Technology and Art

Thanks to the AI system I built recently, the time I spend sitting in front of the computer has noticeably dropped. The time I spent staying up all night wrestling with AI, because I wanted to make something as soon as possible, or because the tokens felt like a waste, is gone too. Of course, right now I'm staying up all night because stray thoughts won't let me sleep. Even in the middle of this, I've become fairly sure that the system will keep running and finish the work I gave it.

I used it experimentally to design and simulate a Christmas tree sculpture for the coming season, and I'm so satisfied with the process and the result. It's surprisingly easy and fast. All I did was give it the overall picture and direction at the very start, and at checkpoint-like moments in between, and everything was finished. Naturally, whether it can actually be built is a separate problem, but whatever it ends up being, I have to persuade someone with resources before I can even try.

Of course there was time spent sketching the idea on paper and rolling various scenes around in my head, but actually making more than 30 drafts, narrowing them down, and getting all the way to the final report document took less than 3 days. Of those 3 days, the time I stepped in was probably around 5 hours at most. And people were unexpectedly satisfied with the result. If anything, it seems like I'm the only one who thinks it's not great. Or maybe they said it was good out of politeness, but I'm going to believe they didn't. That's easier on my mind.

There'll be all kinds of ways to use a system like this. There are definitely lots of people who've made something similar and are using it, too. How are they using it? Are they running apps or services like a factory? At first I wanted to make money that way too, but my older brother told me not to, said it was too much of a day-laborer mindset. To use it in a direction that's truly valuable to me… The way he said it was really uncomfortable, but thinking about it, he was right, so I admitted it.

But there's one side effect, if that's what to call it, I can't stand watching them rest. It's not something new, it's not much different from when I stayed up all night because leftover tokens felt like a waste, the time and intensity just got compressed. Now, rather than which feature to build right away, I keep trying to find what to build. I've used it on a lot of work improving Patternflow's existing code, and I've also set it up to make patterns like a factory. The patterns made that way are honestly not great. Maybe one in a hundred is worth keeping. Anyway!

There's a lot more I could write about this in detail, but I'm not confident I can make it coherent, or that I can stay awake for a few more hours. I think I'll tap at the keyboard for about an hour and then sleep. So I should move on to another topic.

So it feels like I've moved from the role of worker to the role of planner and director. Naturally I ended up with time, and lately I've been reading books to recover my dulled brain. There are two books I picked that way: one is called Art Did Not Exist to Begin With, and the other is called Colliding Worlds. The latter especially is fun, because a lot of it is about the fusion of technology and art, which is what I'm interested in.

At some point I seem to have picked up a habit of reading two books at once that look at a shared subject a little differently, like this. I don't have the brains to analyze and compare them precisely and fully absorb the content, but I am getting that feeling, just a little. Even where, if I'd only read one straight through, it would seem really obvious and I'd memorize it like the one truth, it's more like, oh, this one interprets a situation like this and that one like that… that kind of feeling? Not bad!

I haven't even read half of either yet, but my thoughts on the concept of art seem to be changing quite a bit. And in the case of computer art, that there really were a lot of smart pioneers, and it seems like so long ago but then when I think about it it also seems really recent… anyway, I don't know. But I didn't really like that ideas I seemed to have come up with as really new were old thoughts that had all already come out decades ago. Is there even anything completely new to begin with, but the title of founder of some school, concept, or thought does look cool, so I'm jealous.

The word cybernetics comes up a ton here too. I remember giving up on it before while reading a book because it was really hard, maybe it'd be good to sit down properly and understand it soon. I was also jealous of that kind of environment, where technologists and artists with all kinds of ideas gather to research and experiment. Bell Labs always appears, what's similar these days? Probably something like Anthropic or OpenAI, or Google DeepMind.

If I just had the capital I'm confident I could do really fun experiments… I also thought, maybe I should set it up like a private lab and try asking professors or people with capital. I definitely had the same thought around this time last year too. But I gave up because I had no cases to show, and Patternflow seems a bit different. In particular, the Patternflow intro video I made recently is helping a lot. Professors told me they showed it off to the people around them.

Ah, I got 40 invitations to the upcoming Seoul Design Festival, so I sent them to people in my contacts. Thanks to that, I exchanged messages with a lot of people for the first time in a long while. The funny thing is that even people I hadn't been in touch with for years took it really happily and said they'd come. The funnier thing is that I also sent them to people with some standing, who'd obviously get invited anyway, and they liked it more than I expected. Since I had this excuse, I sent the Patternflow intro video along too, and it seems like a lot of opportunities are coming out of that. It's definitely more natural than suddenly sending "hey, I'm doing this" after no contact. Maybe this kind of thing can be done strategically too? This time it was by chance, but from next time I'll try doing it on purpose. Well, honestly, I'll be lazy and do it half-heartedly again.

Mmmm, right now there are 2 monitors in front of me, one above the other, and I'm writing this on the bottom one. Right above, Discord is open, and in the hardware help section I can see someone typing a chat and stopping, over and over, dozens of times. It really bothers me. It's surely not going to be a welcome message. Something went wrong, and it seems like frustration about it has built up. But there's nothing I can do to help, and hardware is just like that…

Oh, a message just came up with a ding, and to put my worry to shame, it's good news. It's a relief for now, and I hope the hardware problem gets solved well too. I want to write this on Discord right now, but then the conversation might get longer, and since it's normally my sleeping time I've set myself to offline, so I'm holding back! I'll reply when I wake up tomorrow.

Just before that, I did write a message along these lines. That apart from the Patternflow spec that works now, I'm also a real beginner at hardware, so it's hard for me to do anything about expanding it or making things compatible. And that, for that reason, I'd like people to approach it as something we build together. Maybe it's a situation I planned for from the moment I decided to make it open source. And I think this way is more fun, with bigger possibilities too.

In the ecosystem called Patternflow, everyone just finds their own role and place and enjoys it. And there's a project head? seat that only I can fill. I'd like someone else to take this on later too, but for now it's a part I have to carry entirely.

A few hours ago, someone shared with me by DM a work they'd made by modifying Patternflow. Made with four P2 LEDs and a Raspberry Pi, so, a really big form. Whether this can be called a Patternflow or not will depend on their answer to my question. As it happens, I'd had a few business requests around me for a scaled-up version of Patternflow. I'd only told them I couldn't, because I didn't have the courage to invest the time and money to build and test it in a short time right away, but if someone builds it and shares the method like this, that changes things.

If possible, I'd give the person who shared it a fair share of the money made from using it, and I'd make lots of use cases… how cool would it be if later, through these use cases, that person could also make some pocket money from local business on their own. I want to make it that way, and I'm confident I can do it well, so for now I've sent a few messages. If it were up to me I'd want to explain the plan in a really long document, but that would be a burden right now, so I cut it off at a reasonable point and just asked something simple. It'd be really fun if it works out.

I'm the actual owner of the Patternflow account, and as an individual named Seunghun Lee I'm also tangled up in a lot of fields. That's because I've got a foot in each of software development, hardware, design, and art, though my weight in each is different. Especially when I talk with people building their own work in each field, I can feel a fear of the other areas. Is fear the right word for it? Anyway… design people toward development, development toward design, hardware the same, it feels like a fear and longing? something like that toward each other coexists.

What's really odd is that there's almost nobody who connects them directly, and it seems even the people who connect people are few. If used well, it feels like a lot of really fun things could be made. The book I'm reading now also talks about a person who led an attempt to connect engineers and technologists, and maybe something similar could be tried in Hongdae now. And my situation also seems like the best possible condition for it. If… really, if I ended up doing that successfully, I feel like goals like going to the MIT Media Lab might disappear. No, if that goal disappears I think I'd give up on graduating from undergrad too, and that's not it.

Whatever happens I think I'll go the fun way… but even so I have to be able to make money, and at the same time I'd like it not to be a hassle. Is something like that possible. I like things easy, but then I get bored again fast. There's a lot to do. Let's just not rush it. This post, blog or diary, I can't tell anymore, I'll put up after I sleep and wake up. I meant to write for just 1 more hour, but somehow 2 hours have passed. It feels like the sleepiness has gone too. Or not, am I sleepy.