Revelations
by
...PaganSquare
PaganSquare is a community blog space where Pagans can discuss topics relevant to the life and spiritual practice of all Pagans.
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Blog posts tagged in Art
Heathen Visibility Project artists had to decide whether to continue to make and share art, including Project art, in the face of the cesspool of genAI slop invading art spaces with images "generated" via near-universal data theft by so-called "AI" companies. (Generative AI is neither generative nor AI. It merely digests the creative output of human beings and regurgitates average output.)
Many artists have stopped sharing art online, and have taken down their already existing galleries. I too stopped making certain kinds of art. However, since the purpose of the Heathen Visibility Project is to provide free images for editorial use, I have made some Project photos this year. I hesitated to load any more art to my Deviantart because it's not only awash in AI slop but has added features for making the crap. Nonetheless, I do have an established gallery with followers there, and I decided to go ahead and load one Project image there: a photo from the Swords and Swimming ritual. You can see it on this link:
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Lies, damn lies, and statistics - you've heard the saying. But sometimes, we really do have to look at the hard numbers to see what's really there, because our impressions can be incorrect, often wildly so.
Case in point: Minoan art.
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When two societies engage in extensive cultural exchange, there's usually still a distinction between the two.
The whole eastern Mediterranean was a single giant cultural exchange milieu during the Bronze Age. The Minoans borrowed from the Levant, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. The Egyptians borrowed from the Minoans, the Levant, and Mesopotamia. The Mesopotamians... You get the idea.
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You've probably heard about the AIs that people are using to make art these days. These are software programs that take a phrase the user inputs and turns it into a digital painting. But the software doesn't make these digital paintings from scratch. It creates them using a collection of art that's already in existence, that they gather and turn into a database. Where does this collection of art come from?
The AIs scrape it off the Internet.
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You may have heard of Kamares ware - the beautiful polychrome (multicolored) pottery produced in the Minoan temple at Phaistos during the Bronze Age. But did you know that this type of vessel gives us a window into the lives of the ancient Minoans?
Kamares ware was incredibly popular and was produced for centuries, from about 2100 to 1450 BCE. Its bold red and white designs on a black background remind me of the folkloric dinnerware that was popular in the 1960s and 70s:
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2021 was a challenging year for the Heathen Visibility Project for two reasons. One, adapting to the pandemic, and two, some of our symbols started the year with some bad PR.
This was the year that some heathen symbols were brought to the negative attention of the public on the body of a man who was not heathen, whom heathens referred to variously as Horned Hat Man and Mr. Fur-Brains. The event came soon after the publication of my article Heathen Vs. Hate in Witches and Pagans Magazine, which was still on newsstands at the time, so I was able to tell the public via my social media where to look for info on heathen symbols. Rolling Stone Magazine painted all heathen symbols as hate symbols but after an uproar by the public (including me and my forum members) and by organizations such as the UK Police Pagan Association, they corrected their article, although they did not publicly issue a formal retraction.
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