Living Color
Midjourney makes a Rainbow Squared grid
The first collaborator to create a full 7x7 grid of Rainbow Squared images is Midjourney.
I gushed last month about using Midjourney to make Muppets. This month I turned its image-generation power toward the 49 color pairs. It only took about five hours of my evening time to do it, compared with the five to ten hours that usually go into each individual piece.
So why aren’t I more excited?
It isn’t the quality of images. I really love a few of them, though the default painty-ness of the Midjourney aesthetic is starting to grate on me.
I think it’s that the images were never quite the point of the project. The aptly named Midjourney showed me that Rainbow Squared is also about the journey.
To be clear, I had a lot of fun generating these images, downloading, cropping, naming, selecting, filing, and arranging them. Gratifying and creative fun at that. But it wasn’t quite Rainbow Squared.
The whole point of Rainbow Squared is to generate meaning for the maker. Midjourney isn’t actually a collaborator: it’s a tool. I’m the maker, and when I use Midjourney to make so many images so fast, I get a result that technically follows the formula of Rainbow Squared but without its meaning. It’s not the fact that the images were generated by a computer that makes them soulless. I stripped the soul out of the process myself by making so many at once.
If you’ve read these missives before, you’ll know a big challenge of this project is figuring out (committing to?) what Rainbow Squared even is. What started as a personal creative sprint has morphed into many other possibilities. One direction I keep coming back to is Rainbow Squared as DIY divination system, like tarot or any other oracle but using color pairs as the symbol set.
Taking the full Rainbow Squared journey would mean generating one piece a week for 49 weeks (or honestly however long it takes). Each piece involves both visual art and written words, not one or the other. At the end of the Rainbow Squared journey, you could regard the result as a “deck” of “cards” (print or digital) that you can use to give oracle readings. The text serves as an interpretation of the image when it comes up, the card’s “meaning,” if you will.
Rainbow Squared is about more than making sets of two-color images. It’s about sitting with the colors, living the colors. Making narrative connections from where the colors are woven into your lived experience. The time it takes to make each piece is your life. Whether you use the pieces as a divination deck or not, the biggest takeaway is the lived performance of making them.
I’ve been paused on this project for a while. Sure, I’m keeping the feeling alive by continuing to generate these communications, which is what passes for my studio time these days. But it’s definitely not the same as the weekly practice of making.
At the end of my last Rainbow Squared cycle (Year 5), I was so fired up from working with seven collaborators on their seven individual pieces that I wanted to organize the next Rainbow Squared grid to be comprised entirely of collaborative pieces. I was also excited about this idea of Rainbow Squared as a formula for creating an individualized DIY divination system. 49 individuals each doing one piece, or individuals each doing 49 pieces? Those two ideas aren’t mutually exclusive, but either one would take a huge amount of time, effort, clarity, and chutzpah. So I’ve pursued neither. I’ve been writing these “newsletters,” waiting for inspiration to strike and make one of those paths irresistible.
But I’m not sure that’s how inspiration works exactly. In this new lunar year, 5783, I want to make time in the studio again whether or not I am feeling inspired. “Studio,” really, since I count time sitting in a comfy chair querying Midjourney from my phone as studio time. As long as I do it with kavanah: a Hebrew word that translates to something like spiritual intention and concentration.
Lately I’ve been tempted by so many Instagram ads selling me solutions to ADHD, but I know that art is my focusing factor. Perhaps I haven’t made more time in the “studio” lately because when I stopped the weekly making, what constituted my “art” got less defined. I went from a rich personal practice to figuring out how and whether I wanted to lead others in that rich personal practice. Interesting how inspiration dries up when the work gets scarier.
So, using an artificial intelligence as a collaborator wasn’t exactly the solution. But at least it was fun, and fun is certainly more inspiring than fear.
